If You Haven’t Gone Social, You Should Be Very Very Worried

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Mark Babbitt and Ted Coiné have written a book you MUST read, A World Gone Social, if you don’t want to fall prey to Darwin’s survival of the fittest.  Mark and Ted make it clear, with concrete examples, that the Social World’s implications for 21st Century business are enormous:

  • Customers have more power than they’ve had before; Settling for mediocre won’t work!
  • Employees have more power than they’ve had before; Their ideas and insights matter!
  • Command-and-Control is a delusion; Wake up and get flat(ter)!
  • Top talent chooses where it wants to go; Would you want to work for you?  
  • Transparency is a requirement and expectation; If you’ve got something to hide, forget it!

Transparency is foundational to me on at least 2 levels:

First, when information is open, available, accessible and shareable, awesome can happen.  Ted and Mark’s concept of OPEN: Ordinary People | Extraordinary Network gets right to this (Chapter 9). My life has always been about the network, so of course I’d love OPEN.  I measure my professional success by my ROImpact  - my form of ROI.  The broader, deeper and mover diverse your network, the larger the impact you can have.  Ted and Mark state “No matter who we are, the more OPEN we are, the more global our impact.”  OPEN is how we connect diverse expertise around the world to solve wicked problems. It’s how we democratize knowledge, access and opportunity.  OPEN truly makes the ordinary extraordinary – something each of us can do.

"No matter who we are, the more OPEN we are, the more global our impact."

Second, when everything is OPEN, walking the talk isn’t a cliché it’s a requirement.  Your products, services, customer support - all your interactions have to be consistent with who you say you are and what you say you stand for.  Does your organization really care about your customers? Does it truly want to understand their problems and create meaningful solutions? In A World Gone Social, it’s not about what you get (output), it’s about what you can give (outcome).  Some do this because they think it’s the route to success, which it is.  But those who cherish and relish giving do it because it’s a route to making the world a better place – from making it easier to get your prescription drugs or pick up the dry-cleaning to stopping malaria or providing emergency housing in natural disasters.  We may never know the fabulous outcomes of connecting people together, but we know fabulous things happen. 

Get A World Gone Social
Read it, mark it up, share it, give it away – but most importantly, live it!