Wednesday 4 August 2010

Social Trojan Horse versus Troj enterprise


My latest blog post has gotten great views and comments. Any other post "lives" only a day or so but this one has been getting ReTweets for 10 days straight in a row

Other blog posts come along, tweets and comments ping-pong, and then Spiro Spiliadis makes a very insightful comment about a situation where adoption meets adaption. Somehow my answer was about the Social Trojan Horse...

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: the eternal Circle of Creation of Twitter and blogs where ideas freely flow and bend or break or divide like cells, I just love it

I had been thinking about adopt and adapt, got triggered by Luis Suarez' tongue-in-cheeck post Top 10 Reasons to Ban Social Media in the Organisation! — Really? and got the vision of an old-fashioned enterprise hauling in Social media like they're used to haul in apps: buy 'm, customise 'm, give the users a bit of training and off they go!

The fundamental differences of Social would slowly become apparent. In an attempt to answer the needs and demands of the Social Customers and Suppliers and whatnot, employees would find Ho Chi Minh trails around the enterprise's solid concrete structures, and introduce cracks in the edifice

Departmental walls would slowly come down piece by piece, people would start to talk to eachother across basically any enterprise frontier. It's what I call the Chatterisation of the enterprise: in stead of "the magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise" Chatter ended up only linking Salesforce.com internal applications together

Being confronted and interacting with the Social Customer on the outside, a Social Employee would form on the inside. The employee would want to work Social, in a Social Organisation.
The Power of Pull from the outside would meet the Power of Push of the Enterprise - within the walls of the enterprise itself.
The Millennials and GenX would have a contageous effect on their equally-aged counterparts and separate those from the Boomers in charge
Intimacy would challenge enterprise Anonymity. A really joint workforce, connected and tied together by weak and strong social ties, would conquer the division and separation inherent with big organisations, frequent take-overs and changing managers, names and other labels.

I can picture a revolution, which is nothing more than a postponed evolution really.

Chained to the assembly line, squeezed into cubicles, dismembered by the hands of the punch clock, benchmarked to mundanes by KPI's, the employee has been defeated over and over again.
In fact he's died already, just like Achilles, upon realising the mighty fortress of ye olde enterprise can be besieged but not conquered.
Then, the Social Trojan Horse is left right at the doorsteps. In order to get back Helen, the most beautiful of all: pure pleasure, joy and above all pride - in working for a company and its customers

It was lost long ago, and we've struggled to retrieve it. 10 Long (symbolical?) years, seems like eternity

Today, Social is knocking at the door. Just a bit of adoption will let you handle this prestigious thing!

Beware of Greek bearing gifts...

3 reacties:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting this. Strange coincidence: yesterday, my CEO asked how much time I spent on deskwork vs. just being present, talking with people. He wants us to do more management by walking around.

Michael Ricard said...

Another terrific post Martijn. I especially liked the part, "Chained to the assembly line, squeezed into cubicles, dismembered by the hands of the punch clock, benchmarked to mundanes by KPI's, the employee has been defeated over and over again." Isolated and shaped to fit into the pigeonhole that is a unit of labour.

So many of us as employees take the banalities of Enterprise 1.0 as the only way to work. I know I did, until I immersed myself in the discussions around Enterprise 2.0.

Martijn Linssen said...

Thank you Bernd and Michael

Good to see you're made available to walk the floor Bernd. Too many management-by-meeting-with-other-managers

Yes we only know what we know, and do as our neighbours do - fortunately, thanks to Internet and Soical networks, the neighbourhood is starting to encompass the whole world ;-)

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