Ethos Business Law

Proprietary social media research conducted by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law is being featured this week at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting taking place through January 31 in Davos, Switzerland. The 2010 event entitled “Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign and Rebuild” has drawn an invitation-only participant list of 2,500 chief executives from global leading companies, government representatives from the world’s top 25 economies and fast-growing countries, and presidents of the world’s major universities.

Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law conducted a groundbreaking study with C-suite executives regarding corporate use of social media, as well as on the need for internal policies and training. The firms were contacted last month for permission to share key findings at the global event in a session entitled “The Growing Influence of Social Networks,” which featured the CEOs of LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning and Twitter, among others.

“Corporations need to recognize that the social Web has the potential to become a new mode of production and the new “operating system” of a business,” the Forum reported. “But companies face a crisis of leadership. Too many companies are reticent about incorporating social media into either the organization’s internal process or its customer strategy, viewing social networks instead as a threat to employee productivity, or a source of transparency for which some organizations feel unready.”

Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law have participated in numerous speaking engagements since the original research was released a few months ago. A free copy of the research white paper is available at here.

If you have ever been to Minnesota, or better yet lived there, you have probably experienced “Minnesota Nice.”  Typically, Minnesota Nice is characterized by polite friendliness, an aversion to confrontation, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a fuss or stand out, emotional restraint or self-deprecation.  What happens when Minnesota Nice enters the negotiating room?  Often times, it can lead to difficult or failed negotiations.

Unfortunately, Minnesota Nice isn’t really about being “nice” at all. It’s more about keeping up appearances and avoiding confrontation.  Moreover, it can also be used as a negotiation tool, which causes confusion, misunderstanding and frustration among other participants.  So, what do you do when you are in a negotiation and you are confronted with “Minnesota Nice?”  Here are a few tips: (more…)