Why corporate wonks are puzzled by Web 2.0
Posted on July 1st, 2006 by Jackie Danicki
Er:
“The key part of Web 2.0 is that there is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration,” said John Seely Brown, a consultant and former chief scientist of Xerox.”
Heh. Yeah, “something about them”. Adriana notes in her Furl feed:
Not hard to work out what it is.. the focus on the individual, which is something that will never make sense to corporations with collectivist mindsets.
Further:
[T]he issue of having ‘projects’ with such [social media] tools is a mis-nomer as JP has pointed out. Minimal amount of organisation within set parameters is the right approach.
I wouldn’t call the project mentality so much a ‘misnomer’ as a complete error in attitude and outlook. To further paraphrase JP, why would one hire good, smart people and then tell them what to do? Some people have trouble getting behind that idea, for whatever reason. How about this: Do you really think that top-down imposition of bottom-up phenomena is a good idea?
Filed under: Business, Colleagues, Communication, Friends, Individuality vs Collectivism, Life
Ah interesting! Useful to be able to contextualise your positions by reference to Adriana and by extension to the samizdata crew. The argument here though seems to be a bit of a false dichotomy though - there are spaces between rampaging individualism and corporate heirarchy, and certainly most successful creative projects I’ve seen inside large organisations have focused on the collaborative power of small groups - ie. where you don’t need to abstract to process to make use of the fact that other people have different perspectives and skill-sets which can be used to supplement one another. Teams of three to five people with minimal management and little to no internal heirarchies seem to me to generally produce better and more effective results than larger teams or individuals. Creating an environment within these larger organisations for this kind of activity to thrive seems to me to be a very positive move.
I’d recommend reading more on John Seely Brown’s work by the way - he’s done a lot of research recently into the ways in which Far Eastern businesses (large ones like Toyota) have completely turned around their businesses by engaging in strong relationship building with other companies and suppliers. The model of capitalism that he discusses is radically different from the way US companies work (concentrating on making sure that hte relationship is financially stimulating and creative to both parties, rather than using open tenders and blind competition for example), and seems to be working extremely well. He’s basically a profoundly pro-business and pro-free markets thinker looking at how change in practice is impacting on business and better ways to produce value. I didn’t completely agree with his book on the social life of information, but he’s a very weighty and serious thinker in these areas and worthy of a bit more investigation.
All of which is to say, he’s not easily characterisable as a ‘corporate wonk’.
Tom, the post wasn’t about ‘projects’, but about why social media tools work so well.
Tom, you really are getting the wrong end of the stick here. Much as I wish, I don’t consider JP Rangaswami part of the Samizdata.net crew, so your leap from Jackie’s comment on my comments to something you can clutch as an argument is misplaced.
I am looking at this from the network point of you and not the politicised approach that so often mires the understanding of the online ‘underworld’ in the UK. For a network to exist and function, the nodes have to be there, defined and functioning. So it is with individuals and team work. You cannot recreate the collaborative magic of the internet by imposing a fuzzy notion of community onto bewildered employees.
Further, you seem to confuse (or not differentiate enough between) collectivist and collective. The former has replaced the latter in the corporate cultures across the world. The collectivist I abhor, the collective I try to bring to companies. The blogosphere is the best example of the emergent, not an imposed, collective and we (Jackie, I and our lot) strive to understand its dynamics and rules so we can make them work for individuals within companies. ‘Projects’ have very clear implications within the corporate context and usually have the opposite effect to the desired impact of social tools. So introducing social media/tools via traditional projects is a no-no, as JP points out (and we loudly second).
Finally, all your talk of capitalism and individualism and other -isms… Too much politics can spoil the social media broth.