By Oscar Berg, Future Office Evangelist
December 13, 2010 - 8:49 AM
We have probably heard sayings like "big is beautiful" and "big is better" since the dawn of the industrial age (or since the dawn of man). But how do they rime with today's popular memes such as lean, innovative, agile and social? Big AND lean? Isn't it a contradiction in terms?
Large and distributed organizations find it hard to become lean. They find it even harder to become as agile as up-and-coming smaller competitors and, with a few exceptions, they suck at innovating. It seems as the only feasible survival strategy for most of the really big corporations is the "Big fish eat smaller fish" strategy; if you can’t beat them, buy them.
When doing so, they might be hoping that some of the attributes of the small, lean, agile, innovative and social businesses which they have acquired will in some way or another rub off on themselves. If not, they will at least get access to existing innovations and the talent that created those innovations.
However, there is another strategy, one which requires taking an entirely different approach to growing a business.
In the Internet Age (or whatever you choose to call it), even a small organization with limited resources can make it big all over the world in a short time. You “just” have to be great at what you do and combine that with being great at building and maintaining win-win relationships with other organizations and individuals. Such organizations probably rather invent new sayings such as “collaboration is beautiful” than stick with the old and outdated ones.
Remember the shoal of anchovies in Finding Nemo? Tomorrow's enterprise will be more like a shoal anchovies acting as one single entity than a great white shark. It will consist of a large number of organizations, including customers, who participate because they all benefit from what they can do together. Together they will be big enough to allocate the resources needed to achieve their shared purpose, but agile enough to quickly adjust to changing conditions and find a new shape whenever they need to. All the collaborating organizations and individuals will have fully embraced lean, agile and social principles and they find it perfectly natural to make use of the best of all available communication and collaboration practices and technologies in order to outsmart the great white sharks which are still out there.
The Social Business vs Enterprise 2.0 debate is a pseudo debate that adds very little value. Let us instead focus our time and energy on the real question; how to build great collaborative enterprises, whether it is about redesigning large and distributed organizations to become more collaborative, or helping new collaborative enterprises grow and thrive. Right?
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