Apr 15th, 2009 |
I had the opportunity to interview Lee Bryant, CEO of the UK-based consultancy Headshift, and the result was a somewhat long, but extremely interesting series of insights based on his work in many enterprises.
Some of the topmost insights:
- The Economy — “People are still living on last year’s budgets,” so a lot of the momentum now is still based on last year’s decisions. He expects a point of decision for many companies in the near term, which could lead to the tail-off of earlier projects. “Paradoxically, the worst you are hit [economically] the better you come out of it.” Lee suggests that those that who accept the new economic realities quickly are the first to adapt, and may get a leap based on that.
- ROI — Some shell-shocked companies are continuing to fund large, expensive, and perhaps not that beneficial projects, while requiring highly detailed ROI analysis for a $50K experimental project, which is choking off innovation.
- The Rise of the Social Web — Lee has a great historical sense, and suggests that we are at a turning point, like the start of the industrial era. “We have our own railroads, our own telephone system,” meaning the social web, and we have a chance to reorganize our economy around new sorts of scale, new kinds of efficiency and prodcutivity. This is going to be disruptive, but will lead to an new economy.
- Change Management and Culture — Lee makes the case that the meme about people being resisting change is a bit off the mark. People are open to adopting new things if they actually help, and will resist various vacuous arguments about ‘you need to change ot die’ or psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about emergent values and so on. He has found it best to position these tools in the simplest most straightforward and business-oriented way.
I found myself wishing that the conversation could have gone on longer, even though it ran over 20 minutes. Lee and I will be overlapping at several conference in the next month, and I will be sure to talk to him again.
Being resistant to change and being capable of change are two different things. Even if you want to quit smoking or eating junk food, it’s incredibly difficult to do. It’s an order of magnitude harder for organizations. I wrote about this recently at:
http://www.blueoxen.com/blog/2009/04/the-psychology-of-organizational-transformation/
The rise of the social web is something I’ve been researching so I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. Innovation builds on the infrastructure currently in place. If we put trends into perspective, it’s interesting to note that the rise of the photocopier decentralized records/information management, while the rise of the wordprocessor meant that, particularly in the ’90’s, we lost a lot of the documented thought processes in our work, and in somecases lost the work completely. The implementation of enterprise2.0 is bringing back many of the formalized information management practices, but with a twist and is changing how businesses and government are valuing employees, clients and their products. Thanks for a great post.
Janet
It’s good to see the rise of the social Web part as part of this discussion. This is an absolutely fundamental shift in society in general and in the enterprise, but at this point the idea hasn’t gone mainstream yet. Most people still see social as another hot thing, not realizing the depth and breadth of the change we’re living through.
http://connectionsblog.net