I won’t tease this apart in detail here, but suffice to say you’ll notice how it assumes the death of the command and control hierarchy of the traditional firm. It emphasizes the opportunity to equip every individual with tools to help them determine and articulate their needs, desires, knowledge, skills and values in ways that are useful in working out how best to come together to do stuff of mutual value.

At Attenzi, we’ve begun to move away from our traditional hierarchical structure to flatter and more autonomous but still very much aligned and accountable teams, looking to our improved performance management capabilities for sensory feedback. Of course, some organizations have pursued this kind of structure before us, but interesting qualities and opportunities emerge in our social business context we think that help make it all happen more reliably, transparently and productively.

Attenzi is becoming a network, slowly but surely.

Perhaps this new vista will require a redefinition of the organization, the firm, but there’s no need for us to think about that in operational terms just yet.

Does this question convey a vision for 2025? Sooner? Later? Ever? Who knows until we get there, but we think it conjures up a fascinating potential and one that can inform progress towards social business in the nearer-term.

(Interestingly, as a quick aside, we get positive reactions to this exacting take on social business from people with viewpoints spanning the full political spectrum, but I’m not going to get all political on you here.)

Now then, I won’t keep you any longer… there’s stuff to be done right!

We hope you’re using our story here to cajole your colleagues to sign up for the ride. And as part of that communications process, if you’re looking for a slidestack that builds up to this challenging question, check out: What, exactly, is social business?

While we’re talking slidestacks, here’s one that effectively sums up the approach we’ve taken and referred to in our story here that enables us to recognize the value of social even when its impact is one or more steps back from the cash register: What, exactly, is the value of social media? It’s what we’ve come to call social business performance management, or just social performance in short.

Of course, I’ll continue to add such comments and links to the attenzi.com website, and hope to see you there. And indeed at a Social Media Today conference.

All the best.

September 2013 update – a big question

It’s just about five months since I signed off the first edition of this ebook to go to press. Now Robin Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, has invited us to The Social Shake-Up conference and it seemed like a good time to publish this second edition in association with Social Media Today, with Robin’s foreword and the addition of this chapter to let you know our latest. (And a new ‘book cover’ to boot if you’re interested.)

I won’t focus here on our operational performance because, well, what would you go away and do with that? Instead, something more useful…

As we’ve talked with more and more people about respective experiences and expectations, it appears that confusion reigns as to the very definition of social business. What does it actually mean?!

So Marcus began collecting various definitions from these conversations, from conferences and off the web. He put them on big Post-It™ notes on a wall in The Nerve Center, and he, Michelle and I found ourselves browsing them one afternoon. We began to move them around. We put them in groups and then found ourselves ordering the groups in terms of what Marcus called sophistication and I called ambition, and Michelle was the first to spot the pattern.

It turns out, to varying degrees, that many of these definitions mean something quite relevant and useful, and any perceived differences can often be explained away as a matter of timing. In other words, some definitions can be seen to describe where we might get to in 2015, say, others by 2020, and some further out than that.

“Where shall we put this one?” I ask.

“That’s a 2020 I reckon. I’ll see your 2020 and raise you a 2025!”

It was 30th May 2013. I know that because I left a quick comment as such on Chapter 44 on this ebook’s website. That comment consisted of a question, and a variation of that question now sits furthest out on our timeline of definitions:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?