- Image via Wikipedia
PEG The myth of the inevitability of social organisations.
In the rush for the new-new thing we’re confusing the means with the end. Business – as currently practiced – has been built around the need to own and manage a central asset. This might be a factory, some IP or even a skilled team. The tools, technologies, and methods we deploy in business are used as they cause the business (the asset) to perform better: bottom line down or top line up, simple stuff. This seems to have been forgotten. Some of the newer tools – such as social business design –can add value in this content, but they are only tools. If they make sense and add value, then they will be adopted. If not, then they will wither and die. For many companies, it looks like they will only provide marginal utility.
Martin Linssen seems to have started something of a storm on the Internet by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. He was responding to the noise around “social business design” and “enterprise 2.0?. Dennis Howlettthen published a nice missive that builds on Martin’s observation.
The clarity Dennis brought was to highlight that, in the quest for the new-new thing, many marketing machines and practitioners have forgotten that for these tools to be adopted they need to add value, and that it’s hard for them to add value in the command-and-control structures that exist in most companies.
As Dennis astutely said:
When you get down to the nuts and bolts of the problems that prof McAfee correctly identifies but for which no amount of technology will solve it is really simple: the kinds of management and structures you need in order to make these ideas work in a sustainable manner is almost non-existent. Command, control, power and status have a huge part in this. And no amount of putting lipstick on those organisational pigs will change the fundamentals. In one well known case I still see individuals being taken to one side and asked: “Did you really have to say that? It’s not what we expect from people in your position.” Insidious isn’t it?
Today’s business are built around the concept of managing a central asset. This asset might be a factory, it might be a fleet of trucks, the deposits from a community of investors, it might be the methodology and tools a skilled team use, or it might be a brand. Regardless, structures are defined and people hired to support and drive this central asset, and not for any other reason.
Continues @http://peter.evans-greenwood.com
