One of the difficulties with organizations today is to represent them in an acceptable way. The old organization chart is largely outdated since it shows only the hierarchical dependencies and not the reality of the corporation. But what is the reality? How could one represent an organization in a way useful to employees, clients, shareholders and other stakeholders?
Reporters are a good case study of what happens in the world of work with the advent of digitalization. Their situation today is not brilliant at all, many of them have lost their job in cost cutting programs, but there is hope. The profession will just never be again what it was. The job mutation of reporters will depend largely on how the press is managing its transition. Until now, the answers have been desperately poor but there are signs that this is going to change and that traditional press will be alive again. The problem for reporters is that they have to go through dark ages before they can see the light again since the adjustment of the industry will be slow.
In the world of work and in the economic theory reporters are special specie.
One thing that strikes me today is the analogy between what is happening on a global scale between Google and China and what takes place daily on a minor scale in our companies between social media activists and central IT departments. On the one side, the people who advocate some form of freedom of speech to transfer valuable knowledge and view the company as a beehive, and on the other, the people who believe they have to control the way people actually work and view the corporate world as a machine to be automated with ERPs. Google decided to move to Hong-Kong, the same way corporate social media projects move to SaaS suppliers when corporate IT builds walls and behave like Mordac, the preventor of information services in Dilbert. It is the same political struggle, in the noble sense, and I discussed this at length in my book.
Note: what is discussed here is the Enterprise 2.0 Community Managers view, focusing primarily (although not exclusively) on the internal side of it, rather than the social media marketing individuals.
Last fall, Dion Hinchcliffe wrote about the online community manager as the “jack of all trades” in his blog, and his view generated some discussion among Boostzone members and fellows. Hinchcliffe’s diagram is rich and exhaustive, with responsibilities spanning 11 different areas, as diverse as can be, ranging from Platform Management to Brand Management and Staff Development. Among the reactions to the graph, Dominique Turcq liked the approach but thought it made it an unsustainable job and therefore community management should not be just a job definition. I worried about putting all these responsibilities on one head (or even one community management team) and argued that rather the entire organization should take the E2.0 train, and share the load. Philippe Masson, commented that in his past responsibilities as Capgemini’s global leader of the strategy consultants community, with a team to support the assignment, his focus was more fundamental: provide a shared aspiration for the community members, entertain a climate of trust amongst them, and promote the value and fight for the values of the community with group executives.
You should read this article “Managerialism and the demise of the Big Three”
by Robert R Locke [Emeritus, University of Hawaii, USA and a specialist of the history of management sciences]. It was published in December 2009 in the real-world economics review, issue no. 51.
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