“The Internet is the dominant platform for life in the 21st Century… it is the central platform for business, culture and personal relationships.”
Ben Hammersley, Wired Editor, September 2011
It is. Not soon, not in a few years but now. But in business, we’re slow to catch up. Why this is happening? And what needs to change internally and externally?
We live and work in 2011. We are in the information age. But we act as if we’re in the industrial age. Factory mentality rules. Process this, refine that, get a repeatable outcome every single time. Except in our economy, that doesn’t happen.
We don’t live in a 9-5 economy. Example: Facebook traffic peaks at weekends and evenings. How many brand managers are actively looking after their brand beyond Monday to Friday 9-5? We live in lumpy times. Not repeatable. Our workload is up and down. So we compensate for lumpiness with meetings because downtime is a sin. But where some detest this, others embrace it. Google allows developers 20% of their working week to develop projects. This is where Gmail and other game-changing technologies were born.
WE FEAR CHANGE
Because change means different! And the change needed is immense because it spans the entire organisation. Change is required from jealously that guards our knowledge stocks and eks out ever decreasing profits from them. Change is required to become more open, collaborative and sharing. The silo model organisation inhibits growth. Of course, you can’t break down all the barriers. That would cause chaos. You need to become more porous. Demilitarize the silos, fundamentally share the data reserves but harness and mine it for actionable insights. And it can work:
- HP claims to have saved $10bn in customer service costs.
- SAP reduced issue resolution time from weeks to 17 minutes by opening up a developer forum.
- P&G claimed to get over 50% of their NPD ideas from active listening in the social space.
There is no need to fear change. Change is constant. It’s how you embrace it across your organisation that matters.
Be fiercely defensive of time and the wastefulness of it. Practical measures could be to take a leaf out of IBM’s book and have meetings last no longer than an hour. Or take the chairs away and have stand ups to promote quick thought and action. Tame your email culture; implement instant messaging to reduce volume. Encourage innovation by off-setting time with incentives – the desire to fill 37.5 hours per week with billable hours never equates to true resource utilisation. Create cross-functional workgroups to help solve issues and identify new solutions and ensure you have senior involvement and leadership to effect change. And implement a social listening programme and identify actionable insights to improve or challenge your business. Without change, you just keep doing what you’ve always done.
