Creating the Social Enterprise is hard. There are some big obstacles in the way.
Scott Gould wrote a piece on why companies don’t get it the other day that pushed some buttons on this topic. You should read it.
Then Olivier Blanchard wrote a piece describing the principal characteristics of a social business. You should read that one too.
Good pieces all around. They got me thinking about the controlling nature of (especially big) companies. Why do I say “big”? Well that was the image I had in my head as I was thinking. It seems to me that companies develop an overbearing rigidity as they grow (even big companies were small once). The lack of freedom or flexibility afforded employees is, in many cases, a function of size of the company and of the level of trust placed in the workforce (or maybe trust is a subset of size). That is, size informs corporate culture in a significant way, effecting trust and humanness and the personality of the business.
I have worked in a few companies that were relaxed and open and allowed, trusted, even encouraged, their employees to be individuals. However, as those companies grew, an increasing amount of structure crept in, establishing more and more rules, regulations, and restrictions. Maybe during growth, the steady spread of the internal network, where original employees slowly find themselves thinned out and losing touch with the far reaches of the organisation, engenders a creeping malaise and mounting paranoia, causing management to attempt to “hold on to” the old feelings of close community through regulation and rigidity.
If an employee knows everyone else in the business, has regular conversations with them over a cup of coffee in the company kitchen, she feels comfortable about trusting them in their work and vice versa. The management feels the same way. As the company grows, however, new employees arrive, new departments are formed, new layers applied and management slowly loses that firsthand personal relationship with everyone and, perhaps somewhat understandably, slowly loses the trust they had that every employee could do her job and represent the company in any and all interactions. Therefore, management decides to try to give themselves some certainty by putting everyone in a professional box, restricting their roles and limiting their interactions and influence.
It seems to flow like this:Â Business growth leads to loss of internal relationships leads to lack of mutual trust leads to increased regulations leads to reduced employee independence. (somebody get me an info-graphic designer 
)
A factory mentality does exists, as Scott points out, where management attempts to create a giant corporate machine. But there is also a brand control aim at work. And, more to my point, a personal control mentality exists which has a slightly different ambition, less about efficiency and image control, more about, perhaps, attempting to know, the company through structure. As management, in the absence of real relationships, I can construct a quasi-relationship with my workforce if I carefully define their functionality – in essence I “know” them because I know what their roles are.
Personal relationships are a basic human requirement. We need the interaction. But somewhere along the way, in the face of corporate sprawl and in a “modern” attempt at efficiency, we’ve abandoned them as a basic business requirement. Unfortunately, it’s replacement environment has grown deep roots over the past 40 years.
Maybe this mirrors a rule in nature about the complexity of organisms where the constituent parts of those organisms are required to behave in increasingly narrowly defined or specialist ways as the complexity of the whole increases. I’m not sure. Is anyone here a molecular biologist?
So, creating the Social Enterprise is hard. Socio-cultural heritage, twisted human nature, maybe even the bio-mechanics of organisms are at work here.
Now that I’ve got all that off my mind, I can move onto the question of getting past all of the detritus above to recreate an internal corporate relationship environment, to create the social enterprise. But that is for the next post… at least.
In the meantime, keep your eye on what Scott, Olivier and others are talking about (and planning to do) in this area through their P2P likeminds movement.
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