New York Times columnist and author Tom Friedman had a fascinating article in yesterday’s paper about the United States’ two current revolutions — Wall St. and Silicon Valley. In the article Friedman includes Marc Benioff’s description of the IT revolution, which he calls SOCIAL.
- S = speed
- O = open. “If you don’t have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open.”
- C = collaboration. “This revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenge — from designing a new product to taking down a government.”
- I = individuals. “People are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before — as individuals.”
- A = alignment. “The power of social media is that it is easier than ever to both articulate, and reinforce, the vision and values that create and inspire alignment.”
- L = leadership. “In a SOCIAL world leadership has to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down. Leaders need to inspire, enable, and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then edit and sculpt it into a vision from above into a final product.”
From my observation working with large organizations, the greatest opportunity — and challenge — for companies is the Land the A. The I’s seem to be quickly adopting the S, O and C.
As companies plan to roll-out internal social collaboration platforms like Sharepoint, Newsgator and Jive, they worry a lot about putting rules and guidelines around what employees can and cannot do. Many fear what might happen if employees can connect freely. How are we going to prevent “them” from saying or doing inappropriate things, they ponder.
The bigger question to me is how is social changing how we lead?
- How are we going to help and recognize managers to do and say more appropriate things that will make a difference to business outcomes?
- What new competencies will help managers tap into the extraordinary potential value?
- What traditional management practices are no longer as relevant — and what is emerging as more relevant?
- What might be possible if leaders were more passionate, and less fearful about SOCIAL?