Collaboration is key to the new competitive paradigm
The wiki market is really starting to pick up, as the word gets out as to how profound the collaboration paradigm wiki is.
Stories from early adopters such as the investment bank Dresner Kleinwort show major accomplishments in getting transformational change in a collaborative culture to take hold. Major financial institutions such as Citibank and Bank of America have now created enterprise-wide production wiki infrastructure capability after they discovered wiki software was gaining foothold in many specialist functions in the enterprise, many presumably running on development servers.
More and more we are seeing the collaborative wave take hold. These banks certainly believe in it. And it’s hardly surprising given what’s happening with the “myspace generation”.
Every generation discovers the world for itself. Children look at the world and choose for themselves how they are going to perform tasks, selecting from what’s available. Technologies such as the transistor radio were hot news in the 50s and although they terrible quality, they provided the youngsters of the day with access to something they couldn’t get any other way: in their case, Elvis. Children have tremendous advantages over adults when it comes to understanding new stuff: time and immersion in a like-minded culture being the most important advantage.
Today’s twenty-four year old has had 10 years of hanging out with friends in the collaborative age. Extended time at school or university lends itself to plenty of time experimenting and strategies in understanding how to best make it a central part of one’s life.
Our tech-savvy twenty-somethings have formed a collaborative mentality. They think sooner or later any information will get out and so that they might as well broadcast it now. They herald transparency as a norm. Further, tech-savviness is increasingly prevalent thoughout society.
If you or I had been in our teens in the collaborative age we would be equally exposed. We weren’t. Our norms were set by our formative years. The message is clear: youngsters have a different collective mentality than most of the generations that preceded them. Their culture is one of participating in online-communities, sharing ideas and being really open.
Corporations go from strength to strength. Until, sooner or later, they dwindle or die. A long running study of innovation shows that few companies stay on top of their game for more than a decade.
Youngsters clearly think that the collaborative way of interacting gives them an advantage. So does Dresner Klienwort and the other banks. And I agree. I am clear that mass socialisation / transparency + leads to increased opportunities to discover new partners, achieve better goal alignment and to make working together more effective.
Where the presence of internal company boundaries or set processes inhibit ideas from flowing they also dampen an organisation’s ability to innovate.
The majority of today’s leading organisations are anything but transparent. But the organisations of upcoming ones are.
How will today’s leading companies compete? How will they instigate a new culture? How do they create the internal shift needed to stay on top of the competitive game. Such are today’s leadership challenges.
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