Nilofer Merchant zum Thema Social Era – Harward Business Serie

Nilofer Merchant hat eine mehrteilige Serie im Harvard Business Review geschrieben.
Schon die Überschriften sind gut gewählt und versprechen spannende Inhalte. Und Sie hält das Versprechen.

1. Rules For the Social Era
2: Social Means Freedom, for Better or for Worse
3: Why Porter’s Model No Longer Works
4: Why Social Marketing Is So Hard

In aller Kürze hier nur die Aufmerksamkeit erzeugenden Überschriften.
Bitte selber Lesen und eine eigene Meinung bilden.

zu 1:
Lean, not big;
Conversation, not chains;
Sharing, not telling;

The reality is more like this: The world has changed; how we create value has changed. Organizationally we have not. It will be wholly insufficient to put the word “social” in front of existing business models and expect things to change. Instead, we need to imagine the fundamental enterprise anew for the social era. Lean, adaptive, community-driven organizations, built for speed, will thrive. In my next post, I’ll talk more about how companies like that organize to win.

zu 2:
Nimbleness model #1: Staffing with “concentric circles.”
Nimbleness model #2: Customer service outside the perimeter.
– Isn’t This Just Another Way To Cut Costs?
– Shared Purpose as an Alignment System

In essence, organizations will finally act flat because they will actually be flat. (And, of course, this affects management’s role and how we all manage our careers. More on that in future posts.)
Work is freed. This changes not only how we work at the broadest levels — and how we organize every single part of our organizations — but what we make, how we produce and distribute it, and how we market and sell it. Is that scary? For many, yes. But, for better or worse, social is giving us this freedom. The question now is what we do with it.

zu 3:
Big Isn’t Enough;
Generic vs. Distinct;
Social Becomes Central to What We Build;
A Cycle of Profitability;

The 800-pound gorilla dominated at a time when companies needed and used more capital, when the value chain could be profit maximized through vertical integration. To run this kind of organization, leaders had to be focus on being big enough to enable scale — because that’s where the profits once were. Once an organization got big, it took a lot to displace it. But the social era demands something more of our organizations. Something that is qualitatively different. The social era rewards the gazelles — the ones that are fast, fluid, and flexible.

zu 4:
Does social have to be chaotic?;
Is a business built on volunteers manageable? ;
Can you make money this way?;
How do we resolve these conflicts?;

How do we resolve these conflicts?
We want innovation, but without experiencing failure. We want to embrace the new, but without risk. We want to act fast and fluid, but to maintain tight controls. We want to empower everyone but retain decision rights for ourselves. We want to experiment, but we also want predictability. We want to be flexible to customer input, but remain ruthlessly efficient. We want to adapt, but we fear the death of familiarity.
This is why it’s hard to go from being an “800-pound gorilla” to a fleet of 800 nimble gazelles — to go from being a centralized institution that competes through overpowering strength and scale to a diffuse tribe that competes by being fast, fluid, and flexible.

Nilofer Merchant lehrt mittlerweile an verschiedenen Instituten und schreibt unter anderem regelmäßig für HBR.
Außerdem hat sie das Buch – The New How – bei O’Reilly geschrieben und einige Jahre als CEO für Rubicon Consulting gearbeitet.