A level playing field| People rather than products| Gifts| Air of excitement| Nervous trepidation| Unorthodox thinking| Too much coffee| Not enough change| Screen time| Insomnia stimulating inspiration| Inert organisations| Flair| Straight jacket actions| Google| Creative remixing| Bags of ideas| Little impact| Trouble at the mill| Going slow fast| The miracles of innovation| The stupidity of arrogance| Making noise quietly| Fields of turnips| The lack of grace| Twitter| Inconvenient trouble| Broken promises| Plaster solutions| Launch and learn| Perfection is subjective| Ecosystems| Absurdity of naivety| The shape of business| Exploitation| The futility of resistance| Connection not networking| The significance of difference| Facebook| False profits| Fragile trust| Community not brand| A mass of individuals| So its all about intent| Linkedin| The same thing on repeat| Profit rather than being human| Initiating history| Art| The abundance of the phony| Vulnerability| Foursquare| Deep down feeling it more| Ironic expression of indviduality| Frozen relationships| Nudge advocacy| Non financial influence| The future of conversation|

I had the pleasure of chatting to Josh Chandler last week where we discussed social media and its role in small business. Download it here:

http://joshchandlerblog.com/

It’s only 15 minutes long and just trying to get some thinking going!

The groundswell of change is leading to some seismic shifts in the next five particularly for leadership, jobs won’t change much but the emphasis in your company will:

1. There will always be indispensible people required, except you’ll need a lot more in your company tomorrow. These people will be ‘world class,’ passionate, fully engaged, online, followed, creative, leaders, organising discussion groups via Linkedin, people orientated, trusting, respectful and have high expectations.

2. There will always be reliable people unless you motivate them more intrinsically. They get paid to turn up, love silos and blame cultures. Low engagement, low communication, follow the rules, have conservative expectations. Believe in authority, hide creativity, follow but are not followed. They won’t blow your mind but will deliver a great days work to their job description.

3. There will always be low paid people. High turnover, little or low motivation, low in respect. They rock up and then go home with some shuffling in between. Expectations will be low.

You are what you do and what impact you have. In the future our businesses will need to be full of the number ones because its that distinctive element that will make us competitive as our products become increasingly much the same. The future business Seth Godin says “consists of well organised linchpins doing their thing in concert, creating more value than any factory could.”

We’ve already talked about why we need to start shaping and creating communities around our brand but what are the benefits and is it worth the significant effort required?

Well we know from the case studies of Lego, Harley Davidson, eBay, Apple and Sun Microsystems that business communities no matter how big, help us to deal with the ever changing environment and enable us to proactively innovate on a continuous basis. We can’t afford the talent, all the ideas to destructively compete anymore, it makes no economic sense in a world of abundance. There is no sense and therefore no option.

People attracted to our business communities are there voluntarily. They haven’t been imposed upon and are truly motivated to provide opportunities for brands to stretch themselves and move beyond an individuals personal best. Through this we will learn to collborate, an essential skill on anyone’s CV in the future.

Admit it, a new organisational way of doing business is emerging and we are all struggling to adapt and deal with it. The presence of a fully engaged business community will aid that revolution because there is nothing like being in touch with your customers and employees.

Business communities will come up with ideas we hadn’t even thought about. They will open our minds and give us access to knowledge that will send our competitors green with envy. The new challenges we face are just to big and sophisticated for individuals or individual organisations to face in isolation. A community can take some of the responsibility and accountability for these changes and share the burden of finding the solutions. Whilst at the same time you are bonding them to your brand. Making people feel valued brings a return in commitment and loyalty.

The next few blog posts will be about how you start the process of creating a business community that can elevate you above the competition. Don’t forget we are about to go far beyond marketing

It’s easier to maintain the status quo and kill a business, than to change it. The term ‘don’t disrupt for disruptions sake’ just doesn’t hold anymore. Who gets to say that anyway, the boss, who often can’t see the wood for the trees?

Unless you do something, you don’t know whether it will work. Often its the things you can’t see that are the aspects that will cause you problems in the future. Disruption is about finding innovation and innovation is about constantly finding new, improved ways of doing stuff.

Do you spend you’re time fixing things rather than disrupting the core? And what is more healthy; consistently being disruptive, or consistently holding onto what you’ve got? Expect to, in the future, be leading highly talented people who live in creative chaos, rather than the trudging towards synergy.

There needs to be overall coherence to your business but not the routine of sameness. Disruption can bring your brand’s character alive and stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit we all desperately need. Your business is a bubbling cauldron (or it should be) of ideas, thoughts and messing about with ideas. That’s being disruptive.

If it isn’t broken, disrupt it. If you don’t someone else will! Guaranteed.

The world of work has changed dramatically in the last 18 months. Things we did in times of excess will be redundant. Expect sabbaticals to reinvent themselves. In the future these won’t be self indulgent trips to far flung places in the world for a couple of months.

Talented people will still get sabbaticals, but instead they’ll be thrown into a three month project with a supplier, customer, competitor, university or some other collaborative event. Their job to change things, shift the pace, find something interesting, learn and unlearn!

There is an increasing importance centring on the reputation of individuals within business entities and the need to ‘brand you.’ As I’ve said before people are replacing products and, like our products’ reputation, we will have to do that with our people.

Key executives will need to be known for something, though quite clearly not everything. Our people will have a high visibility offline and just as critical online. It’s one we can’t nor shouldn’t control but influence. There is a significant shift to individual reputation (some traditionalists might call this career management) but its more fundamental than that as it means working even more closely with the business than even before.

Can you see why the war for talent is going to be crucial? A knowledge based company’s reputation will not be dictated by its marketing team’s interpretation of the brands identity but it will be the sum of the reputation of the people involved in the brands evolvement.

Think John Terry and Tiger Woods. That has brought it home. Reputation damaged over night, well perhaps over several nights if the truth were known. This isn’t a bad thing. Its not another headache to contend with. It’s a great development. Transparency increases professionalism doesn’t it? Trust breeds loyalty and commitment doesn’t it? Influence shapes new things doesn’t it?

HR departments need to down tools and stop process managing and go and knock on the doors of their marketing colleagues to start banging heads together about how this is all going to work for the people they recruit and the company they work for.

Word provided by Robert Pickstone - www.robertpickstone.com

The only reason we need to be adaptable is because we are moving to mass innovation. It’s critical because no two clients, projects or people are alike. As change perpetually gains momentum and things happen quicker, we will need business models and people that adapt seamlessly to new environments.

We now as individuals, organisations’ and communities have to display chameleon like qualities. Perhaps we will need to change our attitude to business significantly in order to become more adaptive? Adaptability will demand that we understand how our business is going to transform itself from a current to future state as we try to build specific things under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

It will specifically involve solving problems creatively and adapting to dynamic changing environments. Dealing with uncertain work conditions where people have to adapt to novel situations. From that we must continuously learn so we can keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancement and cultural changes this will bring. We are going to have to attain interpersonal adaptability, being able to produce incredible outcomes in fluid work environments with a project led business. Whether we like it or not cultural adaptability, we live and work in a globalised world. We will become one tribe and we will have to learn how to perform well in different cultures, surrounded by people who do things different to us.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. “ HG Wells. Some of us will have to be able to work well in uncomfortable and strange climates. Adaptability is no longer an emphasis on just technology and processes but about people and processes coming together through technology.

The second word from the forthcoming eBook “Hang On.”

It’s about taking the conversation beyond price. Conversation is no longer a distraction at work, it is central to its existence and a leader’s job now is to start those conversations and invite people to take part. Conversation initiates new rules, new ways of engaging. They spring up everywhere. We can’t stop someone from being part of the conversation. Our people are talking to customers, our customers are talking to US and most importantly, our customers SHOULD be talking to each other. We can’t beat them so we’ had better find a way of joining them.

David Weinberger in the book ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ states “We treasure our conversations most of all because they are ours, the way marketing speak never was.” The conversations we are having right now are so important. They can spread ideas, solve problems, gain agreement, build trust, remove barriers, encourage laughter and promote enjoyment. In the future, the conversations people are having in and around companies will be the essence of success. That means allowing it, encouraging it and facilitating it.

Most managers are terrible at conversation, they are too busy directing, making decisions, controlling budgets and keeping order. If you have ever walked onto the proverbial shop floor and killed the conversation you know what I mean!

Conversations are intimate, they are free, and they are open. They flourish when there is trust and a common commitment. Conversation is equal, it’s diverse, it generates the unexpected, and it’s participative and informal. They are actually quite liberating whilst at the same time conversation gives people a voice.

Conversations though do take control and power away from us control freaks and puts it right back where it precisely belongs with our customers, our community and our people. Charlene Li succinctly puts it this way “Campaigns begin and end, but conversations go on forever.” It’s interesting to sit down for a few moments and reflect on what conversations we are having right now……

Innovation comes from freedom to find, not from obeying someone else’s orders. Future talent will demand autonomy and this goes past the simple solutions of the past such as empowerment and being allowed to use initiative. For those that are really talented, will not relinquish their abilities in a career limiting move and hide behind a subordinate role being told what to do.

In the future you will pay people based on their value, on their financial and non financial contribution to your business, not whether they rocked up and worked a 60 hour week. Work is changing. Its become more challenging, more sophisticated, more time pressured, more collaborative, more engaging, more equal, more technological and less reliant on control, command and power. Companies are having to change their decision making processes, their reward structures and abandon their heirarchy.

It means opening up. It is becoming increasing less productive to make decisions in isolation, since in the future, it will require so many different specialists from niche areas to support those problem solving solutions. Its a blinding flash of the obvious but a group of people, almost always, will have more knowledge and expertise than any individual. Future success will depend on leaders being able to pull together and engage the talents of a cross functional nature from inside and outside the organisation.

This type of working increases opportunities to add value but they will bring about significant changes in business infrastructure including, co ordinating people on and off the payroll as well as co creating products.