Social Capital Mentor

Are we moving towards “a new model of engagement for businesses?” Is business becoming more social? Joshua-Michele Ross—in his great article at Forbes.com—says yes to both. It’s one of my favorite articles on the “social” part of business.

…we are moving increasingly toward a new model of engagement for businesses, that is, (you guessed it!) social. We have many years of refining a model of management that centers on routinization of work and highly constrained communications flow. We have extracted as much productivity as we are likely to get from these command-and-control techniques, and we have squelched enough employee value in the process.

This article is very much about the rise of social media, such as Twitter, but to his great credit, Mr. Ross knows it’s not the technology that’s inherently interesting. Sure, I like keeping up on the latest technologies, iPhone apps, and other ways of relating online. But that’s going to keep changing. Next year, there will be something new (who knows, maybe foursquare will be all the rage…).

Human beings are innately social

It’s about connecting with people - which is nothing new. Ross says it well here:

Human beings are innately social. We are designed to share and connect with others. Period. What’s more, we are born into cultures that provide a blueprint for how to communicate and organize. We know how to join a conversation at a party, meet new people and make decisions and organize in a social setting (with varying degrees of competence).

“Varying degrees of competence” indeed. I agree that we all learn, to some degree, how to have conversations and be social; how to make decisions and organize in a social setting. Where this generous picture falls apart for many people is when they mix business and social. Lots of people don’t know how to organize themselves socially in a business context. That’s why we started writing here at Social Capital Mentor.

The Internet is just another platform for being social

The Internet gives us a different level of scale, but it’s still just another tool to help us do what we’re already prone to do – be social.

Because we can, our innate desire and capacity to socialize is migrating to a platform (the Internet) that has breathtaking scale. The observation that these activities are meaningless, time-wasting or trivial misses the point entirely. Much of our day is dedicated to these activities already (tipping your hat to the neighbor, sharing a small experience with a coworker, sharing pictures of your kids with the receptionist). If you are wondering why people spend their time poking their friends on Facebook–stop. You are just seeing previously confined social activity being exposed to a larger audience.

Up above, I said that connecting with people is nothing new. But, maybe we are seeing something new; at least in business. Maybe the “old way” of doing business was more about control and more rigid efficiency:

If the last 100 years was about gaining efficiency and innovation through scale and tight control of resources and communications, the next 100 will be about finding more fluid, open models of collaboration and cooperation. Playing on this new field has different rules. It requires shifting our concept of business from a legalistic model to a social one. Social contracts are very different from the business contracts that dominated the 20th century corporate mentality. In the business contract, the organizing metaphor is the binding, legal document, and the motivator that constrains bad behavior is the lawsuit.

Check it out. It’s worth a read.

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