Shel Israel is researching Global Neighborhoods (it’s not a mis-spellling) the title of his next book and he pinged me along with many others who have contributed thoughts and ideas. Shel’s central premise:
At the core of Global Neighborhoods is a long and hopeful look at today’s teens and young adults. What will happen in a few short years, when this generation comes of age? The book reports on how the next generation is learning and experiencing in ways that prior generations could never imagine.
Almost from the beginning, this blog has asserted that unless professionals pay close attention to the next generation of employees, trainees and business partners, it will wither. My sense is that unless we recognise and embrace the new social computing metaphor, others will step in to fill what I see as an obvious gap.
However, on one point I think Shel is way off base. He argues that:
Human nature has remained pretty much the same since we were hanging out in caves. What keeps changing are the tools we use to explore and communicate.
I cannot agree. It denies our ability to evolve and change. We don’t for example condone public execution of criminals, once seen as a way of maintaining social order and social cohesion. Neither do we condone slavery. In the same way, we recognise that what happens in other parts of the world are no longer local events but global and real-time. These changes may be facilitated by advances in technology but they also alter our way of looking at the social context in which we exist. IMO, this is because anyone who ventures into this medium is on parade. There is no hiding place from the millions of others who are searching for information with which to enrich their lives. Honesty and clarity are no longer optional but a requirement. And that changes everything.
The same is true in business. We only have to think about how the Enron scandal has been dissected or look at commentary surrounding the KPMG trial to see that plenty of people have plenty to say about the moral veracity of our institutions. We can think about some of the current tax avoidance campaigns being undertaken by the Tax Justice Network. Such campaigns, reaching a global audience in the time it takes to click a mouse button, would have been impossible to conceive as impacting those in power just five years ago. Yet they are acquiring power by dint of the quality of work to which they can point. Campaigns such as this strike at the heart of what passes for business ethics.
These campaigns have the potential to alter the moral compass for the profession in deep and profound ways. Not because they necessarily reach a mass audience but because they have the potential to influence those in power. Whether they will succeed is another matter but if they only achieve partial success then I believe they will set in motion a train of thought and action that will be difficult to halt in socially aware society. In doing so, they will be the example that proves Shel’s ‘human nature’ assumption to be false. It would show for example that while ‘greed is good‘ economic rape is unacceptable.
On business models, I think Shel’s onto something:
A case in point on how this is achieved is illustrated at Hitachi, one of the 100 largest companies on earth, which entrusted a 31-year-old mid-level employee to use social media to bolster its worldwide Data Systems division. He created a wiki that invited not just customers, but even competing vendors to join and contribute. The result being primarily that the user, not the vendor, gains power, but Hitachi becomes the perceived category leader for its contributions.
I’ve said many time before, you send them away to bring them back. You demonstrate you’re not the fount of all wisdom by showing how you learn from those far smarter than yourself. In doing so, authors expose a characteristic few people talk about – humility. How many of us want to debate that as part of our understanding of business management? Very few I suspect. Without a discussion of what this means for our ethical growth, I sense that Shel will miss an important if difficult topic I believe is worthy of exploration.
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