Why "Tweet" and "Like" are primitive social actions

Social technologies are not mature. They are a primitive multi-layered bunch of technologies, that are clumsily integrating with each other, while also integrating with and changing our individual and collective thinking and communication habits and skills. They will probably change the very nature of what it means to communicate. And someday, we will forget that they are a technology altogether ...

Professional communities and the pace of time

Acceleration, by Hartmund Rosa, should be compulsory reading in business school, and it was actually recommended to me by the CEO of a client.

Hartmund Rosa defines three causes for acceleration, technological acceleration, social change acceleration and acceleration of the pace of life. These are major trends, and even though they are some times softened by havens or deceleration (relative deceleration), they are trends that corporations need to cope with to compete in an increasingly social market (I am using compete in a positive way, like in compete to provide the best customer experience ...).

Put it in another way, leaders must ensure their company moves faster than any other if they are to survive.

But acceleration is also, and foremost, a dangerous trend. I tend to think of it alongside other trends like the second economy or the third economy. It is already producing some frightening results, and the existing business mindset, without deep changes, will only make things worse.

There is reason to be optimistic though. Michael Fauscette writes in Enterprise Irregulars that community building is the major initiative for 2013, in the social technology field. This is important. Because communities are one of the few spaces where time is deep. In fact, communities can accelerate time around them while providing a slow conversation space, a somehow protected environment, where relationships, genuine caring, subject interest, shared responsibility, mutual trust, provide the virtual equivalent of the ancient British Clubs ... Communities are the new people-centric environments, where people have the possibility to reclaim mastery of time.

Which reminds me of a great insight from my friend Alain Garnier, "social technologies are moving the focus of work from space to time".

What I am more concerned about is how companies will manage to develop the community managers (I prefer host or owner, or the French "animateur") in their existing HR processes. The only answer I have today, I have called it unleadeship.

The year we kill social business

Social Business (or #socbizz in Twitter) has reached buzzword status. If you want to live by the ambitions that were behind it, you probably need to kill it.

Visibility will kill management

The main issue with social technology in the corporate context is visibility. These technologies will show anyone anything, and that is terribly annoying to management, that has made a living on control and information brokerage.

And therefore management needs to evolve ... but not in the direction most managers fear. Really, we need more managers, not less. We need stronger skilled managers, able both to manage content and context, people and process, internal and external.

Because visibility does not come with talent. It's only visibility. And the capability for insight, that would allow any employee to act on this new-found access to most information / knowledge / people / issues is definitely not a given. On the contrary, it is talent that will be long in the making for most people, notwithstanding what the tenants of "generation flux" may say.

Social technologies should have us working on increasing the number of managers, I mean of people entrusted with the responsibility of achieving the company's mission.

Obviously, as Dominique Turcq hinted at in a recent post, it should also have leaders thinking on this mission and on the corporation as an institution. But that is another story.

Facebook and the Commons

Should we think about Facebook business model or insist on it becoming ... a public utility ?

Dreams (and nightmares) of an HR leader

HR Officers need to jump on the driving seat (or committee) of major technology projects (HRIS ones, but also social business, big data, mobility and even BI). Otherwise, they might loose their influence or even worse, their soul, in the next few years.

From social objects to business objects ?

Moving from a document-centered work organization to a relationship-focused one is a long, difficult journey. Adapting some insights about social objects to the business world can help accelerate the pace.

Future of organizational development: framing for a learning experience

If HR is to assume a leading role in the next generation, social, organization, it should lead the way in framing the working & learning environment that will allow the emergence of meaningful learning and working patterns within this organization.

This next generation, social, enterprise builds upon external trends, as it is now commonly admitted that the social web is opening new horizons for business organizations, from user experience (consumerization of IT) to new learning models (social learning). By understanding the inner workings of this social web and successfully adapting them to the specific goals and constraints of business organizations, HR has yet another opportunity to reinvent itself and the way it impacts organization and talent development.

Unleadership

If we are serious and ambitious in our drive to transform our organizations into next generation social enterprises (or social businesses), we need to unlearn most of what we think we knew about leadership, and focus our R&D efforts on next generation leadership.

Managers beware : Is there a Corporate Jasmine Revolution lurking out there?

Something is at work deep down our corporations, that pushes employees to resist and opose the ideas of those managers that wouldn't change or accept the new social reality.