Perhaps a poor play on words but the real point is to use a good tool to capture some key insights that I recently got from an article that was a riff on a book. Which makes this brief post a “riff on a riff”. I’m talking about JP Rangaswami from Salesforce who was writing about Haydn Shaughnessy’s book, The Elastic Enterprise. In particular these key thoughts: “Haydn argues that for businesses to become truly social, they must be transformed, and radically at that. This transformation takes place in three dimensions. First, there is a change in how people are connected and how they communicate, both within the enterprise as well as beyond the enterprise, supply chain and distribution network, all the way to the customers themselves. Second, this transformation affects the very fabric of the industries involved, its participants, structures and processes as they evolve into open platform-based ecosystems rather than vertically integrated silos. These two facets, when taken in combination, then yield the third dimension: a genuine focus on the creation and evolution of shared value.” I took some creative license and embellished somewhat to come up with the Venn diagramme. What do you think of this as a description of social business?