The New, Improved Organization: Now Without a Chewy Center!

"If it happens twice it’s coincidence; if it happens three times, it’s a trend." – Anonymous

For the past few months, I’ve been dealing with one of those gut, right-brain feelings — not enough hard data to draw the graph, yet well-more than enough to get the spidey senses on alert.  That gut feeling tells me that business is about to get really weird.  Happily, I also have a feeling that ultimately said weirdness is going to manifest itself in a positive, transformative way.

The key driver behind this feeling has been the humanization of so many organizations that, heretofore, have been opaque and, well, corporate.   Dell.  GM.  Salesforce.  Wells Fargo.  Oracle.  In all of those cases, the organizations have started to make transformations from being purely represented in the marketplace by their sanitized, focus-grouped-to-death marketing departments into organizations where at least some identifiable number of their employees or representatives are having "real" identities online that integrate both their "corporate" and "human" sides.

As we discovered here, individuals from Big Companies self-identify online with a variety of sites online that they state as their "home base."  For many of us, our blogs are "home" — when someone asks us "where can I find you online," we give our blog URLs.  (This is the camp into which I fall.)  For many others, a Twitter stream, or even a Facebook or LinkedIn profile might be that touch point.  Some of us have separate homes, one for our "professional" self, and another for our "personal" self, perhaps even under a pseudonym.  I have a feeling (again, no hard data here) that the generation coming online now will more strongly identify with themselves and their peer networks, rather than any organizational home online, regardless of how benevolent that organization may be.

Here are three other posts that are poking on different side of this:

Umair Haque: "There’s only one real answer: rethinking strategy itself. A world of
cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the
edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and
what’s not."

Fred Wilson: "We are in the midst of a groundbreaking shift from a centralized
economy dominated by large "orthodox" companies to a "edge economy"
dominated by end users."

Jeff Jarvis: "Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things
less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite:
release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid."

What do you think?  Will organizations continue to fragment, and become more networked and organic, or is the current vogue of online individualism merely an outlier that will eventually return to a more traditional strategic state?