It's not just the technology causing the paradigm shift.

7:30 am Friday morning, preparing green tea to start the day and a co-worker asks why I'm so pumped up. Response: I've found the answer.
This Enterprise 2.0 unit is a mind stretcher - the market potential of blogging, flattening organisation hierarchies with social media, sites to source global expertise - wow. Yet, I'd been grappling with whether the technology was the cause of this seismic shift in thinking, or the effect, and on Thursday night found the answers in Jo Owen's book.

I had been concerned by the one-sided view of some of the evidence for the impact of Enterprise 2.0 tools and thought there must be more to it.

OK, I understand the technology is phenomenal, but why has it had such a profound effect? Owen's writing provided the background I sought, describing how, in the old management style (in INN436 we have been calling Enterprise 1.0), every company was following the same management rules or strategies, which had often been retrofitted onto an existing successful business model. The result, as business competitors were doing the same thing, is that nothing improved. In fact, worse still, we suffered the dot.com bust and the credit crunch. Owen gives a high level overview of what he calls Modern management (Enterprise 1.0?) vs New World Disorder (Enterprise 2.0?). A snapshot:

• analysis, certainty vs experiment, uncertainty
• competitive warfare vs asymmetric warfare
• prescriptive rules vs  change the rule.
• make and sell vs co-create
• information deficit vs information surplus
• formal power vs informal power

The understanding I gained was that the technology is enabling this paradigm shift, but is only one of five drivers. The other four equally important factors are:

1. Education - not that humans are smarter, but that more of use have higher education
2. Affluence - that we are better off than our parents and grandparents, and this provides new markets.
3. Globalisation - in the old way, a product was assembled on one site, in the new, there can be several globally dispersed sites. Globalisation opens new markets.
4. Recessions - cited as tough for individuals but good for progress.(For one thing, less viable companies disappear, so there is less competition.)

I appreciated seeing the darker side of the changes also. "The new technology promises freedom but delivers slavery". As an example look at the comments posted in response to airlines proud announcements of wifi provision on long haul flights. A potpourri of responses.

Owen's writing provided another light bulb moment as to why modern man needs to collaborate. This one really resonated with me. Modern man is "collectively smarter but individually more ignorant", and therefore have a greater requirement for collaboration.




A medieval peasant could make and repair almost everything they needed.
A medieval scholar might confidently say they knew 10% of all known human knowledge.

A modern man often doesn't know how things are made, and relies for repair on the aid of a magic wand (credit card)
A modern scholar will confidently know only a teeny tiny % of all known human knowledge.

So - now I understand just how massive this world order change is, and where the technology fits in, I feel I can comfortably and confidently address this week's task - to identify a company successfully using Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

and the winner is.. Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest healthcare company, provide an example of an established company who has changed to embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies. This social media  website has an interview Robert Halper, who is the director of video communication for Johnson & Johnson. Robert explains how Johnson and Johnson use youtube to directly promote healthcare and indirectly humanise the image of the company.

 

Although for interest - read this blog on a company in Brazil (Semco) where the owner made radical changes to the way the company worked by removing management and empowering employee collaboration, including allowing the workers to choose the hours they worked and  their pay scales and all without advanced technology.

 

and to finish - a great video...

Crowdsourcing explained

 

Whew.
So much information, so little time.

Thanks for reading my blog.


References:

Owen, J. (2009) "The Death of Modern Management. How to Lead in the New World Disorder" Wiley