On Social Business, at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit

It’s both amazing and hilarious to consider that being human, or treating people well, or interacting with one another, is now in-vogue in big business. We did a turn with quality (“we need to make things well!”) in the 80s, optimization (“we need to track the supply chain and distribution chain!”) in the early 90s, the internet (“bricks and mortar is dead!”) in 2000, and now it’s All About Social. But when you unwrap “social”, you start to realize that it’s a container for some major, powerful, and fundamental aspects of human life. It’s not a business construct, as was six-sigma or ERP. The stuff we mean when we talk about “social” is the stuff of life, and it’s natural. And so I find it both amazing and very, very funny to observe how fundamentally hard it is for some people to “manage social” and to understand the role social plays in the context of business. 

I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit, and I’ve heard from some very eloquent speakers in some very impressive positions at the large brands in our lives. Speaker Jaime Punishill is the Director of Strategic Planning at Citibank. Frank Eliason is the Senior Director at Comcast. Rick Maynard is the Manager of Public Relations for KFC. And the problems they are all struggling with relate to the nature of some pretty fundamental things, most simply put as “people like to interact with one another”. Some of the talks described how to limit the way people talk to each other. For example, Jamie, from Citibank, described that 200 of the 280,000 employees at Citibank are allowed to use social media at work. Other talks focused on how we can increase our abilities at work to change corporate culture. Kate Niederhoffer, of the Dachis Group, presented how the use of empathy – a social psychology phenomenon – is critical to changing a company’s culture, as you have to feel what it’s like to embrace the old culture prior to proposing a new one.

But the most fundamental talk, and one of the best talks I’ve heard in a few years of conferencing, was the kickoff from author Doug Rushkoff. Doug, who wrote (among other things) “How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back”, presented an overview of the current “ways of doing social”, and the fundamental problems with these methods.

As he explains, social is a thing marketers are using in order to get consumers to hype their products. It’s a way of generating buzz or message, and it emphasizes a void between consumers and marketers – the void that’s been there for 600 years, since the end of the middle ages. He painted a picture of business owners – in many cases, land owners – who created the rules, the monopolies, and then hired (or inherited, as the case might be with serfdom) people to work under those rules and monopolies. Those in charge then acted to maintain these monopolies, rather than create new things; all efforts went to maintain a set of control, and in this controlled environment, the best worker was one that was not necessarily skilled but instead replaceable. That is, a worker who could easily be swapped out for another was of more value than someone with a highly refined skillset, and so tasks were established that were essentially intended for the unskilled.

There’s an obvious allusion made to corporations of today, where many large corporations no longer actually make anything; instead, they simply manage the books and finances, and rebrand white-labeled goods or services. The example of note is a TV manufacturer, who doesn’t actually manufacture televisions – those are created by an OEM in China. They don’t design them, either – that’s done by a vendor. The marketing? Handled by a consultant. The entire large corporation of television making, then, doesn’t actually make televisions, and from one perspective, doesn’t really do anything at all. As Rushkoff describes, the corporation is now in a position of hiring the unskilled serfs of the middle ages, because they are replaceable, and there’s no need to train them to actually do anything.

Yet the various financial issues that plague our country and world are calling attention to the fundamental problems of this model, and the model is now shifting. Doug explains that “We are finally in an environment where the way to make money is to actually be good at something! That’s the story, and it’s not a brand story.” As people talk to each other – as they do the things social people do, enabled by the technologies of twitter and blogging and facebook – they are talking about the story. And if there isn’t an authentic story to talk about; if it’s all marketing and brand and artificial and contrived, they either aren’t talking about it at all, or calling it out loudly as what it is.

In Doug Rushkoff’s view, the way to succeed in business now is to make things, not brand them. It’s expertise and passion – management and the larger corporate structure is there to protect people’s abilities to make things and be passionate. It’s truthful, and real, and it should be good. In his words, “We are no longer in a universe of messaging and marketing. It’s a universe of doing.”