The interactive age has brought us a bunch of new organisational trends and hot topics for discussion. So these days, everybody is talking about ideas like user-centric design, crowdsourcing, user-driven companies or even the wisdom of crowds. While CRM is getting tired, VRM strives to be the next cool interactive thing.
This changes the perspective from traditional company-focused to consumer-focused. In his talk at next09, Lee Bryant from Headshift walked us through the implications of this shift. Axel Bruns summed it up like this:
Perhaps there's a need to return to the idea of corporate organisations with a social mission - restoring an understanding of social responsibility which has all but disappeared from the corporate world in recent decades, in favour of plundering available resources. The current financial crisis is caused in good part by the failure to balance profit motives and social responsibilities, of course.
So, for a company to be user-driven, it must also be people-driven - and this needs to be represented not least also in the company's internal organisational structure. A company cannot just be soft on the outside, and hard on the inside; change for the better must start with the company's own employees - they must be allowed to be human, too, and to engage with customers. There must be consistant values throughout the business.
What, then, will the successful companies of the future look like? They'll need to be very keenly aware of the ecosystem within which they operate; they need to create a shared meaning and purpose; and they need to trust their network to be able to support them. Some of this is starting to happen externally, around companies - but crucially, it must also happen within them.
So what should companies do? In the words of Ton Zijlstra:
Companies need to ask themselves whether their goal is pure profit maximisation in the short-term, leading to pillage and plunder attitudes, or sustainable income by real value creation over the long term. If the latter, companies need to find balance between respect, social status and profit. If you opt for profit in the short-term it will cost you your respect and social status, which in turn will come back to hurt the company itself. Large companies as Unilever started out with social and profit goals. Banking was a respected profession serving communities until they descended to plunder (I think it started with the introduction of financial derivatives in the mid 1980's, when financial investment products became completely disconnected from underlying companies and their value/values). Bankers may be rich now, but not respected or with highly regarded social status.
The slides of Lee's talk can be found at SlideShare.
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