Yesterday, I reviewed Rawn Shah’s book, Social Networking for Business. Today I am going to comment on his interview With Don Tapscott: The Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas. I reminded of the TV commercial where everything runs on gas, even the dentist drill. It asked what if everything ran cleanly on the grid? Don is quoted as saying, “Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.”
I hope he is right. But then a lot of the gird is powered by old style coal that is not so clean. Don position is that people are now participating in mass collaborations within or across the boundaries of the organization. This collective now powers enterprises. While this is should be the wave of the future, examples like the BP oil spill in the Gulf demonstrate that the networks of collective intelligence are not always running cleanly.
I am sure that Don would argue that it is successful organizations that are now connected and those that are not will also run out of steam. This I would certainly agree. I just hope this concept spreads faster.
To make the connected enterprise run smoothly you need leaders who “guide and influence others, rather than to give orders and instruction. Simply said, they are not managers any longer but influencers and this takes new skills and a different mindset.” I agree but still see old school management occurring in many places. He gave an interesting example of the Chinese motorcycle industry where hundreds of little companies all work together. They meet to coordinate on the Internet in tea houses and provide 40% of global motorcycle production. Of course operate with very command and control political infrastructure and likely benefit from its macro economic policies.
Don is working with a number of cities using a variety of means to gain greater citizen engagement and reap their collective intelligence. Methods include: digital brainstorms, electronic town halls, citizen reporting, predictive markets, and policy wikis.
Tracy Hackshaw, the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago, leading a similar effort. His government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts. There are 1.3 million people in Trinidad and Tobago. A main goal is to increase the engagement of these people with their government and have them more satisfied with what the government is doing. Within the country there is a high percentage of access to mobile phones so this was one channel they focused on. One popular example was maps with the location of government offices and transit information on to reach them. Another was the reporting of such things as broken street lights or potholes in the roads. They have reduced the time that these issues are reported.
CEMEX, the highly profitable Mexican cement company, found the business case for social business by connecting their employees globally to gain operational efficiency. They found this efficiency. They also wanted to find radical innovations and they found these as well. They wanted to unlock the collective wisdom of their employees and this occurred, as well. I did some work with them about ten years ago and they were impressive in this regard then.
Rawn concludes his interview by noting that leaders may feel challenged when the number of stakeholders increases by magnitudes. Yet, he says that these systems have worked and they continue to work. They are our best way to make use of the collective and diverse intelligence within our organizations and our world.
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