Comments on: How Much Can Enterprise 2.0 Transform? Experts Agree to Disagree

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 09 May 2007 09:57:27 +0000

From the The Visionary's Handbook (Nine Paradoxes that will Shape the Future of your Business) by Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor: The key to a false vision is that, in the face of knowing for sure that the world is going to change, a company or an organisation or an individual aspires to stay the same. The key to a true vision is that, in the face of knowing for sure that the world is going to change, a company or an organisation or an individual aspires to change with it and stay the same simultaneously . And the reality of a true vision is that, unlike a false one, pursuing it is such difficult work. My full pennies worth here

By: Jon Husband

Jon Husband — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:08:03 +0000

That said, I think as people who have grown up relying on participatory technologies — using everything from IM to MySpace to Twitter to manage personal and professional lives — assume managerial roles, those technologies and approaches will follow into the corporate culture.

This will be hard to stop, stem or deny, in my opinion.

Not to mention that effective (and still hierarchical when appropriate / necessary) leadership and management could be using the dynamics promised by E2.0 to grow and sustain healthy, adapative, resilient and learning-oriented organizational cultures – something many organizations already spend a lot of money trying to accomplish.

Warren Bennis once said “Much of hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust”. It takes a lot of work on the part of leaders and senior managers – listening, championing, changing course when wrong, communicating effectively and consistently – to sustain effective organizations where knowledge-based work is mission-critical.

Why is it, for example, that coaching in organizations has caught on quickly and widely ? Why are emotional intelligence and social intelligence now important issues to organizations. There are some pernicious aspects to traditional top-down hierarchy that E2.0 – intelligently conceived and designed and applied for appropriate purpose – can help to mitigate.

eOD anyone ? Why ignore what can be put to good use ?

By: Oscar Berg

Oscar Berg — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 11:49:01 +0000

Technology can play a part in changing how humans think and behave in an organization. But, by putting too much trust in new technologies we will only fool ourselves. We have to look at ourselves first. Technology is at best a mirror reflecting our behaviours and forcing us to think about them. Then it is ip to us to learn something from what we see.

By: Bill Ives

Bill Ives — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 01:28:36 +0000

Great post. Thanks. Good example of the baggage that blogs drag into the enterprise. I greatly respect Tom but he has seen blogs in the past as the “tools for individuals to express their somewhat random musings.” (Thinking for a Living. p. 108) and I think this might still color some of his perspective. On the other hand he is open to change as he concludes the same HBS article cited above with this thought. I will write some more on this next week.

‘I freely admit, however, to one key uncertainty. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today’s wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?.”

By: Perry Hewitt

Perry Hewitt — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:00:18 +0000

I see Tom Davenport’s point about the absence of participative technologies not causing organizations and expertise to be hierarchical — and I have seen more than a few tech firms fail as a result of denying that reality.