Today I take off on an exciting journey, to join the thought leaders and star analysts at Altimeter Group, as a partner focused on enterprise 2.0, collaborative culture, and how organizations can learn nonstop.
As writing my third book, The New Social Learning, drew to a close this spring, I knew it was time to consider what was next. The opportunity to work with Laura Fitton at Pistachio Consulting this past year has been a pure joy yet as oneforty consumed her time, I craved a vibrant community to spark new thinking and up my game.
Over the last month, Charlene, Ray, Jeremiah, Deb, Lora, Michael and Alan have asked questions and introduced approaches that energized my thinking in remarkable ways. A naturally energetic person already, that means I’m practically buzzing. This team truly lives what it says so the experience has been disruptive, honest, inspiring, and catalyzing. In person and using modern tools, the adventure has been like nothing I’ve had before and one I look forward to introducing others to in the years ahead.
Social media has the power to transform enterprises into ecosystems teaming with innovations, fresh solutions, thoughtful decisions, and the capacity to lead wisely into their future. The trouble is, most organizations do little to tap the collective wisdom of their people, let alone systematically use all the talent they hired to tackle complex challenges in their midst. If anything they treat the brilliant people they were so excited to employ as potential liabilities needing to be kept in check.
Rather than banning people from connecting in new ways, there’s an opportunity to open conversations, develop thoughtful policies, and rejigger cultures while still honoring privacy and productivity. There is a parallel opportunity for nimble tools to augment very human practices often left out of organizational traditions.
This is where I’ll focus first: on the intersection of enterprises seeking a new kind of value chain with people at its core, and emerging tool vendors committed to creating smart, connection-oriented technology.
Collaborative tools, paired with open leadership practices, create powerful and readily available opportunities to intermingle ideas, information, and experiences, resulting in something more potent than individuals could contribute alone. When used by several people simultaneously, they enable a shift in individual thinking and increase the energy and intelligence we can produce together. People learn quickly, iterate fast, share their knowledge, and engage with colleagues, business partners, and the customers they serve.
This generates a virtuous spiral, socially generated and built. In a world of rapid change, we each need to garner as much useful information as possible, sort through it in a way that meets our unique circumstances, calibrate it with what we already know, and re-circulate it with others who share our goals.
Part of my operational charter at Altimeter will be to extend that circle to include you, the many people we have learned from on our collective journey to arrive at now. I look forward to working with you, learning with you, and creating with you as together we make sense of what’s next.
If you have questions, comments, or ideas, please email me at marcia at altimetergroup.com. I’ll use this blog as a hub of my new work and my ongoing work with Fast Company (which will resume this coming week), my ongoing partnership with Pistachio Consulting around the Enterprise Microsharing Comparison Report (update out in June), The New Social Learning book (out August 2nd), and on Twitter @marciamarcia.