More Evidence

Every day, the blogosphere increases it's distributed information and knowledge. On any given day I can find or stumble upon high value knowledge that in my case offers more evidence to support what I want to do to help transform your organization for the better.
Today was another case in point. I started by reading Peter Miller's "The Smart Swarm", which lead me to becoming aware of the U.S. intelligence community's "Intellipedia", a Google search in turn lead me to Radar O'Reilly's technology site, from which a blog post there lead me to this terrific post by Andrew McAfee's blogpost called Enterprise 2.0 Is a Crock: Discuss.

McAfee is responding to a piece by Dennis Howlett titled Enterprise 2.0 What a Crock.

Howlett raises what I often talk about here, but what also is a false dichotomy: the self organizing nature of social media and Web 2.0 tools are a threat to the existing hierarchy and bureaucratic order of organizations. They can  be, yes. That is a long ways away from them having to be. Howlett also raises another excellent point: companies and 'corporate America' are far more engaged with trying to deal with the worst recession since the great depression. Engaging with new social media tools may not be high on their to do lists.
That is a point. But it is also a point one would expect from the old guard.
He also misses that it was a lot of the old guard mentality, lack of foresight, lack of social intelligence and greed for short term gains over that of long term organizational and society health that brought on the worse recession since that 1930's.

It was herd mentality the lead America and many others over that cliff. Your organization could have separated itself from that herd. Your organization, your corporation can still separate itself from that herd.

Howlett is wailing the loser's cry. Leaders and winners look ahead, look for the new tools, the new science that can take them there, and forge the paths America and the world needs to create the kind of sustainable future where society benefits, and private and public organizations benefit.

Read the entire posts by both Howlett and McAfee. One is progressive and forward looking, the other rooted in an increasingly outmoded mentality, one more concerned with accounting principles than that of forging better bonds between the producer and consumer.

Howlett does not offer up any argument against being better connected, better informed, better decisions, whereas McAfee does offer up more evidence supporting that being better informed, better connected can lead to better decisions.
How well your organization can do that depends on the culture that can be fostered to harness the knowledge and human capital within.