This is the first in a series of posts about the new book that Maddie Grant and I wrote, Humanize. I’ll be writing an “Exploring Humanize” post every day for the next week as part of the launch. Enjoy!
One of the main reasons Maddie and I wrote the book, Humanize, is because we feel like we heading into an intersection of trends that is shaping up to be an ugly collision. On one hand, you have the juggernaut that is social media. In Chapter 2 of the book, we summarize what has been happening over the last ten years around the amazing growth of social media and the profound changes it has been making to our economy. We’re big fans of Clay Shirky who has already demonstrated clearly the shift in the balance of power away from the centralized producers of content, news, entertainment, etc. and towards the “people formerly known as the audience.” Now that we’ve given the power to create and share to everybody, the game is changed. And the rate of change is through the roof.
Being social media geeks, we think that’s pretty exciting, but our excitement turns to concern when we pay attention to the intersecting trend that is a part of the collision, and that is our organizational addiction to the status quo. This is the focus of Chapter 3 in the book. The way we manage our organizations is very stuck. Social media (and computer technology in general) changes at the speed of light. What seemed like science fiction twenty years ago is reality today. But take a look at management. We haven’t made any wholesale changes to management in decades. For some of our practices, it’s been over 100 years since they have seen any innovation. In chapter 3 we challenge the status quo thinking around three pillars of management: strategic planning, human resource management, and leadership. That’s important work–strategy, people, and leadership–but the way we’re doing it isn’t serving us well, yet we keep doing it the same way. That’s a problem.
So the very dynamic social media is colliding with our very stuck management practices. We think that’s why companies are having a tough time implementing social media. It’s not because they don’t get the tactics right (okay, maybe some of you still need some help on tactics…). It’s because there is something much deeper about social media that is incompatible with our management practices. It all comes down to humans versus machines. Social media has succeeded because it has tapped into what makes us human, but our management practices have come from a very mechanical view of the world. The rest of the book, of course, talks about how we can create more human organizations moving forward.