The Physical Space

Many of today’s physical office spaces are designed with a panopticon-like layout. In most spaces, seniority dictates who sits on the outer edges of the office, with junior people closer to the center. This classic Japanese style and most workspaces follow some variation. Managers occupy offices around the outer edges of the workspace, just as foremen occupy desks high above the shop floor. Thus, workers in the center can never be certain if or when they’re being monitored.

Same goes for conference rooms, which are technically shared spaces. Most companies will nickname a conference room “the fishbowl” because of transparent walls and prominent focal location. Physical layouts are often described with adjectives like “collaborative,” “open,” and “flat, just like our org chart.” What they’re really designed for is institutional control.

Let’s go back to The Story of Grand Central and the Taming of the Crowd:

“This design…preserves the Crowd in a central area, providing raised balconies from which there are plenty of opportunities to people-watch. Being placed on display is not lost on the subconscious of the Crowd: what appears to be hustle and bustle are manifestations of many synchronizations happening at once…These items add perspective to the Crowd and diminish its psychological power as an uncontrollable mass.”

How often do you hear an executive throw out the “people are our greatest asset” cliche? Humans run every business out there and the larger the company, the larger the crowd that needs to be controlled.

The Virtual Space

But we’re in the social business era now and corporate office environments are evolving. We have coworking spaces, hotelling, and telecommuting. Emerging software enables online collaboration and enterprise evangelists encourage everyone to “work out loud.” That is – increase operational efficiency by using tools that facilitate collaborative publishing and editing, getting valuable content out of woefully siloed email inboxes, “where knowledge goes to die” as they say.

Most companies consider the Crowd to be external to their payroll. The unruly masses are the billions of social media users who seek customer support, get excited when a brand tweets back, and have the power to make campaigns go viral for better or worse. The external Crowd is impossible to control and many companies thus restrict their employees from participating in social media, even when wholly contained inside the firewall.

By doing this, companies lose opportunities to not only drive productivity gains but also manage more effectively by exterting greater control. Not all employees relish the chance to work out loud – they’re the ones who are wary of being monitored. Other write this hesitation off as paranoid – working out loud is liberating! Exciting! Collaborative! 

Managers would be wise to tap into this zeitgeist and build a business case to support blissful ignorance. By putting an internal Crowd control design in place via process and technology platforms, the organization would better prepared to mobilize towards common outcomes rather than allowing behavior to evolve unchecked.

Put another way, which is preferable: having employees burning hours by skulking off to coffee shops to vent with colleagues, or having data and analytics available to provide quantitative employee insights or safe, well-lit places out of the public eye for employees to vent qualitative concerns – before they hit Glassdoor or other word-of-mouth sites?

It’s a manager’s job to control the crowd. Bad managers attempt this using brute force. Good managers understand how individual vs. institutional roles should be orchestrated to best effect.

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The Architect

These professionals deliver the theory, helping make the case for social business and identifying best practices being created as the industry evolves. They are typically found in roles like industry analyst, author, public speaker, or thought leader. Architects the ones that can help brands avoid ending up with structures like this:

and instead get something closer to this.

It’s important to note that not all architects weight form and function as equal in importance. That’s where you’ll see emphasis on social media and communications or enterprise 2.0 and technology.

The Builder

These professionals apply theory to infrastructure, helping renovate and remodel existing culture, process, and tech infrastructure. They typically have the title consultant or adviser on their business card. Builders apply methods that assess situations

assist in creating process flow

and put the right platforms in place.

The Manager

These professionals are responsible for social business efforts within brands and are held accountable for their success. Managers typically come from marketing and communications functions, but all usually have experience with technology — a critical experience set in the current digital age. You can increasingly find professionals with titles like social business manager as the industry mainstreams. In any case, these client-side professionals are tasked with keeping the trains running, orchestrating internal departments, business partners, and increasingly demanding consumers.

TBD

Those are three key roles — surely there are more to be added as we see the space evolve.

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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,” a classic business text. Its subtitle? “A Manifesto for Business Revolution.”

You probably know what happened with reengineering. It quickly gained a negative reputation for being a management fad and excuse to lay off staff. Not exactly business revolution.

But no question, social business seems to ask the exact same key question of organizations today — with an intent of corporate revolution.

Whither social business?

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After months of discussion and debate with my Dachis Group colleagues Jeff Dachis, Kate Niederhoffer, and Ellen Westcott, in January 2009, I was the first person to publish and use the phrase “social business” in a blog post. That post, titled “It’s Time To Transform,” touched on the fundamental need for a new concept—something that would get us past incremental changes in marketing and technology, and would unlock much greater value creation for businesses.

(Note: The phrase “social business” was in use prior to January 2009 in reference to the work of Professor Muhammad Yunus. That definition is quite different than our use of the term as applied to evolutionary marketing and technology strategies.)

Later that year, with David Armano and Jevon MacDonald on board, we wrote about the concept of Social Business Design, which explained what social business is, why it matters, and where to apply it in the organization.

In brief: Social business draws on trends in technology (e.g., powerful mobile devices, widespread availability of high-speed Internet access, low cost of data storage), work (e.g., always-on culture, globalization), and society (e.g., propensity to share). Companies should care about social business because they can improve business outcomes (i.e., increase revenue or decrease costs). The core principles touch on all areas of a business, whether for business-to-customer engagement, employee-to-employee collaboration, or supply chain optimization. Making social business work requires focus on a company’s culture, connections, content exchanges, and measurement and analytics.

Let’s pause for a second. As you can see, the definition of “social business” is already unwieldy.

Why You Should Care About the Definition

Here’s where we get to the part that explains why you should care about the definition of social business.

The thing about social business—and what is true to its original definition—is that it’s a BIG IDEA. Again, go back to that original blog post, and see that social business intends to transform marketing and technology. Companies have always listened to customers and have empowered employees. Companies have also been exploring new media and implementing new technology for decades.

But here’s the difference: Social business harnesses the trends in market today, helping us change business models of yesterday and driving brands forward into the operating modes of tomorrow.

Dion Hinchcliffe and I wrote a book called Social Business By Design to explain how to make social business work. A graphic model for thinking about the concepts in this post is included below.

Social business is huge, and it’s not going away. Three years after the phrase “social business” was coined, at least 101 examples of social business ROI exist. Momentum is building. Companies are using the core social business principles to create competitive advantage and drive business results.

I cringe a little bit every time I read a post that tries to “define” social business but ends up marginalizing the concept. Social business stands for what companies need to become—not a description of an incremental feature or business function. And now that you know what “social business” really means and why it matters, you need to preserve the integrity and expansiveness of the definition.

If you can stay true to the big idea, you’ll have the blueprint to transformative success that others clearly have a tough time grasping.