We had to take communication to a Web 2.0 environment.

We had to take it online.

I think the tools are incredible.

You get better loyalty, you get less office politics.

Taking an idea and really stretching it across the entire

organization and network out.

Meet individuals that are passionate around the same

thing to accomplish something that you'd never be able

to accomplish on your own.

Most companies traditionally communicate at employees.

They send a message to employees, and the message

gets received, you hope, and now we're done.

But that's not how the world works anymore.

Employees will start groups on Facebook, or MSN, or

at MySpace, or wherever.

They're already socializing.

Why not give them a venue where you can be part

of the conversation?

A group of us set out to say, well let's make a difference

and let's change this.

Blue Shirt Nation is a social networking website, something

very similar to MySpace.

Blue Shirt Nation has been pretty much like a lab for us.

It's allowed us to try a lot of different things, fail really

fast, and then try things again.

It gives me an opportunity to really connect with more of my

coworkers, not just here at the store but throughout

the entire company.

The WaterCooler is the online discussion forum that allows

employees to talk about whatever's on their mind.

It's the only method where I can actually talk to my team

from the comfort of my own home.

It's the fastest way to distribute information

across the entire store.

The use of Wiki makes our employees feel like they're

empowered, and that they can contribute to everything

within the company.

If the stores are learning something from the customers,

or any experiences, any events that they're having, they

can add in the Wiki page.

I have created the actual home theater page.

It supplies retail field information on home theater.

We also have contact lists on there if they

have any questions.

One of my employees had a great idea.

He came to me and said -- what do I do with this idea?

The idea itself was the Geek Squad gaming services.

I told him to go ahead and post on the Loop Marketplace.

The Loop Marketplace is where people can go to post

innovation ideas that they want some feedback on.

Four hours later my idea was up and people were

commenting on it.

I was funded.

Now it's going company-wide.

It was a pretty fun process actually.

With so many stores spread so far and wide apart, how do you

actually get people's voices into our most

important decisions?

How can companies use the power of the free market to help

drive their decision making?

Tools like the prediction market tool help us do that.

It's a web-enabled stock market game.

Stocks represent future events or future outcomes.

And people trade in the market based on what they think

will happen in the future.

If I'm leading a project and the stock is will this thing

launch on time, and then all of a sudden it went down

20%, I instantly know that something has happened.

That gives me a chance to be able to have a voice to

leadership when they're seeing the stock, or they're seeing

the movement in changes going.

And know that the stuff that I know is valuable enough that

people want to hear it.

We talk about our core philosophies at Best Buy.

It allows us to bring our unique experiences and

ideas to the table.

You know, it's not easy to call up Brad Anderson and say -- hey

look, this is what I'm thinking.

You get better loyalty, you get less office politics.

And you create the conditions whereby this marketplace of

ideas can come to fruition.

We're talking more as a company at all levels, which is great.

I think we have to turn that transparency outward towards

the customer, and allow them to participate in the

conversations as well.

Imagine a Wikipedia not only populated by the masses looking

for knowledge, but also by a bunch of tech masters from Geek

Squad who are also using the same space for their own use.

Now you've got the quality of the crowd and some

Zen masters in the mix.

We're moving from a role of being the ones who own the

messages and deliver those to employees, to a role that

we are just facilitators.

We're encouraging, we're enabling.

We're getting ahead of the curve so that when those next

generations of folks come work for us, we're set up.

We already have everything ready to go for them.

It allows us to use those insights, that input, and that

feedback to do better at serving our customers.

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]

SPEAKER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Vice Chairman

and CEO of Best Buy, Brad Anderson.

And Chairman, The Conversation Group, Peter Hirshberg.

BRAD ANDERSON: Peter, good to see you.

PETER HIRSHBERG: Hello Brad.

So when we think of Best Buy, this is an organization pushing

3,000 stores and $50 billion in revenue, and it's in the

distribution business.

And that's not the first place I would think about as a

company as a Wiki, and pulling knowledge in from the edge.

So talk to me a little bit about the transformation, or

how such a traditional business is adopting some of these new

tools, and culturally what this power shift means.

BRAD ANDERSON: Well, we weren't actually built to do this, so

it's a little like taking a big engine and completely

flipping it.

But the great thing that we've had as an organization is we've

had to sell technology, which is always in flux

and transition.

There's nothing stable in the businesses that we sell.

So it made it a little easier to do this.

And essentially what we saw as the primary insight was that

our customer who we built to basically distribute goods and

services to, we're now going to be much more interested in how

they were going to use the product and with the

application of the product.

And instead of that being most easily served by one single

efficient methodology, that's now literally millions of

different choices that people are making in terms of-- so

we're going to have to go from a product distribution company

to a service company, and we're going to have to go to

a solution company.

And it would be a very wide array of solutions.

So this seemed like the only possible way to do it, and the

most exciting way to do it.

PETER HIRSHBERG: As I've watched your company over the

last year, I've seen you roll out experiments like the ones

that we've just seen where it almost looks like employees are

trying things, and you say that works, and then you're

learning from that.

So culturally here you have employees taking the lead,

folks on the line -- kids -- and then you have traditional

middle management doing things the way they should

be doing things.

What's it like at that wave front, when you have

traditional management coming up against power shift

and Wiki-esque things?

BRAD ANDERSON: Well this is something that I really think

there hasn't been anything close to enough dialogue about.

This is murder on middle management.

Or actually, the more senior the management

is the worse it is.

Because a lot of us who assume the role of leaders assume the

role of leaders because we like to be on stage.

And we like to assume the limelight, and we like

to make the decisions.

And this absolutely flips the role of the leader.

Because actually if I've got an idea, it's less effective than

if somebody in the field has an idea.

Because it has an authenticity coming out of the field that it

doesn't have coming from me, and it can develop a community

before it actually gets actionable.

So fundamentally as a leader, what I've got to be interested

in is not so much divining the great right strategy, but I

have to have the curiosity to do the right kind of listening.

And I have to know how to take whatever resources I can do as

a leader to marshall it behind initiatives that come from

somewhere else in the organization instead

of from the top.

And that's really been tough for us at the senior levels.

PETER HIRSHBERG: I think one of the reasons that this

innovation is happening at Best Buy first is there's almost a

perfect storm going on.

You're dealing in geeky technical things where you need

an awful lot of the collective knowledge of line employees and

customers, but your employee base is really interesting.

When Jennifer spoke earlier, she talked about the fact

that 50% of the world is under 25 years old.

And that's pretty much the Best Buy employee base.

So talk to me a little bit about the people who are at

the core of this kind of--

BRAD ANDERSON: Yeah, we had this enormous natural asset.

I sort of look essentially at organizations as they're

sort of energy pools.

And we've got 170,000 people with the potential insight

of 170,000 people.

And I know after 35 in starting in the stores, you're exactly

as motivated to deliver service as you feel like you're

engaged in the work.

So their level of energy for the whole enterprise rises

dramatically if I can feel like I'm actually engaged and not

just doing a job somebody else told me to do, but I'm actually

creating the job that I'm doing.

And with the technology we're talking about today, you

literally can do that.

Plus that our customers use the devices in so many different

ways, if we're going to mirror it we have to have a huge range

of capacity in able to be able to add value in the process.

So the economic potential for us as an organization, to be

able to sort of mirror those 22 year old-- our average age is

about 22 in terms of our employee base -- to mirror them

and their insight is just enormous.

And that's the adventure, to see if we can get

these two lined up.

PETER HIRSHBERG: That video went by quickly.

I want to go through a couple of the case studies there.

There was something called the Loop Marketplace.

Now this essentially replaces the suggestion box.

And what does everybody think of the employee suggestion box?

And in this case, you're actually using almost like a

financial market, where if an employee has an idea they

can make a suggestion.

And then if somebody in corporate wants to fund

it, it makes the market.

And the employee doesn't-- it's not just thanks

for the suggestion.

It's like here's some money, go ahead and do it.

BRAD ANDERSON: Yeah, and there's even a bigger

advantage before that.

Which is if I hear the loop and somebody in corporate doesn't

think it's worth anything, but I'm in another store somewhere

and I think that actually solves my problem, I can go

try that somewhere else.

And so if it doesn't land with the person in corporate

initially, I could have a small army starting to do it before--

that actually overwhelms the decision that winds up being

made at the corporation, because I've now got evidence

that it actually works.

PETER HIRSHBERG: And there's another financial market type

thing, which is Tag Trade.

Which is where you almost assign phantom stock to

programs, like how many of these DVD's will we

sell, or how will the Christmas promotion be.

And you track what employees think of the stock