Author Archives: Peter Kim

“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” – Thomas Gray, 1742

“I always feel like…somebody’s watching me.” – Rockwell, 1984

This month’s Scientific American contains a feature called The Story of Grand Central Station and the Taming of the Crowd. If you’ve ever been in a public transportation terminal at rush hour, you know that commuters expect the crowd to flow. In fact, when people disrupt flow intentionally or not, it causes issues. When a friend of mine first moved to New York, he told me how he used to stop to let people pass, which was courtesy in the south. The result was that other people had to stop moving as well, impeding flow, and making people angry. No wonder JetBlue hired a Broadway choreographer to help redesign JFK’s terminal 5 – flow is critically important.

Well designed spaces facilitate better outcomes. In the case of transportation terminals, passengers move freely and avoid congestion. Within a business, employees are able to access resources easily and work more efficiently. Organizational design applies to both physical and virtual spaces.

There are a lot of voices out there when it comes to social business. There are also a lot of opinions on which voices matter. Who are the best experts? Who has klout? What about skills?

When you step back and take note of topics that people generally focus on and engage around, patterns emerge. To get a full perspective on social business from theory to practice, it’s important to subscribe/follow a cross-section of these key archetypes.

Consider this consulting question: “If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and the current level of technology, what would it look like?” Sounds like a contemporary social business question, right? It could be, but the original context predates “social business” by two decades. It’s the key question from “Reengineering the Corporation,” …

Continue reading “Whither social business?”

“Social business” is a term you can’t escape these days—even if your work just remotely touches on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, or collaborative technologies, such as IBM Connections or Yammer.

But what does “social business” mean? And why should you care?