Collaborate or Die

Collaborate or die...of irrelevance.   While others collaborate and become stronger and more successful, your company will simply fade into the background if you don't evolve.  I, like Jack Welch the former CEO of General Electric for 20 years, believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere and anyone.  Command and control cultures are quickly becoming a thing  of the past.  There are two types of leaders...those that surround themselves with the smartest people in the room..and those who need to be the smartest person in the room.  The best leaders are the ones who surround themselves with the best people.  After all, if a leader knows it all, why hire managers? Why not just tell people what to do and have them execute?  The future is about collaboration and it won't happen unless it is fostered from the top down and integrated into the culture of the company.  Collaborate should't be just limited to employees within a company.  Companies should be collaborating with their ecosystem partners and customers as well.  

There is a big big difference between social media marketing, social media, and leveraging social media technology.  While many business to business (B2B) marketers are having success with some social media technologies like blogs and many of the popular social media sites, the true future of social media in the B2B space is the integration of social technology into the day to day operations of the business.  Gone are the days where someone has a burning action item and shoots off an email to a list of people and then waits for someone to respond.  Now a question can be posted for all to see and the best answer can come from someone unknown to the poster, who has just solved a similar problem in their work group.  No more reinventing the wheel or having a burning request die in email in boxes.  

There are a handful of enterprise social technology companies that enable enterprise-wide collaboration, such as Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Microsoft Yammer, IBM Connections, etc.  Many companies believe that if they implement enterprise social technology it will facilitate collaboration among their employees.  That's just backwards.  Collaborative cultures enable social technology not the other way around.  I evolved AT&T's call center product portfolio into a collaborative contact center portfolio of high-tech services.  I learned a lot integrating collaboration capabilities into an existing technology platform.  Mainly that people won't collaborate just because you give them some new technology.  It's not about the technology.  It's about the people and the way people interact.  Once there is buy in and acceptance to a collaborative culture from the top down the benefits of collaborative technology can be realized.  Not vise verse. 

Social business and Enterprise 2.0 are about enabling collaborative cultures, not about delivering collaboration technology and hoping for the best.  It's all about culture first then technology, not the other way around.  Companies need to embrace a culture of collaboration first then implement the right technology to enable their culture to flourish.

Socially yours,

Greg
Social Media Greg, AKA SoMe Greg
Gregory T Simpson
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