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THE REVOLUTION IS WITHIN
The biggest change that we will see in business is not in the systems we use, the strategies we adopt, or even the organizational structures we invent. The biggest difference is going to be inside ourselves. In our sense of self, what that means in terms of work, and how we use the workplace as the best opportunity we have to discover what we are capable of as individuals.
When you have a conventional Taylorist view of the workplace you see your staff as relatively undifferentiated bits of meatware that you strap to your machines to get them to work. In the post industrial world we have “employee engagement” and other mealy mouthed attempts to re-invent the language of the workplace to be more acceptable to people who have realized that there is more to life than being a wage slave. But this linguistic tinkering at the edges is being perpetrated by people who really haven’t moved on from the idea that the organization is a thing, has an existence outside of the people who work in it, and can consume “human resources” albeit in a more socially acceptable way.
In reality organizations have only ever been loosely held networks of individuals who turn up at the same place at the same time. They do so for a complex mix of reasons, most of which are personal – and have little to do with money. It is these aspects of being at work that begin to become more apparent when you start to use social media. The assumptions about work weaken. We see more variation ...
