image credit: DeaPeaJay
As social business concepts emerge, there is a clear and growing divide between those companies that have embraced social modes of work and those that are still operating under the rigid rules of twentieth century enterprise.
This of course has lead to all sorts of misguided and mostly useless debate about whether or not the shift to Enterprise 2.0 is important.
But I’d argue that point is not whether or not social business models are “better” than traditional industrial models, nor is it about what’s profitable right now. The importance of this conversation is about how human connectedness through technology is changing the way we interact and do work.
My take on this is also most likely not completely new, but as I begin to piece all of this together, it’s my hope to continue the conversation about the changing nature of work (not just the changing nature of social interaction) and invite you to join in.
The Challenge of Being Big
It’s tempting to place the importance of social media solely on the outward-facing communication functions of an organization.
This, I think is a mistake.
Sure, as Stuart Foster recently pointed out, big brands have big challenges to overcome in order to reach the level of social marketing effectiveness some of their smaller counterparts enjoy. But Foster himself outlined relatively easy solutions to each of the social media marketing challenges.
What’s more difficult is the socializing of business itself, and more specifically, the socialization of work in the enterprise. It requires that we leave entire business paradigms behind. It means culture shift.
Slow, Complex, and Complicated
Letting your employees tweet at work does not equal socialization of work.
Because the socialization of work has to do with an adapting structure of an organization, smaller orgs seem to fit more easily within social models of business. Martinj Linssen suggested that if your organization is at the level of enterprise (or larger), there’s possibly no place for social in your organization.
Linssen explains that traditional enterprises are slower, more complex and entirely more complicated than their more socially inclined counterparts because of their size, their inability to let go of historically ingrained practices, their overly political systems of power, and the challenge of legacy apps.
All of these things are symptoms of the enterprise obsession with groups. It’s what Stowe Boyd has been saying for years: “the rights and responsibilities of individuals are derived from group membership, and these rights are granted by the enterprise.”
Compare this to the social web networks that provide individuals with rights and responsibilities without a transfer of power from a group.
The issue is human
As Tim Jahn recently articulated in my interview with him for the Ask Summit, larger organizations often lack humanity.
Once you attain a certain size, you become more or less defined by the sum of your processes. In order to maintain rule for the sake of the process, you must strip any humanity from the equation. Process trumps creativity and automation trumps innovation.
And that’s how we become the cogs Seth Godin keeps telling us not to be.
Economy and Scale
So why try to change the enterprise if it’s so riddled with challenges? Why not kick the whole model and shrink organizations?
Despite the growing commitment to creativity, collaboration and innovation I see in conversations online, me must nod to the economy of scale. Stuff simply costs less when it’s purchased or produced in bulk.
But what’s the cost of the supporting infrastructure for producing cheap goods? If we look carefully, we see that return on assets (ROA) has dropped over the last 40 years, even as labor productivity improved (source: Harvard Business Review). It’s as #smchat founder Chris Jones articulated:
How can we hope to make money, when the answer to every problem is to buy and/or build more infrastructure? Large scale operations require maintenance and up-keep, care and feeding. It’s a problem that doesn’t go away. A viscious [sic] circle.
So should enterprise organizations “think small” and attempt to act more like their social counterparts to boost profitability as technology and human connection advance? Jones continues:
It’s no longer enough (if it ever really was) to try to ‘think entrepreneurial”. Small and nimble companies are developing a clear advantage in the new global marketplace. They lack the bureaucracy that blocks collaboration, that shields executives from shifting market paradigms, that strands innovators in organizational silos.
A fractal sort of scaling
At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, I think some of the problems of traditional organizational scaling might be solved by rethinking scale altogether.
After sorting through all of this, it seems I finally understand what Stowe Boyd meant when he said that the future of business would face a fractal kind of scaling where “the same sorts of organizational principles are at work in the large and in the small.”
This type of scaling, as Bas Reus shows us, might appear as heterarchy, a wirearchy, or some other networked structure that resembles nothing like the traditional organizational pyramid.
In any case, the future of business in the social realm is more than a marketing program or a mindset.
It’s a complete restructuring.
What do you think?
Are you caught an an immobile enterprise that’s seeing your market share being eroded by start-ups or smaller, more nimble organizations?
Do you sense a coming change in organizational scale?
Do you think I’m completely wrong here?
Leave a comment if you’re so inclined.
-Andrew
Image credit: DeaPeaJay on Ficker; see original for copyright info
