Tag: social business

  • Social’s second chance

    For context, I believe the first chance was brand/marketing. That potential has pretty much been converted into a banal, mostly campaign oriented, traditional media (with better targeting thanks to various contexts) approach, though thankfully, we have do some rebel strongholds. I can clearly see this within the Big Shift construct – the third wave is about how organisations/institutions respond to knowledge and the flow of information, and what I see now is the typical marketing organisation conveniently converting social into a media framework that it seemingly understands and has worked with for a long while. The big boys – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – have all created advertising products that cater to this thinking. Viva la broadcast!

    But I’d like to think that all is not lost. Social changed to social media when it approached brand in the same way its media predecessors did. I see this as a phase which will last until social media saturates itself and becomes just another standard media platform. That leads me to think – if each domain (HR, Product) treats social in the same piecemeal way, it is bound to fail across them all.  When this does happen, at least some organisations will realise that a larger structural change is afoot and the institutional response needs to be more strategic. “The Next Social Imperative” made me realise that social has been attempting to work on top of business processes, but it needs to work the other way to even begin this journey. (also, strongly reminded of Tac Anderson’s post in this context back in 2010!) The driver will be market dynamics but the good news for organisations is that many in the existing workforce have the potential to become navigators of this change.

    How does the workforce systemically play a part? Stowe Boyd’s insightful “The Future of Work : 4 trends for 2014” has at least two trends (consumerisation of work and me-isation of productivity and performance) that clearly point to this shift and its harbingers. Consumer technologies (and more so, the philosophy behind them) and a different kind of workflow can actually make an organisation more consumer centric than the silo approach currently followed. Steven Sinofsky’s long but superb post on the theory and manifestation of this paradigm shift is a must read on this subject. A very interesting manifestation of this shift I saw recently is Zappos’ move towards holacracy – a comprehensive ‘operating system’ for organisational governance that focuses on purpose and accountability without a top-down, hierarchical management structure.

    This could be the first step towards ‘social business’, and I’m thinking of social business as a platform. (a fantastic read on platforms) The organisation and its purpose would actually work as a platform to channelise and augment the connection between employees and consumers. This purpose would also convert a job into work than an employee is connected to, and on the other side, it would help the consumer get closer to a brand he believes in. This is also when epics happen. Social (and other) technologies would play enablers for a more fundamental change in the structure and nature of work, and allow organisations to harness data, connections and transactions towards a shared purpose. More a transition than a disruption. Different organisations, I think, would evolve differently – some would not evolve at all. This is more hope than anything else, but I do believe that social technology has it in itself to be transformational, and not just transactional.

    until next time, back to a socialist, communist workforce 😉

    quote-Peter-Drucker-so-much-of-what-we-call-management-108215

  • The evolution of work and the workplace

    I spent Rajinikanth’s birthday  at Jaipur, all thanks to one of my favourite bloggers – Kavi, who, in his official avatar, invited me to his organisation’s annual HR conference. The theme of the conference was Evolve Connect Enhance, and I can honestly say that many of my perspectives were enhanced during discussions about the real  implications and challenges for organisations, brought about by radical changes in the business environment.

    For now, I’ll let the talk do the talking!  (transcript below the ppt) Do comment with your thoughts!

     

    Final Talk Points by manuscrypts

     

    until next time, work it out

  • A change of course

    There was an intriguing article on HBR last month, titled “Can Companies Both Do Well and Do Good?” It was based on a research that looked at the correlation  between the financial performance of firms and their social & environmental performance. At the corners of a grid made of both kinds of performances on X and Y axes respectively, are Idealists (great on socio-environmental, but low on financial performance) Trendsetters, Exploiters and Laggards, in the clockwise direction. As should be expected, there are companies all over the chart, and the correlation is near zero! There were outliers, of course, but not really a pattern.

    It made me think whether it was possible for the corporations we see around to do good and well. I am not talking of CSR or ad hoc sustainability projects that would temporarily bring them to a Trendsetter level, but a radical shift that would stand the test of time. We are seeing a paradigm change in the way business is done, but this era is only the beginning of that transformation. In general, the entities we see around are hard wired to maximise profit and not really to spare a thought on the social/environmental or I daresay human fallout of their activities. These are large corporations with individual personnel, processes, shareholders who are used to a certain perspective. These are systems with a single point agenda. Is it really possible to shift them without a huge investment of all kinds of resources – time, energy, money – with no guarantee that this would really benefit the firm in the long run?

    So does this mean that in the medium-long term, these corporations are destined to fail as our understanding of achieving a balance between profit and being ‘good’ matures, and only those which have started/start now with a DNA that is meant to achieve this balance will do well? Or is it that as the individual and societal mindset gradually change, and as social business evolves, corporations will also be able to use that time to slowly transform themselves? I do wonder. What do you think?

    until next time, become the change you want to see

  • Social : Means or Outcome?

    In the last few weeks, I have had several interesting conversations on the subject of social’s utility to brand building. I realised that I often veered towards building the product/service ground up with social inherent in it. I was trying to understand why and that took me back to the ‘aligning business to social’ vs ‘aligning social to business’ perspectives. (earlier post and source)

    Though fundamentally the same concept, its application brought about the title of the post. With a pragmatic approach, I realise it is impossible for existing organisations to suddenly transform one day and change/align their business to a socially relevant purpose. It requires evolution. So once they identify the need for this evolution, their challenge is two fold – to build social into existing products/services and simultaneously look at identifying need gaps (of the users) in their domain which have the potential for social resonance. (either by giving the individual user such an excellent experience that he shares it in his circle willingly, or by delivering a utility by using his social connections on other platforms) The first is using social as just another means to meeting an existing objective, and the second is building something that by its inherent nature will have a social outcome that also delivers business results.

    They differ not only in approach and design, but also in terms of gestation, returns and time frames. Depending on the organisation’s evolution appetite, they will have to choose how much they would like to focus on each.

    until next time, social output is where buttons come in 😉

  • Evolution of Enterprise 2.0

    In the last post  – on defining social collaboration – I had also applied it in the context of social business. It was a brief mention and I did describe it as a utopian thought at this stage. However it reminded me of a debate late last year on Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, because ‘collaborative tools’ found mention then. The reasons for the debate notwithstanding, it was still interesting.

    It began with a post from Andrew McAfee, written in favor of Enterprise 2.0 and in which he pretty much called ‘social business’ geriatric. 🙂 Stowe Boyd shot back with this post, giving his definition of social business and insisting that the nomenclature was important.In keeping with my generally agreeable nature, I subscribe to parts of both thoughts. Social business as an idea is indeed old, but its adoption has been patchy at best. The ‘social’ tools of this era can enable greater, better and more consistent adoption, as there is indeed much potential for synthesis when people, processes and technology meet. Because of this, the manifestation of ‘social business’ would be new.

    But in my mind, there is quite a dichotomy between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 anyway, primarily because of intent, and therefore the way they’re pitched as ideas. To use them interchangeably would be doing injustice to both. Enterprise 2.0 focuses on using social technologies to address the objectives of the organisation. But Social Business has a larger role and (for the purpose of a direct comparison) would involve setting organisational objectives with a social-societal perspective and a purpose that people can identify with. In Hugh MacLeod’s words, “the need to belong  to something that matters”.

    Is one better than the other? I don’t think so and it is perhaps not an apt comparison. Enterprise 2.0 is perhaps a better fit (relatively) to the current organisational frameworks, while Social Business is much more radical. But it is quite possible that over a period of time, an organisation that adopts Enterprise 2.0 will transform into a Social Business. As for social collaboration, it is a process that can fit well into both.

    until next time, a social enterprise 🙂