Business Culture over the Years

Business Culture has changed from a closed rigid environment to that of a social business, which is open and multi connected, something which a few people are still struggling to understand.

Lets look at the three distinct models briefly and try to understand the differences:

A Closed business is the typical business model we learnt about in the 80s, every department doing it's own thing with their won resources and establishing their own empires. After all the bigger your empire and the more people who reported to you, the higher salary you could command on whichever grading system your company had chosen to follow. Sharing was for the children who watched Barney on TV. We must always remember that Closed business systems do resonate with most people as it appeals to our selfish 'all about me ego'.

A Collaborative business on the other hand shares information freely within the organisation, and the more delicate the information is the more careful people are and thus the NDA or Non-disclosure agreement came into being as well as a whole lot of other corporate legal terms and conditions. Authentically if we can't trust each other we should not be in a relationship, I am not sure a legal agreement helps much but it does give the legal eagles a reason to earn your hard earned cash.

The idea behind the Collaborative business is good in that it allows sharing, but only within the inner circle of trust and the organisation, the later usually getting very little of the information that can actually be of benefit to them.

A Social Business is a relational business that is engaged, transparent and can rapidly change. It engages with it's customers, partners and employees in new and exciting ways. It is transparent  in that it opens up and gives direct access to subject matter experts. And its nimble because it can react really quickly when you get the right people together getting the job done.

Arguably every business is a social business because every business has people in it; and people presumably are intrinsically social.  So I don’t think it’s a question of bringing it into the business, I think it’s a question of unlocking it, but just how do we unlock the intrinsically social within us? 

Let's hear your comments about how we can be more engaged in this Social Business model?