I am researching a first piece for the financial press on this subject and its premise is that investors really need to know much better how well their investments will compete in a world populated by social media-driven workplaces.
I am not talking about Facebook, of course, but the influence the new technologies will have on the way work is conducted, innovations are conceived, new products are delivered and organisational learning is captured for reuse.
When we attempt to anticipate and describe the impact of social technologies on the workplace, we find ourselves quickly encountering an altogether new world of implications for knowledge management and transfer.
For investors, this might be a world in which it proves really hard at this point to back a winner. There is simply no way of telling which companies will have the ability to adapt at speed to such revolutionary competitive pressures. And by the time we even get fast broadband in Australia, it might all be over for some.
When those in the ecosystem in which your investment does battle are getting busy on embracing social technologies, it’s a time for investors to ask better questions. Most companies aren’t yet prepared for what is around a very near corner. “Organisational learning” remains an abstraction for many without a developed human resource capability, but it and “human capital” are the currencies of the near future.
So, this post is a quick blast, and me thinking aloud. And it depends on what you read, what you study and what you believe, but the risks for investors would appear to be that the management teams they are backing:
I am not talking about Facebook, of course, but the influence the new technologies will have on the way work is conducted, innovations are conceived, new products are delivered and organisational learning is captured for reuse.
When we attempt to anticipate and describe the impact of social technologies on the workplace, we find ourselves quickly encountering an altogether new world of implications for knowledge management and transfer.
For investors, this might be a world in which it proves really hard at this point to back a winner. There is simply no way of telling which companies will have the ability to adapt at speed to such revolutionary competitive pressures. And by the time we even get fast broadband in Australia, it might all be over for some.
When those in the ecosystem in which your investment does battle are getting busy on embracing social technologies, it’s a time for investors to ask better questions. Most companies aren’t yet prepared for what is around a very near corner. “Organisational learning” remains an abstraction for many without a developed human resource capability, but it and “human capital” are the currencies of the near future.
So, this post is a quick blast, and me thinking aloud. And it depends on what you read, what you study and what you believe, but the risks for investors would appear to be that the management teams they are backing:
- Are not learning quickly enough about how to use the social technologies for their own organisational learning
- Are underestimating the impact the social technologies will have on the workplace in anything other than a marketing capacity
- Are still considering the tools only as a nuisance factor when younger employees use them in the workplace
- Prove themselves to be led Canute-like, incapable of learning and wilfully disbelieving in the face of the tsunami of discontinuous change rushing toward them
- Don’t have a strategy for fast, collaborative, reflective workplace engagement
- Being out-innovated by smarter, nimbler competitors
- Missing out on being invited to participate in the best networks and alliances
- Losing people attracted by more forward-looking working environments
- Their people not being engaged in the jobs they already have
- Ultimately, facing critical knowledge loss through the departure of experienced hands and becoming employers of a less than optimised workforce
