What is it Success Factors did over the past 4 years that led to this result?

I have been collecting my own answers to this question and improved on my answers after attending a competitors customer conference in Boston this past winter.

This is a story I would enjoy capturing in depth. And I suspect a good percentage of this story is already published within the Success Factor web site, which over the past two years has become an increasingly valuable asset that reports on the details of this story. The SuccessFactors web site is a valuable piece of social media that provides a remarkable archive of knowledge.

Here is my simple answer to the question: “What is it Success Factors did over the past 4 years that led to this result?”:

Success Factors stopped behaving like a software company. Through Lars Dalgaard’s leadership, Success Factors attracted a talented workforce that applies valuable social networking expertise. This resulted in shaping a high performance team of people who have a greater impact than what most software companies teams that typically focus on activies initiated by separate departments that work in isolation from each other, e.g. product development, sales and customer service. As a result, the knowledge and learning surrounding SuccessFactors is now shaping into a sizeable value network that has bridged what Pfeffer and Sutton of Stanford University define as the “know doing gap.”

Two years ago, I became a student, who studied the SuccessFactors web site and monitored changes to this social media on a regular basis. This study of the website has led me to conclude that SuccessFactors customers are not focused on what is the software going to cost me annually , they are focused on learning how to utilize the applications and the practice these applications provide to gain value and increase their own capacity for success.

I look forward to learning more from any write up and reports from next week’s global conference. Sorry I can’t be there.