Recently I was invited by the HR VP in Argentina to speak at Human Camp, a well known forum for HR managers in the whole industry. This year´s subject was about "Change, New Generations & Crisis", and the reason of me being there was the deep conviction of my colleague that we must understand how new media is affecting the citizens and in particular the new generations. Therefore, my speech was about technological changes and new trends and how this may be affecting people and organizations in the short and longer term. You will find the presentation below but just to summarize key messages: There´s no doubt the world has changed, so I started with the Shift Happens Video as an introduction to the 5 trends:
1- Unlimited Access to Content & Unlimited Storage Capacity.
2- Super Distribution & Interconectivy
3- Screens convergence
4- Nomads Mobility (worth to read the full article on "The Economist" http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10950394 that in a nuthshell talk about the impact mobile phones and wi fi enviroments on mankind)
5- The power to the People.
This leave us in front of a man/woman that is connected at all time, anywhere, everywhere. A much more powerfull entity that can decide to let you in or keep you out. A lot more impatient, as he/she is used to get anything with just one click. A greater influencing role for him/her. He can talk to peers in a much bigger scale and let everybody knows what he thinks just twiteering it. Finally, we´re in front of the Wiki Man, one that is willing to contribute to a common space of meanings. This can happen for different reasons; we just need to understand the motivation behind the action; whether is it for concrete benefits or based on the desire to achieve social recognition or a good reputation. Being it driven by altruism or just a desire for self expression; the wiki lifestyle is here to stay and had radically changed the power structures within societies. From verticalism to horizontal networks; from one to many to many to many.
This opens the door at least, for some uncomfortable thoughts for organizations like ours. That´s why I´ve shared with the audience the concepts illustrated by Ori Brafman & Rod Beckstrom in their book "The Starfish and the Spider" as an invitation for re-thinking how organizations could or should work in the future, wihtin this new era for leadership and HR management.
Basically, the old organizations work as spiders, with one central head and the new ones acts as starfish, with coordinated legs. If you cut a leg to spider, you get a 7 legs spider... if you cut its head... you get a dead spider!!! The concept of a starfish organization is based on the hability of this organism to grow again any of their bodyparts when cut!! The thing I found very interesting was to see how deep this subject is installed within the HR community, reinforcing my conviction that we should keep on trying to leverage the awareness of this major revolution among everybody in the Unilever world!
You can see the presentation below. Cheers!
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1 comment:
The fact that the new media landscape has a 'reverse' impact on other areas is very interesting.
I imagine also how much our basic operating business model of developing products will be affected. In the end, the model of developing big brands, gigantic individual SKU sales, extensive distribution etc, was always supported by the ability to communicate massively, at once, to big audiences.
How much complexity will be able to cope moving forwards??
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