change agents – ITSinsider

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around / No time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain’t got time for that now…

Life in Wartime – Talking Heads

The world changed in 2011. Did you feel it? No doubt you saw it changing on TV, on Twitter, on YouTube, on your mobile phone. Did your heart swell with pride? Did the emotion of a history-changing moment grip you and render you teary-eyed? There were so many events this year that captured our attention. Regimes crumbled, cities burned, young revolutionaries rejoiced. And in the rush of those events, we felt we were part of it. That finally, within our lifetimes, people could use their mass and will to effect dramatic changes in the lives of ordinary people. It’s important to remember that every revolutionary event began with a belief and a person who believed passionately enough to make it happen.

Enterprise as we know it changed this year as well. Serving as a wonderful backdrop to this #occupyenterprise story, I was happy to see that the #ows movement in NYC was meeting in the lobby of Deutsche Bank. Although I support the #ows movement in spirit, I’ve chosen to change these large organizations from within. In a nutshell, that’s what we’ve been doing in the Council. In fact, our guy at Deutsche Bank is making a lot of progress. Last June, John Stepper presented his case study at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. In closing, he left the audience with this lesson: “Don’t just retweet other people’s revolutions. Start your own. Apply the big ideas to real problems at your company and change the work.” Change at these powerful institutions is not going to happen over night, but it is happening today. And our members are driving that change every day.

In the Social Business Council, we have a popular tag: #clang usually followed by several exclamation points. If you search #clang on our Socialcast site, you’ll retrieve 146 posts. That’s 146 times our members have either posted or commented on an enterprise-changing event made by one of our members. The cases run from the minor, but very significant, to the blow-your-mind-this-is-really-happening variety. Watching the progress our members are making is history in the making. Sometimes I feel like I’m an embedded reporter. It’s not a violent war, but an ideological one. The Council members are fighting for a new way of working where freedom of ideas will produce increased employee motivation and loyalty which in turn will spur innovation and problem-solving. Yes, business objectives are driving this change, but the natural by-product is the humanization of the workforce. Transparency will go a long way to revealing the unsavory underbelly of the corporate beast. One of our members, Andrew Carasone of Lowe’s Home Improvement, has done a fantastic job of explaining how social business drives business performance. It’s predicated on using social business change as an organizing force, embracing a culture of sharing vs. a culture of fear of “not knowing.” He also has some insightful views on how the formulas for human capital incentives and achievement need to be rewritten. In short, reward competition less and collaboration more.

If you see yourself as a change agent, or someone who believes in the power of the “Think Different,” you have a home in the Council. Our members are deployed in the largest organizations in the world. We are changing the world from the inside out. Join us.

Surreptitiously, while I was inspired to write this post, I heard Garrison Keillor on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac do a short birthday piece on Robert Persig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” For other Hippie 2.0’s out there, “Zen” occupies essential shelf space on the permanent library. (GenY’rs: read it.) Persig, a philosopher of sorts, penned a brilliant quote in two parts. Here is the first part,

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

On G+, Facebook, and on our private discussions in the Council, I’ve been relentless with the same mantra that the re-engineering of the enterprise for this era is about re-tooling hearts and minds. We are aiming to change the world of work. All the re-engineering that packaged, streamlined, and removed human error (and innovation) in the last era (the Debbie Downsizer 90s) left a lot of baggage behind to undo. I lived through that era. And even though a lot of consultants, systems integration firms, and enterprise applications vendors got rich, the price corporations paid in crushing the human spirit was far greater than the costs saved on process improvement.

Unless you haven’t noticed, U.S. corporations are under pressure these days to perform. Getting them back on track to record earnings is going to require something difficult to measure on a balance sheet or excel spreadsheet: human intuition, motivation, ingenuity, passion.

The radical changes folks like Luis Suarez, Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd, Euan Semple, and many others have been championing for a long time support this fundamental philosophical do-over of corporate culture. It begins in the hearts and hands of a few evangelists/change makers/trust agents/intra-preneurs to beat the drum for change.

Now, the second part of Persig’s quote is,

“Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.”

To get to the “fix” part of this equation, it’s going to take the smarts and knowhow of everyone who’s focused on the Enterprise. There’s a great thread on G+ from Sameer Patel on the “how.” The lasting value will be to apply the spirit of social revolution in the enterprise to the practical application of social in the enterprise. I’ve heard reports from Dreamforce that the rhetoric-to-reality gap was pretty stark once you left the Benioff keynote cathedral and walked onto the show floor.

This is the hard part. Delivering on the promise of social. So consider it a clarion call for all practitioners, consultants, and vendors (big and small): Figure it out. Bring it home for the rest of us and the planet. We’ve done the first hard part which is selling the promise of revolutionary change. And we’ll keep beating that drum, btw. It’s the backbeat to the song we’re singing.

A presentation I gave earlier this year to member 3M on the power of Change Agents.

Social change agent – 3M

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