At the recent Switch conference in Porto, I touched briefly on whether entrepreneurialism is compatible with the collaborative nature of Social Media and Enterprise 2.0.  It seems to me that there is an inherent clash between the two approaches.

Although there are of course exceptions, an entrepreneur tends typically to be someone who:

• has their own clear ideas of where they should be taking the organisation
• is working towards a relatively long-term strategic goal
• only shares their knowledge to the extent necessary to achieve their goals
• tends to have a hierarchical attitude towards organisational structure
• launches a business very locally and perhaps later spreads to other geographic regions

The above attributes do not marry well with the collaborative nature of Social Business, wherein:

• strategy is often the result of crowdsourcing ideas
• the web is usually used to identify the next incremental step, not the long-term goal
• information is shared openly with complete strangers
• organisations tend to be very flat and relatively unstructured
• from the outset, businesses tend to be global

To succeed in this highly interconnected world, a new breed of entrepreneur is needed.  Entrepreneurs of the future will need to be:

• less self-centred and more open to others’ ideas
• more prepared to share their own ideas with the world
• less convinced of their own superior status in the organisation

But there are definitely some attributes that have always been important for an entrepreneur that do not change in this Web 2.0 world.  They must always:

• have enormous drive to succeed
• be prepared to work very long hours  often to the detriment of their personal life
• believe in their goal
• look after and support their team

and above all have the humility to accept that they don’t know everything and can always learn more from those around them.

I’m sure that many readers will disagree with my comments here, so your thoughts on the subject would be very welcome.

@demeto

Much is written about adoption of Enterprise 2.0, but adoption is nevertheless slow in most cases.  My belief is that this is largely because those selling the idea to top managment are not hitting the right buttons.  As a former Chairman and CEO of several companies and  a company director for over 30 years, I think I know what would have convinced me to adopt E2.0, had it existed at that time.

How not to sell it

There are several ways to ensure that all but the most geeky techies on the management team will NOT buy into the concept.

• Don’t call it Enterprise 2.0: This sounds too gimmicky.  It doesn’t convey any message that revenues and profits will increase any time soon.
• Don’t use the word ’social‘: CEOs know that it is good for employee motivation for them to have a happy social life, but most of them believe that (apart from Christmas parties and occasional staff drinks) this is something best kept out of the office.
• Don’t emphasise the technical points: Most CEOs do not want to hear about iPads or whether iPhone or Blackberry is better for accessing Twitter when traveling.  And if you descend into discussions about bandwidth, you’ll have lost them completely!

What buttons should you hit?

Instead of the above, I strongly recommend that you concentrate on the following messages.

• Talk about engaging with stakeholders: This is something CEOs understand and know they need to do.  They see stakeholder engagement as one of their key roles in life, be it with employees, customers, suppliers or whomever.  A system that makes this simpler and frees up some of their own time for other activities will be very attractive.
• Emphasise the benefits of collaboration: CEOs know innovation is important.  They have been brought up under the ‘Change or die’ maxim.  Providing them with a collaborative system to innovate more effectively will appeal to them. Real life examples (of which there are many) of companies cutting time to market of new products will impress them.
• Explain the alternative: You can’t sell E2.0 using simple ROI as a measure (any more than you can calculate the ROI of having a roof on the office), but you can point out the costs and risks of NOT incorporating E2.0 in the business.
• Kill the security question early: One of the major concerns of CEOs is that any social media application will put the company at serious risk of leaks of confidential data. Explain early that this is something that clearly has to be avoided, but that there are excellent existing tools for ensuring this (quite apart from clear company policy guidelines, which the CEO will hopefully confirm are already in place).

I hope this helps.  As I think of other suggestions, I’ll tweet them.  (@Demeto)

David Demetrius (Partner and co-founder of Fyronic)

I saw a documentary recently about how the web not only changes society but in fact changes our brain. The documentary presented a research experiment that shows that 12-16 year old youngsters process information in a very different way than older generations (50+). It revealed for example that older generations needed a lot more time to review information found on the web in order to answer a number of questions than the younger ‘web’-generation needed. This web-generation grew up with the internet, with social networks and wikipedia.

They gather information and knowledge in a different way. They find information associatively unlike the older generation which is used to linear thought and information gathering. It’s the librarian’s doing, I suppose. Information used to be very linearly structured in neat classes or categories, named taxonomies. But the web doesn’t work like that. The web works by association. Hyperlinks ‘associate’ pieces of information in a much more natural way to our brain.

Now there’s a lot of discussion about whether the web and its use really changes our brain. (see for example this article in Newsweek by Sharon Begley). But what it does prove is that the abundance of available information forces us to treat information differently as say, 10 years ago. Filtering becomes more and more important. Distinguishing important information from less important information is becoming ever more crucial in taking decisions. And on the upside of all this, we become smarter.

The abundance of information and access to knowledge might be perceived as troublesome for some, but for those of us who can manage to filter the stream, it becomes a source of ever-increasing  knowledge. In fact, some see the internet as a world-wide, endlessly growing brain.

If we assume that the changing way of gathering information exists indeed and will only become more and more obiquitous, we can also assume that it will influence how we work. And it does.

Consider how many companies block access to social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Why do that if not because it changes people’s behaviour at work? I can understand CEO’s fear of this vast, unknown, potentially time-consuming new social shift. How do you deal with people who are gathering information and knowledge in a way you’ve never seen before ? How do you deal with employees who become authorities in their own personal networks?  It must be scary. But ignoring the inevitable is not a good strategy. (Can you block out mobile phones?) Instead of ignoring it companies should find a way to use the power of social networks and other web 2.0 tools and concepts.

So, if people’s brains are not changed by their extensive use of the web at least their behaviour is affected. And company leaders should learn how to harness this change, this ability to process information fast, to filter important from unimportant quickly.

Business environments change all the time, technology changes business all the time. And although it is the technology that sparked the changes, these changes are now primarily about people and culture. Web 2.0  and therefore also Enterprise 2.0 are altering the relationship between employee and employer. With the coming of social tools like blogs, social networks, microblogging, every employee has a voice that can be heard throughout the entire organisation. They can become leaders in their own professional networks, they can be the source of innovation and knowledge sharing initiatives.

It is this change in behaviour (and perhaps the change in how we gain knowledge) and the increasing influence and authority of employees throughout the whole company, that calls for a different kind of leadership approach.

In the nineties, as I recall, there was a lot of lipservice being paid to the idea that ‘people are the most important asset of companies’. Well, it becomes unmistakingly clear that they were and they are. And now they can also show it!  It is now up to the executives to lead their people in this online business environment, taking into account the new relationship between them.