After years of working in various size companies, one thing that I am struck by how immensely difficult it is to maintain focus. It is very difficult to keep two people on the same page, let alone hundreds or thousands of people. To combat this, companies organize themselves into a decision-making and responsibility hierarchy. One thing I wonder is that in a community environment, where there is even less ability to directly motivate members, is it even more difficult to maintain focus? And if it is, how does a corporate entity who wants to incorporate communities gain traction in any one direction?I go back and forth on this answer...and I think this is one of the most difficult issues to grapple with as a profit-driven entity. And it is why structured content will not go away - and neither will organizational process and structure (sorry to the social media activists who may believe that you really don't need formal information structures). Because businesses need to have decision-making and investment categories, they will necessarily need structure around information and content. Add to that financial and regulatory constraints and businesses will never get away from a top down structure. The question is - how do you incorporate user generated information into that structure...and how do you allow individuals to add structure to content as appropriate rather than forcing it on them? User-generated conversations are immensely empowering and motivating because individuals can participate in topics about which they are passionate. The productivity and value gains generated from that type of activity are huge but to take advantage of them, they must be transitioned into the corporate structure that can take advantage of the opportunities.I do think some communities can focus - if the values of the community are strongly felt by each member. In that case, only people who are like-minded opt in to begin with and that is certainly a model that some companies can emulate but in my experience, most companies do not espouse and act on a strong articulated value set in a way that is conducive to enabling focus and a community-based structure. There are a few Craigslist, Zappos, W.L. GoreWhat do you think? Will there be more community-based companies? Is structured content important? How important is it to link structured content to unstructured content? Picture by: pietroizzo
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