Conventional business thinking has been focused on producing, distributing, marketing, selling and serving customers with unique value propositions and messages.
Conventional business models have been centered around structured organizational designs aimed at optimizing productivity, controlling cost and improving quality. Conventional business wisdom has focused on selling more at less cost and expand your markets while staying true to your core competency.
Today's business environment faces many challenges. The challenges include finding, training and keeping talented employees, increased cost of technological advances, adjusting to global competition, shifting market dynamics, the fluctuating cost of money and the list goes on and on.
The impact of social networks on businesses will call for new thinking required to succeed in a connected and challenging world. Today conventional wisdom can't help you keep pace with the rapidly changing business landscape, and outmoded structures, models and methods can actually lead you to obsolescence and failure. Today, business people have to turn the old rules inside out, upside down, and backwards not only to succeed, but to survive!
The rules of business are changing, the new rules are unconventional. The social web removes all barriers to entry, provides technological mediums at a fraction of historical cost, enables people to work from anywhere at anytime and connects everyone to everything globally, including your customers, at the click of the mouse.
Companies and their leaders that fail to capitalize on the opportunities of the social web will loose market share and ultimately reduced shareholder value. The real sources of future business success will be centered around the knowledge and creativity of how to tap into and use the power of the social web for business purposes. The social web challenges conventional wisdom while providing data, resources and insights to help companies transition to the unconventional wisdom of networks as sources of capital, relationships, ideas, wisdom, feedback and economic transactions.
The social web is the future business landscape that could enable businesses to produce much higher returns that conventional business structures and models. Understanding the dynamics of the social web forces businesses to challenge questionable assumptions and much of the current conventional management wisdom.
The social web enables businesses to access a global reach of rich ideas and resources. Networks will fuel dramatic changes in business structures and dramatic changes in the idea of collaboration and sharing with unimaginable reach to communities as sources of ideas. Given this access, all kinds of people can get involved in business challenges and "discover gold" from unimaginable sources - via sharing a bit of information.
Unconventional Business Attitudes
Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old CEO of Facebook says: "Building Facebook is fun. Part of the reason why this is fun is because we've managed to build a team of really smart people who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and think in different ways. People constantly try to put us in a bucket: are we trying to sell the company? What are we trying to do? What is the business strategy? Whereas for me and a lot of people around me, that's not really what we focus on. We're just focused on building things.
When was the last time you came home from the office and said to your spouse "I had so much fun at work today I can't wait to go back tomorrow". It would seem unconventional, to say the least. When you consider most traditional business mindsets and their perspective about the "social web" the attitudes reflect a disconnect in understanding. What are the top ten things they don't understand or simply forgot?
Here is the top ten:
- Free Begets Money
- You Asked for Feedback
- Business Has Gone Virtual
- Conversations are Powerful
- Relationships Create Economics
- The Semantic Web Is Changing Everything
- Advertising Doesn't "Click" Anymore
- Your Either Part of or the Topic of Conversations
- You Will No Longer Engage rather you will be Engaged
- Relationships aren't for Sale!
What say you?