Well, for the first time in a long time (I think over ten years?), I'm down at Lotusphere where all the talk promises to be about "social business". I'm actually quite interested in social business, so I thought I'd write about it periodically here, usually tagged "innovation" and/or "technology". The views here on this (or any!) subject are mine and not necessarily those of the IBM company, and my intent is to explore thoughts in this area, as in other areas on this blog, rather than shill for my employer. Its a new line for me to walk, so if I stray the course, please advise.
Anyway, I think the Quora definition of social business is quite good in its reductionist sense (and since the market is still evolving here a reductionist definition is probably a good one). At its root, social business looks at the way people have "improved" their personal lives using social tools - insert your favorite technique here - and says "Why can't we do the same in a business context?". In other words, if you like hanging out on Facebook and find its a good way to keep up with what large groups of people are doing and stay in touch, you might ask yourself when you're in a work setting why you can't do things the same (well, perhaps slightly modified…) way. The same could be said of other consumer social business tools (Facebook, but also Twitter, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr, etc). It turns out you can do business this way, and IBM and others sell stuff to do this. I wanted to focus more in this blog however about how people generically think about this stuff and where it might go, rather than who has the best way to implement it.
The most difficult thing I've noticed in discussing "social business" with people is getting them to grasp the power of it, and whats required to get the power. Its quite difficult, as the benefit is most easily realized through experience, and the benefit grows the more the people that you work with are part of the experience. Its a huge bootstrapping problem to get from "zero" to the experiental result. In this experiential regard, its not unlike some consumer devices (what makes, say, the iPhone a cool thing is a lot harder to describe than it is to experience by playing around… Hence the Apple Stores…. but I digress). The difference though is that experiencing the benefit of an iPhone doesn't require you to get some critical mass of friends on the iPhone. In the social realm, it does. This was a huge barrier at the beginning of what we used to call "Web 2.0", and one that the best companies accidentally or on purpose broke through with groups of early adopters until there was sufficient network value for it to be likely that mainstream users could quickly realize the benefit.
So far, so good.
In businesses, however, I think there is a further hurdle. I think that those business that get to the full benefits of social business will ultimately wind up overhauling their cultures in as fundamental of a way as the changes that human societies went through in the transition from subject to citizen. At the endpoint of this journey, a whole set of expectations about how ideas progress through the corporation and how people shepherd them will change, to a large degree to ways the polar opposite of the way they are today. Why?
Well, business (or human society…) has always been about relationships, cultivating the right people to sell to or get investment from or get promoted by or whatever. This is nothing new. In a closed society, however - for example, the monarchical cultures present in what we might broadly call the medieval period of many cultures - the nature of these relationships is fairly straightforward. People have an explicit rank in society, the rank flows from the sovereign, and sucess has to do with answering the interests of the sovereign and forming relationships with the sovereign and those whom the sovereign deems important. The broader set of ideas and interests of "We, The People" are part of the equation only in so far as the sovereign and gang need to avoid revolution and motivate, say, the army to defend the nation or grab another fiefdom.
This frankly worked well for much of human history, if you gauge well as meaning "assembling empires" at least. Ie if the British Empire or the Roman Empire had a stock price, you certainly could have played buy and hold for quite a long time based on the successes that their closed society management models delivered.
Over time, though, it started to break, perhaps beginning with the Enlightenment. To grossly oversimplify, what started to come out in the Enlightenment is that it was really important to get the best ideas, and the closed society model stifled the best ideas too much (either because the people couldn't get enough food and education to have ideas, or because the people with the best ideas couldn't get heard (best case) or got thrown into a volcano for threatening the perceived wisdom (not even unfortunately worst case)). Societies that loosened the reins started to surge forward.
This wasn't all sweetness and light, though. There are probably lots of reasons, but for the purposes of this essay I'll claim that the collapse of closed Empires coincided with the growth of heavy industry and industrialization. These societies did need good ideas, but they also needed lots of capital. A crappy idea about how to make steel, along with huge amounts of capital that a steel factory needed, made more steel, and hence advanced the society, more than a great idea with no capital. Ironically, the society that most triumphed in its ideology the need for labor to overcome the despotic desires of capital, the Soviet Union, may well have been kept alive by the fact that the greatest growth periods in its history (the first industrialization wave in the twenties and thirties, then the rebuilding and "Sputnik" wave in the fifties and sixties, when the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on earth) coincided with times when the demands of the society required capital more than labor (or a least more than the innovation aspect of labor).
Eventually, however, the innovation/labor drumbeat started to drown out the capital/heavy industry drumbeat in advanced societies. The "easy part" of industrialization was done, and now societies needed to find the best ideas in order to continue to generate wealth. This becomes visible in the latter part of the Cold War, when western societies, the US in the vanguard, really started to increase the productivity gap between them and closed societies at an increasing rate. Innovation came into its own, the Soviet Union crumbled, and some great ideas started to bubble over that way as well.
What does this have to do with business and specifically social business? Well, I think we're on the cusp of the same thing. Business leaders in many advanced economies and even in developing economies where the "winners" have started to emerge have outstripped the "heavy industry" phase, where having lots of capital was a greater determinant of success than having lots of great ideas. Silicon Valley is an obvious ground zero of this revolution, but it spread. Innovation has become a primary determinant of survival, not just victory.
The challenge? Many businesses look much more like closed societies than open ones. Knowledge is siloed, hierarchies manage the flow of information (even in the best flattened hierarchies), task forces pop up periodic great thoughts whose "radicalness" is limited a priori by the selection of the participants. Things may not fall apart, but, hey, this approach ain't gonna put a man on the moon. They need to find a better way to get the best ideas, and the better way is to shift the culture, from a closed society to open society.
This is, however, a radical thing. Its certainly not simply the technology of what I've heard disparaged as "blogsnwikisnthings" (blogs and wikis and things). It is however a major change in behavior encompassing the use of blogs and wikis and things that will let these ideas get out. If you want to allow the best talent to hit the best ideas and influence them in the best ways, its a prerequisite to implement an open culture where the people and ideas can actually find each other. If we tell everyone to blog, but never read the blogs or comment on them; if we put our ideas in wikis, but lock down the wiki, prevent changes, or treat the wiki as a technique for "the owner" to publish his or her internal website, we certainly didn't get a culture of innovation. We got, merely, blogsnwikisnthings.
The analogy, from a society standpoint, might be newspapers and elections. The Soviet Union had newspapers and elections. It just didn't have the ability for anyone to make a newspaper, express any (well, longer story, but pretend "any") idea they like, and allow any idiot to run for election to see which idea would win. This is kind of like having blogsnwikisnthings that are locked now: thanks for printing the party newspaper, as I needed something to wrap the fish in. The secret locked down idea has the same value, perhaps even the same future, as fish wrap, bird cage liner, and other noble roles.
This, in my view, is the payoff but also at its heart the challenge of social business. To gain the benefit, a business needs to begin to chart a course where the "closed society" model gets overtaken by the "open society" model. To do so, the business needs to gain new skills, and start behaving in new ways where the techniques that were often the most successful in the old model are now at best useless, and at worst harmful. To implement the new skills and culture, businesses need the technology support. Its not about blogsnwikisnthings, but if you're looking around and not seeing those things implemented and used as fundamental cornerstones of an increasing number of business processes, you're probably not yet on the road to social business.
You may, of course, prefer the old, closed, model. In this case, you certainly don't need blogsnwikisnthings. A few propaganda posters ought to do. After all, isn't it true, as the Stalin-era propaganda poster said, that LIFE IS BECOMING EVER MORE JOYFUL?
