Social and Business #socbiz - Emergent Mental Models

A segment of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are on the cusp of a change that is slowly going to change organizations as we know them. And as the quote goes "If you find change difficult you are going to find irrelevance even less"

Came across this fascinating article in Forbes on just how different a "social CXO" is from a traditional CXO, and therefore the unlearning that needs to be done if their organizations is immense.

As the author +Joel York says:

While clean, systematic internal processes provide the control CXO’s need to manage efficiently, they are not the real world. The real world outside the corporate firewall where customers, partners and investors live is a messy, personal one. Harnessing the chaotic power of the organic conversations and processes that criss-cross the company social network and directing it toward a relevant business goal is the fundamental Social CXO challenge.

While this true, I also feel that the very purpose of organizations and the way they add value is undergoing a massive shift. The focus from shareholders to stakeholders is already reshaping corporate agendas, but the social era will make "social good" one of the central corporate goals. As this HBR article asks "Can companies both do well and do good?" 

As +JP Rangaswami writes in his blog posts, we are perhaps going back to a simpler time, when personal relationships were central to conduct business, expect now with scale "The plural of personal is social" and the social customer, like the social citizen, is a radically different person than the traditional customer and citizen. And yes, I will add the social employee and the social candidate to that mix too.

As someone tweeted yesterday "Social doesn't change your company culture, it exposes it", so forget about hiding behind the corporate firewall, secrets will be shared, communities will be formed around social objects

So in this age - where IP and stocks will not be the key differentiators between companies, we will see the companies that will create value by enabling the network, the sharing and the shared community it forms. See the change that is starting in higher education, where value is being unlocked slowly by surely.

When the dominant media of an age changes, it impacts society and shapes it differently, the organizations of tomorrow will be based on new mental models (as Santosh Desai says in this presentation)