Social Business – Rethinking Innovation, Organization and Leadership

Over the course of the last few weeks I have been engaging on a good number of conversations around the subject of Leadership (Which I am hoping to be talking about plenty more very soon, by the way, once a publication makes it out there in the next couple of weeks…), and how social networking is changing the way we view traditional management / leadership moving along from a command-and-control attitude into one of leaders as servants, which clearly comes to define, in my opinion, the next generation of leaders 2.0 for the 21st century. But, I am sure you may be wondering, what would it look like, right? How do we identify those new, emerging leaders both within the workplace, as well as in our own societies? How do we make them stand out and help them lead us in such a complex, global and diverse environment? What would we have to do to transition successfully into that kind of new leadership? I know, lots of questions, right? Well, here is one potential answer to them all: Social Business – Rethinking Innovation, Organization and Leadership

I can’t get enough of it, I tell you. I *love* it when some of my favourite people bump into those little golden nuggets and precious gems on some really thought-provoking subject(s), specially, related to Social Computing, and they share them across openly to inspire others to get involved in the conversations. Well, I just had one of those moments! Yesterday afternoon, in our microblogging social tools, my good friend and long time KM & Collaboration extraordinaire, Scott J Smith, shared along this absolutely wonderful YouTube 4 minute video clip under the heading “Social Business – Rethinking Innovation, Organization and Leadership“:

And from there onwards, it’s been making the rounds time and time again all over the place. It’s one of those fantastic short video clips that you know you need to bookmark somewhere, as you are bound to make use of it as a superb icebreaker for upcoming workshops or presentations you may be delivering around the subject of social business. The clip itself describes, pretty nicely, the background of the emerging social networking world as part of a larger ecosystem where complexity, globalisation, people movements, the financial crisis, urbanisations, outsourcing, women in the workplace / society, collaborative software, disruptive innovations, etc. etc. are helping provoke the necessary changes of how we conduct business nowadays.

However, traditional management doesn’t seem to be keeping up nicely with those rampant changes we have all gone through over the course of decades. On the contrary, in pretty much all over the corporate world out there, some of our management systems are still very much thinking along the terms of the industrial revolution and not the digital one we have been living over the last decade, for instance. Somehow, it looks like that change is now more necessary than ever. And that’s just exactly the premise behind this very short, but rather inspiring, video clip; here is an excerpt of the description that was put together for it:

“A more open and transparent world challenge us to rethink the way we do business, the way we organize and the way we lead. Globalization, Tranparency, Social Media, Collaborative software – all part of a social revolution that forces companies to engage in Social Business Innovation and Open Business Leadership. What can we learn from LEGO, Google, Starbucks, Proctor & Gamble and Nike?“

If someone would ask me to explain what the Future of the Workplace would be like, my definition would probably come pretty close to some of the main messages you will see permeating throughout the video: openness, transparency, a growing need for CLOs (Chief Listening Officers – Goodness, gotta love that job role!), trust, engagement, work organised around networks and communities versus organisations and traditional hierarchies, social capital as *the* main driver of interactions, etc. etc. In short, a new kind of leadership inspired by social business innovation and driven by those very same knowledge workers who are willing to shape up the next generation of their leaders, the next generation of business.

Like I said, this short YouTube video clip will surely make you think twice about how you view work, how you interact with other knowledge workers, and how social networking, both inside and outside of the firewall, is helping shape up some of those various different interactions, making them clearer, more transparent, more open, more public defining the way we are going to do business from now onwards. The good thing, as the clip shows, is that we won’t have to wait much longer. It’s already there! It’s already happening in multiple places and it’s just a matter for us to decide how we would want to facilitate that change to take place, because whether we like it or not, we are at that point in time, where change is inevitable; so we may as well embrace it and make the most out of it, don’t you think?