Social business: Culture matters

Why culture matters when a business goes 'social inside' and why adoption isn't just about operational roll out and more about culture change.  Where does your company fit along this culture spectrum?

Attribution:  Thomas Power on CSC versus ORS.

 

Comments

[Derek Bishop]

Isn't this the same for any change implementation and is therefore not unique to social business. e.g. any system implementation or change of approach can only truely achieve the business case if the people are in engaged in the need for change and adapt their practices and behaviours to suit the new ways of working.

[Oaxaca]

Good point but I don't agree. Social software encourages open, sharing behaviours that are counter intuitive to most organisations. Every one of them suffers from silo structures re-enforced by contractual arrangements that reward people to hoard knowledge and protect their turf. Social business is about a shift from command and control models of organisation to peer-to-peer models of organisation. This is new. This is different to other change programmes.

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.