The end of the corporation as a closed box.
Sunday, July 18, 2010 at 7:06PM So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation's managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.
Banking epitomises this. When I eventually give up with online systems - that treat me as an undifferentiated unit of a mass market, barely segmented into simplistic demographics - and trek down to my local branch where I have to sit and watch a bank teller - who is treated as an undifferentiated unit of a staff who isn''t trusted to make any decisions and are subject to the same online systems as me albeit with a different set of assumptions this time about grade and accountability.
We both face the same impersonal closed box and we have both had enough. We are starting to talk to each other.
Reader Comments (5)
You are a dangerous man, Euan Semple. I sure hope there are no impressionable young children reading this blog. What would they think?
Dave Birch posted a critique of the "Manifesto for a Network Nation" by Martha Lane Fox which, to my mind at least, is informed by a similar disgruntled realism. http://bit.ly/bj67CG
Talking to each other? Outrageous suggestion! How does business get done when everyone's talking all the time? The modern organisation would run so much more smoothly without customers demanding service. Or staff with their bothersome expectations.
Agreed Euan; we're moving into a new age of transparency and change. From Agricultural, through Industrial to Information Revolution. Perhaps this is beginning of the Transparency Revolution? Viva la Revolucion!
Euan are you intimating Facebook may become a Bank?
Anything is possible!