Business in the 21st century: Stay tuned for brave new world

Business leaders - take note: web technologies are poised to change everything - economic, political and social - says Jim Mortleman.

It's easy to greet talk of change in business with a weary sigh. For more than two decades, a succession of buzz phrases like 'paradigm shift',' process re-engineering' and 'business transformation' have littered the management lexicon.

But for all the blather, most traditional organisations have failed to change fundamentally the experience of customers, employees or the wider communities with which they interact.

Similarly, when the internet landed on an unsuspecting business world some 15 years ago (following several decades in the darkness of defence and academia), many scoffed at the revolutionary claims made for this 'new' medium.

We were told it would be more significant than the invention of the printing press some five centuries earlier. Yet most businesses merely co-opted internet technology into their traditional structures, adopting email as a replacement for snail mail and fax, and treating the web as 'just another channel to market'.

The dotcom crash at the end of the millennium further fuelled cynics' fire, as hyper-inflated company valuations and egos were rudely burst.

Amid all the talk of transformation, environmental, social and economic crises were coming to a head - and nobody was doing much to avert them (as recent events show all too clearly). In the context of all this, it's hardly surprising today's pronouncements about a social web, semantic web or web 2.0 "revolution" leave many feeling jaded. Hardly surprising, but wrong.

As Professor Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management has pointed out, when electricity was introduced to industry in the 19th century, it took more than 50 years before the technology (and people's understanding of it) matured to a point where businesses realised they could organise themselves in a fundamentally different way, since they no longer needed physical crank-shafts to connect parts of the factory to a central gas-fired turbine. Thus the familiar production line was born and exponential improvements in efficiency and productivity followed.

As more and more people are realising today, the rise of the social and semantic web represents a similar dawning of the true potential of the information age. This time, though, it's not the parts of a factory that can be connected differently, it's everything and everyone.

The economic, political and social structures that grew up during the 20th century are unsustainable in the 21st.

If our civilisation is to have any viable future, it must be one where we free up people's talents for the betterment of themselves, others and the planet at large. That means re-envisioning business not just as a means for people to make money (a miserly definition which devalues business's role) but as a vehicle that enables collaboration to flourish beyond old boundaries.

The web isn't really about technology, it's about connecting people - our knowledge, ideas, energy and efforts.

This has far-reaching implications for how we think about our organisations. It means dissolving silos and hierarchies, embracing openness, diversity, collaboration and sustainability, treating customers and employees as human beings rather than target markets or cogs in a machine. Business thinkers have been telling us this for years but history shows us real change only comes when there is a clamour from the bottom up as well as leadership from the top down.

But isn't this just airy-fairy utopianism? I don't believe so.

Advances in the performance and pervasiveness of mobile and networked technology have today brought us to the tipping point. As Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle point out in their white paper Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On: "As is so often the case, the future isn't clearest in the pronouncements of big companies but in the clever optimizations of early adopters and 'alpha geeks'."

In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, social media guru Clay Shirky shows how people are increasingly using new technologies to connect to one another and organise themselves. "Newly capable groups are assembling, and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous stuctures that bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere," he writes.

CIOs and others who consider themselves agents of change must grasp these issues and communicate them with passion and clarity if they don't want their organisations to be on the wrong side of the future.

Writing in the new 10th anniversary edition of the pioneering Cluetrain Manifesto, which in 1999 outlined how the internet was transforming markets, one of the original authors Chris Locke says: "It's hard to imagine the Era of Total Cluelessness coming to a close. But try. Try hard. Because only imagination can finally bring the curtain down."

Jim Mortleman is a business and technology writer, commentator, consultant and speaker. He writes a blog, The New Game.