Way back when, companies used to hire people based upon attributes like education, intelligence, character, and fit with the culture -- the central glue that made us "Us". What followed after getting hired was often a grooming process that included a succession of lower level jobs, training, and if you didn't screw up, promotion. This meant that the company invested in you over time, and a significant part of your value to the company was your knowledge of it, the way you carried the torch of values embodied by the company.
In reading about IBM's Effort to Google-ize the Enterprise it occurred to me that they weren't Google-izing the Enterprise. They were replacing another part of you. Google-izing functions of your job. But they haven't Google-ized the Enterprise. Not even close.
Think about this -- we have stopped hiring for long term fit with culture. We hire now for immediate delivery of skills to solve immediate problems. We have stopped grooming for the future and become more transactional. This has led us to automate the functions of customer relationship management (institutional knowledge of customers that used to be held by people). It has also led us to outsource engineering. And manufacturing. (Institutional knowledge of uniquely serving customers through products.) And customer support. (On going interaction with customers, hopefully leading to new transactions.) Because we can collaborate real-time, we can Google up the best resource at the best price (well, not really, but we think we can) and get the job done well enough. (hmm, really?)
So what does it mean to you? To get today's job, you have to do the work to make sure your name comes up on the top of the list of the search results, by hitting all the current transaction's requirements precisely. To the corporation, it diminishes and dilutes the effect of culture. (If culture is only "the way we do things around here", it becomes far more shallow and transactional in our instant-on-instant-off world where we cannot easily get to the deeper elements of culture, Shared Underlying Assumptions and Core Values. In a sense, there is no there there. No center. Not just because we are collaborating, but because the shift is now constant. Unplug from this, plug into that.
Now some have talked about building a Collaboration Culture but as near as I can see, this is only an idea. What we are often left with in a collaborative, outsourced world is a telephone answered by someone with perhaps the right information but no real expression of who the company is the customer is dealing with.
To illustrate this, let me use an "old world" example. In ancient days, perhaps 1990, if you purchased a product from Digital Equipment Corporation, you paid a premium for the product and for its service. But when you had a problem, you picked up the phone you could often eventually talk to somone who breathed that product and who had bought into the DEC's customer serice ethic. Contrast this with current customer support experiences in which the pleasant person on the other end of the telephone seems to have some authoritative information available, but expresses no recognizable values that would distinguish this experience for any other experience, and certainly does not espouse commitment toward achieving an experience with you that communicates those values. They just want to get you off the phone, or respond to your email.
The bad news, is this now is the corporation. We have outsourced virtually everything. So can we have a corporate culture in this environment? Or are we headed to the place where everything we do or make is subject to lowest price commoditization?
Or perhaps on a brighter note, how can we collaborate in such a way that we infuse every action with the underlying values that embody the organization being represented? How can we use our technology, our ability to tag everything in such a way that the values, not just information are transmitted with fidelity, no matter who is tasked today with delivering them?
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