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Social Organization
As a leader, it's your job to extract maximum talent, energy, knowledge, and innovation from your customers and employees. But how?
In The Social Organization, two of Gartner's lead analysts strongly advocate exploiting social technology. The authors share insights from their study of successes and failures at more than four hundred organizations that have used social technologies to foster—and capitalize on—customers’ and employees’ collective efforts.
But the new social technology landscape isn’t about the technology. It’s about building communities, fostering new ways of collaborating, and guiding these efforts to achieve a purpose. To that end, the authors identify the core disciplines managers must master to translate community collaboration into otherwise impossible results:
• Vision: defining a compelling vision of progress toward a highly collaborative organization.
• Strategy: taking community collaboration from risky and random success to measurable business value.
• Purpose: rallying people around a clear purpose, not just providing technology.
• Launch: creating a collaborative environment and gaining adoption.
• Guide: participating in and influencing communities without stifling collaboration.
• Adapt: responding creatively to change in order to better support community collaboration.
The Social Organization highlights the benefits and challenges of using social technology to tap the power of people, revealing what managers must do to make collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage.
In The Social Organization, two of Gartner's lead analysts strongly advocate exploiting social technology. The authors share insights from their study of successes and failures at more than four hundred organizations that have used social technologies to foster—and capitalize on—customers’ and employees’ collective efforts.
But the new social technology landscape isn’t about the technology. It’s about building communities, fostering new ways of collaborating, and guiding these efforts to achieve a purpose. To that end, the authors identify the core disciplines managers must master to translate community collaboration into otherwise impossible results:
• Vision: defining a compelling vision of progress toward a highly collaborative organization.
• Strategy: taking community collaboration from risky and random success to measurable business value.
• Purpose: rallying people around a clear purpose, not just providing technology.
• Launch: creating a collaborative environment and gaining adoption.
• Guide: participating in and influencing communities without stifling collaboration.
• Adapt: responding creatively to change in order to better support community collaboration.
The Social Organization highlights the benefits and challenges of using social technology to tap the power of people, revealing what managers must do to make collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage.
252 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 2011
11 people are currently reading
130 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 11, 2011
I am so done with this type of books: a whole bunch of empty words, straight out of an MBA text book that adds absolutely no value to your life. They say the book is dedicated to the how, well maybe if you spend your life trying to figure out what the right buzz words of the week are, it is. But for people like me who are in the trenches, knee deep in social media noise and communication, it all sounds so hollow.
This is the kind of book where you can replace every mention of the topic with another topic and it would still make sense.
They're getting one star for reminding me that everything you need to do has to have a purpose. But then again, nothing new there huh! And for people who want to learn more about purpose, don't read this book, check out Simon Sinek's TED Talk on why we do what we do. Much more inspirational.
So to summarize: boring, uninspiring and definitely not helpful in trying to figure out how to become a Social Organization. To me, part of the shift happening is bringing out some personality that forms your company, "to show some ankle" as my colleague Andrew Green always says. And that is probably the biggest problem with this book, it completely lacks any personality from the authors. This could have been written by any MBA student, that's how text book like it is! I'm preordering the Conversation Company from Steven van Belleghem, if anybody has any other suggestions, please share them with me here!
Thank you.
This is the kind of book where you can replace every mention of the topic with another topic and it would still make sense.
They're getting one star for reminding me that everything you need to do has to have a purpose. But then again, nothing new there huh! And for people who want to learn more about purpose, don't read this book, check out Simon Sinek's TED Talk on why we do what we do. Much more inspirational.
So to summarize: boring, uninspiring and definitely not helpful in trying to figure out how to become a Social Organization. To me, part of the shift happening is bringing out some personality that forms your company, "to show some ankle" as my colleague Andrew Green always says. And that is probably the biggest problem with this book, it completely lacks any personality from the authors. This could have been written by any MBA student, that's how text book like it is! I'm preordering the Conversation Company from Steven van Belleghem, if anybody has any other suggestions, please share them with me here!
Thank you.
July 25, 2013
The book takes off quite well and has some good insight in the first three chapters. As soon as it comes to how reach what has been soldin chapters one to three it completely looses track and goes offroad. The author gives advice that will never properly work in a professional environment. His step by step approach suggests activities that consume a lot of time and ressources but won't help a company on its way to become a social business. He promotes an approach that almost completely plans collaborative work top down.
I read the book to roughly the middle and then skipped to chapter 10 but couldn't find any useable information there either.
Reading this book is a waste of time. The examples are extremely generic and obviously not self experienced. The entire book lacks any sign of passion.
I read the book to roughly the middle and then skipped to chapter 10 but couldn't find any useable information there either.
Reading this book is a waste of time. The examples are extremely generic and obviously not self experienced. The entire book lacks any sign of passion.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews