Over many years, companies have made major investments in technology to give their businesses a distinctive edge, a new competency that competitors find it hard to match.
Now, rather than the implements themselves, it may be the way which in certain instances cheap, generic tools of shared, social creativity, paid for by subscription, are used that provides the competitive advantage. As Michael Dell claimed for his Dell Computer back in 1998, some may be able to substitute intellect for inventory.
The tools place emphasis back on the inventiveness of human beings working together and their combinations of unique competencies that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate, and can not be substituted by other resources.
The social technologies and the flow of human capital that is their currency will unleash a wave of change within organisations and the way work is done, the like of which we have not seen since, as Harvard Business school professor Gary Hamel put it in mid-2011, the pyramids were built.
Hamel suggests one of the next major waves of innovation will be in management itself. His The Future of Management remains essential reading on this subject, despite having first been published in 2007.
It looks as if we will see the age of social re-engineering and the evaluation of a new ROI, the return on intellect, or on innovation or imagination, take your pick.
It is clear that not everyone will benefit from this.
The 2009 movie, Transcendent Man, about technologist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, suggests that as we build the next technologies with the ever-improving tools of the present, progress is exponential and may lead to humans encountering the “singularity”, an age in which humans and machines find integration and humans may be able to live forever. He puts this date at 2045.
Clearly, better enabled and more effectively enabled teams of human beings will contribute to this acceleration, which will influence the ways in which companies select and reward their teams. Effective knowledge contributors are likely to be high on their pick lists.
Nevertheless, how your workers are engaged, what they know and how that information is brought together in the creation of sustainable businesses which have the potential for creating competitive advantage is likely to become a defining differentiator.
Achieving the organisational agility future competition will demand is in large part about removing factors that impede it and reinforcing those that enable it.
The future differential is likely to be found in how distinctively a company can fashion its human response to keep it ahead. Currently, however, rigid hierarchy, in a world that favours networks, geography and 20th century management models are the major obstacles in many mature organisations wrestling the challenge of nimbleness.
Social technologies enable people to come together to dream up ways of doing a better job. How this is done itself creates a new kind of competency.
They make a team of committed people better attuned to spotting opportunity and they can help to facilitate a state of permanent and ready inventiveness.
Within any business, there are many layers of intelligence that remain unused and much game-shaping tacit knowledge to be drawn on which has to date has been underexploited.
When many organisations continue to retrench those with long-established workplace knowledge, this may come to be valued more highly when socially constructed knowledge itself is valued at premium.
This blog and the conversation it aims to become part of focus on organisational activities that can lead to new future states for businesses that wish to stay abreast of the change.
It looks at innovation as enabled by a collaborative "Enterprise 2.0" approach to its management. Enterprise 2.0 presupposes that an organisation’s forces for innovation can be more effectively harnessed, even across distance, by stimulating the creative collisions of tacit knowledge and insights of those who work within an organisation.
It looks at agility, and the future being about networks of competencies coming together in endless new and unprecedented reconfigurations to create and capitalise new learning and knowledge.
It talks about the need for purposeful organisational learning that ensures opportunities to share and learn are built steadily through networking the insights of those who do the work, where it happens.
One purpose of such learning will be to identify both ways in which work can be done better, where businesses are weak or vulnerable and to focus insights at the interface of change itself.
This has some profound learning for management, but once organisations find this is good for business, it will drive further exploration in every field of commercial endeavour.
And because all business models are vulnerable to the forces of time, it will expose those whose duration is up, just as part of the natural cycle of creation and destruction always has done.
Hierarchies are out, learning networks are in, so it’s time to get with the new ways of doing things. For some, it may prove easier said than done.
Now, rather than the implements themselves, it may be the way which in certain instances cheap, generic tools of shared, social creativity, paid for by subscription, are used that provides the competitive advantage. As Michael Dell claimed for his Dell Computer back in 1998, some may be able to substitute intellect for inventory.
The tools place emphasis back on the inventiveness of human beings working together and their combinations of unique competencies that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate, and can not be substituted by other resources.
The social technologies and the flow of human capital that is their currency will unleash a wave of change within organisations and the way work is done, the like of which we have not seen since, as Harvard Business school professor Gary Hamel put it in mid-2011, the pyramids were built.
Hamel suggests one of the next major waves of innovation will be in management itself. His The Future of Management remains essential reading on this subject, despite having first been published in 2007.
It looks as if we will see the age of social re-engineering and the evaluation of a new ROI, the return on intellect, or on innovation or imagination, take your pick.
It is clear that not everyone will benefit from this.
The 2009 movie, Transcendent Man, about technologist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, suggests that as we build the next technologies with the ever-improving tools of the present, progress is exponential and may lead to humans encountering the “singularity”, an age in which humans and machines find integration and humans may be able to live forever. He puts this date at 2045.
Clearly, better enabled and more effectively enabled teams of human beings will contribute to this acceleration, which will influence the ways in which companies select and reward their teams. Effective knowledge contributors are likely to be high on their pick lists.
Nevertheless, how your workers are engaged, what they know and how that information is brought together in the creation of sustainable businesses which have the potential for creating competitive advantage is likely to become a defining differentiator.
Achieving the organisational agility future competition will demand is in large part about removing factors that impede it and reinforcing those that enable it.
The future differential is likely to be found in how distinctively a company can fashion its human response to keep it ahead. Currently, however, rigid hierarchy, in a world that favours networks, geography and 20th century management models are the major obstacles in many mature organisations wrestling the challenge of nimbleness.
Social technologies enable people to come together to dream up ways of doing a better job. How this is done itself creates a new kind of competency.
They make a team of committed people better attuned to spotting opportunity and they can help to facilitate a state of permanent and ready inventiveness.
Within any business, there are many layers of intelligence that remain unused and much game-shaping tacit knowledge to be drawn on which has to date has been underexploited.
When many organisations continue to retrench those with long-established workplace knowledge, this may come to be valued more highly when socially constructed knowledge itself is valued at premium.
This blog and the conversation it aims to become part of focus on organisational activities that can lead to new future states for businesses that wish to stay abreast of the change.
It looks at innovation as enabled by a collaborative "Enterprise 2.0" approach to its management. Enterprise 2.0 presupposes that an organisation’s forces for innovation can be more effectively harnessed, even across distance, by stimulating the creative collisions of tacit knowledge and insights of those who work within an organisation.
It looks at agility, and the future being about networks of competencies coming together in endless new and unprecedented reconfigurations to create and capitalise new learning and knowledge.
It talks about the need for purposeful organisational learning that ensures opportunities to share and learn are built steadily through networking the insights of those who do the work, where it happens.
One purpose of such learning will be to identify both ways in which work can be done better, where businesses are weak or vulnerable and to focus insights at the interface of change itself.
This has some profound learning for management, but once organisations find this is good for business, it will drive further exploration in every field of commercial endeavour.
And because all business models are vulnerable to the forces of time, it will expose those whose duration is up, just as part of the natural cycle of creation and destruction always has done.
Hierarchies are out, learning networks are in, so it’s time to get with the new ways of doing things. For some, it may prove easier said than done.
