I finally connected with Charlene Li, of the Altimeter Group and the co-author of Groundwell, and she gave some great insights to the state of Enterprise 2.0.

• On Leadership — “The reason that leadership is so important is that this is really hard to do.’ The difficulties are so comprehensive that things won’t just naturally happen. “It isn’t just putting up a wiki or some blogs, there is a whole ‘back culture’ that has to be involved”.
• On Bottom-up or Top-Down — Charlene relates a story about Michael Dell turned Howard Schultz onto the SalesForce Ideas product, but “that doesn’t happen very often, unfortunately.” Usually, it starts somewhere else, and it won’t go vert far without an executive champion. “When you put social technologies in place it starts tearing down the way that power is shared.”
• On The Power Shift as Cultural Barrier — “When you give the power to people to post into a wiki or write a blog, [...] and if you let them do it freely, that diminshes the gate-keeper role. [...] And if you think about the way that organizations are laid out, its usually a bunch of silos, and social technologies puts a big sticl of dynamite in that.”
• On Tools — Charlene thinks that enterprise Twitter-like tools will displace a lot of email. “It supplements the natural communication already going on, like IM, which many enterprises have already adopted.”
• On Blogs — I wondered why we are finding blogs so little used. “I think its because people don’t like blogging. It’s hard to find time to sit down and compose your thoughts. [...] It asks people to communicate in a very different way. [...] I suggest to executives that they not blog, but they sure talk a lot, so I suggest they video themselves.”
• On 10 Years Ahead — “Today, working is very solitary [...] in the future it may all be in Twitter or other tools that sit on top of the social graph.”

As usual, talking with Charlene opened my head to new ideas. Definitely more than worth the time, and I look forward to returning to Charlene in the next month or so, when we are boiling down some of our results.

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Charlene Li Enterprise social software howard schultz Michael Dell oe09 Open Enterprise 2009 salesforce ideas Twitter

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