Companies need to move beyond the old, mechanistic strategies for connecting and collaborating. To thrive today, they must now look to the biology-inspired strategies of networks. This is the evolution of the firm – a move away from the self-reliance of yesterday, to the radical connectedness of today.
Like new-born hearts, beating and radiating from many locations and in all directions, the Occupy Movement is reframing our environmental and social problems as the symtoms of one root cause: the concentration of wealth and its corruptive influence on business and government. The vibrancy of this movement is giving courage to many, and may even shift the way the Tea Party thinks about the real problems now facing America.
Many of you know that I write a lot about engagement and think about it as “the process of building relationships with people and putting those relationships to work to accomplish some goal.” This exercise is designed to help you better balance this tension between tasks and relationships.
What we are seeing in Occupy Wall Street and related events around the country is our youth, at least some small segment of it, telling us that everything is not alright. They are telling us that our social fabric is stretched to a dangerous point of fraying.
Netflix is slowly exploding all its goodwill with customers, through a series of decisions on pricing and reshaping its service offerings. It’s been a bad six months for the company, and I don’t see things turning around for them again for a while … if ever. It’s too bad. It’s a good company that just made some bad decisions.
There will soon be a day when the majority of our online social interactions will occur through mobile devices, and we will face a much more intensely social world than we can even imagine today. When that day comes, our software will need to be much smarter at recognizing people’s social context.
It’s one of the great tragedies of modern life that our amazing capacity for emotional intelligence gets short-circuited online. We need software that helps us not only retain, but augment our online emotional intelligence. Here are four areas to focus on and a plea for injecting anthropology into our software development process.
TicketMaster just announced a new interactive seat map feature that allows you to more easily book seats next to your friends at concerts. This new “social seat map” feature is a prime example of “Friend Discovery” – connecting an organization’s CRM database with the social networks of its customers.
Software-based businesses like Amazon and Netflix are rapidly displacing traditional businesses, but it goes much deeper than that. Software will soon replace much of what you do at work – and at lower cost and with better service. The question is – how far will we take this? Will software someday run our companies?
Being effective is part what we focus on and part who we focus on – because so much of what we do in life, we do with other people. To know who to focus on, you need to look at “who matters” and “who you can influence” – and that influence comes through engagement.
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