The middle is very often a conservative place in organizations. The challenge is that the top can be sincerely interested in incorparting social business, and there can be a lot of frontline people who are sincerely interested, but it’s what happens in the middle that can determine success and failure.
Study finds correlation between digital maturity and profitability. Y axis is digital intensity of studied companies. X axis is transformational intensity. Percentages show profitability.
(via ‘Digitally Mature’ Companies Outperform Novices - Business Insider)
Ray Kurzweil’s analysis in the “Singularity is 
Near” predicts that technology capabilities grow at an exponential rate. Long periods of preparation and solving many small problems set the stage for the ability to combine those smaller solutions together and solve bigger problems. Moore’s Law is used as the canonical case, but my favorite example is the rate of progress in mapping the Human Genome, which followed this pattern.
What has become known as Social Business is now at the elbow of such a curve, in my opinion. From basic telephony, to email, to centralized forms of collaboration such as forums, wikis, and blogs, we have come to an integrated suite of capabilities served up to us through Jive Software, Lotus Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, and in many other products.
It is possible to see these suites as the end of the road, as the culmination of a set of capabilities into a product category that will last for 30 or 40 years like ERP or CRM. I reject that view and instead assert that the culmination of Social Business will instead be a new paradigm that changes how knowledge is captured, how processes are designed, how applications are created, and how work gets done. Consider the rest of this article a manifesto for completing this transformation.
It shouldn’t take 20 minutes to order a pizza on a phone app. The solution lies in modernizing legacy business process for mobile experience. Via Forrester blog
Eight I’s of infinite innovation. An innovation framework designed to power a wave of new organizational transformations that are customer- instead of product-centered. It focuses the organization on delivering solutions for customers whose needs are constantly changing. Via Innovation Excellence | Evolutionary and Revolutionary Innovation.
How To Move Away from the Industrial Age Company Model - Forbes
If Social Business is really transforming the way we do business why are most of the stories and cases out there focused on changes to a single business function like marketing, human resources, or customer service? Shouldn’t it act as a change across several of these functions, or for that matter will these functions go away or change so fundamentally that we can no longer tell them apart?
It may appear to be a fine distinction but yet a very important one. Transforming a business process may involve one or two functional silos like sales and customer service. Transforming how a company is organized on the other hand asks use to review basic question of how a firm should operate. It asks if we need separate business functions to do production, distribution, marketing, or sales.
I read author, thought leader and the ‘female James Bond for Innovation’ Nilofer Merchant’s great five part series on Harvard Business Review, Rules for the Social Era, that asks the fundamental questions of why organizations are designed the way they are. In particular, she refers to how organizations still operate according to Harvard University professor Michael Porter’s Value Chain model, a classic business strategy definition of of how companies should be organized to determine their market competitiveness.
What counts is not the large scale but the successful fulfillment of the project promise. And this is more reliable achieved on a small scale – therefore the old call for “start small and move fast” is still valid. At E20 SUMMIT the discussions have extracted some more detailed aspects on this:
Via enterprise 2.0 blog
Traditional ways of working are being challenged and in many cases superseded by a new model based on collaboration, empowerment and openness.
In a Social Business, the line of business is king in terms of adopting new collaborative technologies – the IT organization has to recognize this and provide comparable solutions of its own or risk being sidelined by the users it is meant to be serving.
Via Business Computing World
“In their book, Future Work: How Business Can Adapt and Thrive in the New World of Work, co-authors Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson, pose this important question. Are we ready to change the way we work? They believe that the changing needs of the workforce as well as the opportunities that technology offer, necessitate a radical change the way in the way we do business if we are to be successful.
4. How does leadership and management need to change with this model?
They need to move from controlling to enabling. They need to provide people with the tools and clear objectives and trust them to get on with it in the way that works best. This is tough for a lot of managers and we give lots of guidance in the book on how to make the shift. It has to start with the leadership of the organization, and to be driven as a business strategy, otherwise it’s unlikely to be successful.”
Me: there is a need for leadership, for sure. but sometimes, the obstacles seem so stubborn to shake, akin to the ”tendances lourdes” as they say in French, which are the basic, fundamental trends or characteristics which are at once structuring and structural. It’ll be a matter of luck for a company or organization to be endowed with the leaders capable of effectuating such necessary changes as refered to in the interview
From below, newer employees from the younger generation come into the company, and rise through the ranks, but they have different assumptions in regards to relationships and networking. Control/command strikes them as…odd. Just isn’t the way they operate.
From above, the top-level managers and direction operate under the auspices of the shareholder value model of doing business which handicaps them from thinking and investing in the long-term. They react by doubling-down on the command/control side of management in order to squeeze out those margins which Institutional Investor-grade analysts urge them to achieve under pain of rating them as “sell”.
In the middle, the varying levels of empowered employees and hierarchically-recognized (middle-) managers who are more or less left to themselves to use their discernment in striking the right balance between the seemingly contradictory demands emanating from the direction and the newer employees (if not to also say already-existing colleagues & employees). The most valuable resource in this regard is their judgment and character, as opposed to the name of the school emblazoned on their MBA or BComm diplomas. Given such a state, the prospects of a company or organization will be significantly determined on the frontlines of market competition where middle management is to be found, and dependent on how they navigate such rocky waters between the Scylla of direction’s commands and the Charybdis of the Millenial employees’ claims.
via domesday:
