The social business
September 18, 2011
Almost all leadership concepts start with the assumption that a key role for the leader is to set a direction. This usually means designing and communicating a vision and a set of goals. Traditionally, the roles of vision and goals have been there to help people to understand the direction of the enterprise and how they can contribute to it.
Today we need something more.
We need to define what binds individuals together. Separate individuals connecting with the vision may not be enough if people don’t connect with one another. What we are striving to do is not enough if there is no discussion about who we are, and why we do the things we do. We cannot talk about an organization of people without referring to what makes them a collective.
Leadership in the era of the social business should be about providing a platform for discussing the meaning of work and the collective identity.
Leadership should address the human search for being part of something larger than one’s self. The more gifted people are, the more they want to connect with meaningful people doing meaningful things together.
As almost all organizations are becoming increasingly diverse and network-like, and as all boundaries are increasingly flexible, the notion of what brings people together is becoming even more critical.
When we think of intelligence, we usually think of extraordinary individuals. We imagine the thought processes of independent geniuses innovating in isolation. Nothing could be further away from the reality. Creativity is an interactive and social process for even the most gifted. Significant creative breakthroughs almost always represent years of sustained collaboration with others. Creative individuals need both independence and interdependence to do their best work. A creative organization thrives on the tension that arises from widely different but complementary abilities and views working with one another.
In industrial management, individuals were taken for granted and had no choice or voice. The foundations of work relationships are still largely built on asymmetrical relationships between the employer and the employee, the manager and the worker. This antagonism is already affecting labor markets in developed countries: firms are finding it increasingly hard to hire good people. Younger people are more and more attracted to self-employment and entrepreneurial possibilities instead of joining a corporation.
The ideas and technological solutions around the social enterprise can help renew and refresh outdated approaches to work.
The social business is very different from the industrial corporation. In order to be successful, the firm needs to listen and involve people in the same manner that we are today trying to do with one group – customers. Successful corporations, no matter how large and established, are evolving collectives of talented, passionate and diverse individuals in interaction
Knowledge workers want to have a say in what they do in life; where and when they work and most importantly – why and with whom!
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More on the subject: New social networks. David Weinberger on impractical knowledge and knowledge is the network. Douglas Rushkoff on the future of jobs.
Coworking spaces in London, and Amsterdam and co-working as a phenomena.
September 18, 2011 at 11:00
Esko your analysis is well put and I think corresponds to the way many people experience the present context of uncertainty in organizations and society. But I wonder if there isn’t an additional challenge to the conventional view of leadership, one that is important to distinguish since it can’t be “solved” just by engaging in better processes or fuller interaction. It has to do with expectations and expectations, obviously, are about the future. And so I wonder if one essential ingredient here is changing what we expect when we ask the question: why? If we expect to know the future, set a specific goal – getting to the top of the mountain together – then it is easy to know why – because it is there, it exists and we want to climb to the top. So too for a creating the best widget or experience or idea, we imagine a specific outcome within a set of quite strict assumptions about the future and then we try to figure out the best way to get there. We play chess – rules, resources, goal are clear and unambiguous – no longer emergent and fluid. Fine, good collective intelligence and full interactivity can certainly improve moves on a chessboard. The leader that achieves that goal will have contributed a lot to winning the chess game. But what about non-chess situations? What about situations when the expectation with respect to the question “why” is not about the future but about the what and how you see emergence, the previously non-existant and incomprehensible? Then seeking a response to why that is based on the expectation that you need to fix a goal in the future may turn out to be counter-productive, undermining your capacity to invent the present in its full, novel richness. When people try to answer the question why by knowing the future they obscure the present, locking in one way of making sense of the now. In such situations and in our current moment in history, strongly shaped by planning and efforts to lead by knowing the future, one way or another, the additional ingredient is assisting your community to use the future differently – to embrace unforeseeable novelty as the richest resource and so abandon the idea of “knowing the future” for the expectation that we are constantly reinventing the present. Then when we act we no longer expect the answer to the question why to be in the name of some unknowable future but rather it becomes directly connected to our responsibilities and values in the present.
September 18, 2011 at 16:33
Very nicely articulated, Esko .. bravo ! You have distilled the core issues to the essence.
September 20, 2011 at 13:19
[...] second thing that came to my attention was an excellent blog post, The Social Business, from Esko Kilpi. He proposes that: “Leadership in the time of the social business should be [...]
December 2, 2011 at 12:11
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