When we talk about new organization or management approach, about the tools that support new ways to communicate or collaborate we often use the knowledge economy as a justification. Moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy means a deep change of context and responses of a new kind from businesses. That’s an obvious fact and none of the current social business or enterprise 2.0 expert has coined anything new : there already was an abundant literacy on these new forms of organization while most of os where still learning writing and counting at school. If we take the technology side apart, any old book from Peter Drucker could be a best seller if published today with the same texts and a socially fashionable title.

So knowledge economy is there and both organizations and people have to deal with it. But what do they do it so slow, with so much reluctance, fears and doubts ? Why can’t we see this draught, this collective march that happened when the world faced its last similar evolution ? The answer is easy : because the knowledge economy does not exist. Not because it’s a dream kept alive buy a few passionate and lunatic people but because it’s not a concrete reality, foundations on which we’ll be able to craft the future.

A field was not enough to craft the agrarian economy. A factory and some steam or electricity did not found the industrial economy. There were organization models designed for the factory. Labor laws evolved to lead the change. Financial mechanisms were set up to make the requires investment possible, what made industrial economy grow. A factory did not made the industrial economy but a set of rules, practices, mechanisms did. They turned a need and an opportunity into reality.

So, what’s about knowledge economy ?

One swallow doesn’t make a summer and a knowledge worker does not make a knowledge economy. Knowledge work exists. Knowledge workers too and they represent each day a bigger part of the working population. They are the resources that may help to build a sustainable growth for the future. But that won’t happen unless some requirements are met.

As a matter of fact, even if the potential exists it’s poorly exploited. First because businesses don’t do everything possible to make the most of it…but that’s an easy pretext. Businesses  also are  looking for sense, for reasons to do things. They don’t find these reasons because they are operating in an environment that did not change that much during the last 50 years. Consequence : they struggle to reinvent their model, to reinvent themselves. Evidence  is those that success, that find the way of a new durable growth, are those who made choices that were both “obvious” regarding to where the world is heading and crazy according to the current environment in which they operate.

What’s missing to craft the appropriate environment ?

- innovation : programs that encourage innovation and sustain creation of innovating businesses.

- an appropriate legal and accounting environment. It will be quite impossible to move further In an economy that relies on people when everything that’s about them is seen as costs and never as investments. Globally speaking, we need to rethink everything that’s about time. The knowledge economy needs time to create knowledge, trust, learn. Time is an investment when wisely used. Short term approaches leads to resource wasting and shifts adaptation costs to others without removing them.

- means to link incomes not with jobs but with participation. Both inside and outside businesses. Many systems relying on people and communities from which businesses draw benefits rely on the voluntary participation of as many people as possible. That’s not a problem as long as it’s a secondary activity that comes in addition to a “real one” from which people get money. When principal activities are becoming scarcer every day, this model that many think is the model of the future, needs to be sustained differently. Even inside organizations this is a major barrier to new approaches to emerging collaboration, where people can’t find what’s in for them and managers find themselves at risk because of the use made of the resources they are accountable for. Let’s remind that cost allocation is a collaboration killer.

- an appropriate legal environment. Don’t forget that, in many countries, the new way of working we’d like to encourage and the use of tools that sustain them are close to the legal border line, because of regulations dating from decades. Yes, law is lagging far behind…so much that some will advise you “not to care about it”. But the risk is actual and huge. The point is not to break all what exists down but to find a new balance that fits today’s context. In the meanwhile, this is one more reason not to go even if it would make sense.

- the future of businesses will depend on the people that will make it. Provided they have the right mindset and toolkit for the upcoming years, not for the past ones. The education system needs a fix too.

- infrastructure that will sustain both local and global growth. A wide scale fiber program is as essential today as railroads were one century ago.

- since it’s all about global challenges that are quite beyond what businesses can do, we need a long term vision at the countries level. And we’re still far from that. For instance, a couple of months ago the French government installed a “Digital National Council”. Quite a praiseworthy decision in a country where “digital” is a strange, poorly known and even scary thing fior elites still stuck between the 60s and the 80s are are more focused on bringing the past back to life that dealing with the future. Praiseworthy initiative I said….until I had a look at who will make it up. Not to criticize those who’re in (they are recognized and legitimate professionals) but to think about those who are not. Except what I call “pipe sellers” and those who sell things through the pipes…nearly nothing. An education system expert ? A tax system expert ? An HR professional ? A labor law professional ? The lack of vision is obvious. “Digital” is only seen as a new channel to deliver contents and goods. Can it be leveraged to transform our organizations, the way work is done to drive future growth and competitiveness ? Is this question worth ? Of course it is. is it a part of the national ambition ? Not at all because this ambition does not exist and none of our leaders gets a thing about “digital”. If they do there would not be a state secretary dedicated to the “digital economy” but the minister of economy would be in charge of all that.

I’d also like to remind that, because they were not good at knowledge work, businesses had to find their profitability elsewhere in the last decades. On financial markets. If you’re looking for some of the causes of the financialization of economy that lead to the extremes we know you have a part if the answer here : their inability to turn themselves into knowledge organizations because of the constraints of an economy that’s still designed for industrial work and only for that.

If we also take into account how much the knowledge economy shares with the service economy, we can understand how big the challenge is.

Knowledge work exist. Knowledge workers too. The potential in terms of growth and jobs is obvious. But knowledge economy is still a dream while, beyond what businesses can do, it’s a new society model to be implemented if we want to build foundations for tomorrow’s growth.

Without such an approach, many will find that enterprise 2.0 or social business initiatives have too little impact, are too soft or not enough something. Don’t try to find the reasons anywhere else. As well as we’ll overlook the real problems, everything we’ll do at the enterprise scale will look very futile.

People talk a lot about social business, enterprise 2.0 or similar concepts to refer to new ways to organize work, new relationships between people and between people and their work. But that’s only the smallest part of a global transformation that impacts the whole economy, a transformation that need to be taken into account if we don’t want all the efforts made at a micro level to change the way people work to be irrelevant with the economic structures that exist at a macro level.

Taking into account the deep change of the nature of economy and the relationships between players (not only economic ones) does only not mean  stating that the world is changing and urging people and organizations to change. That’s what has been done for years and we have not admit that was not enough. It’s about aligning the macro context with the new nature of economy, to make efforts that are undertaken at a micro level bear fruits.

We’re heading towards new value creation models that don’t adapt very well to manufacturing and taylorian ones that have been set up to help things in the past. I already mentioned the accounting side of the problem…and that’s only a part of the issue.

Today, value is created through information sharing, connecting people and knowledge, in a networked and decentralized way. In fact…not exactly. To be more precise, this decentralized and connected world works in the background of the economy we know, making it work faster, better, even in a more balanced and responsible way for those for make the most of its new potential. This background activity works both inside and outside enterprises, bridging both worlds. On the other hand, this background world need to make sense for people involved in to work well. They need to know in which way it could be beneficial to them. It’s very well explained in this McKinsey post, titled  “the second economy“.

If the “first” economy, the one we know and see in our everyday lives, works according to well known logics and rules for what’s about people’s contribution to value creation and and what they get from it (even if the balance of the system is more and more questioned), there’s no such thing for the second economy. It relies on the invisible, voluntary and often unsolicited work of lots of people, in either their personal or business lives. The problem is that it creates value and improves competitiveness for the visible economy while there is no remuneration model for participants who created value for others.

For instance, inside organizations, it’s about all the “over the flow” dynamics that are peculiar to enterprise 2.0 or social business. Participation into communities, open innovation, knowledge sharing to help others. Globally speaking, a whole part of the digital economy now relies on these invisible anonymous players (you and I….) : sharing, “like”, “+1″, communities, crowdsourcing are the most visible parts of the system. Who’s making the most of it ? Other anonymous, businesses…

Everything seems to be working fine so why should be talk about it ? First because it does not work that well, or nor as well as it should or could. Second because it may stop working and collapse if no one pays attention to the players of this second economy, their contribution to a system that does not pays off for them.

Of course, we can say that, in this system, people’s motivations are of a new kind. The pleasure of giving and learning. Recognition. Reputation. That’s right. But it does not work on a very large scale, on a macro level, and even less in the current changing economic context.

As it’s written in the McKinsey post, the first economy creates less and less jobs and relies more and more on the second one that relies itself on voluntary activities that cost nothing. They day when both will be well articulated well reach the following situation : more and more value created on the one side with no repercussion for those who helped to create it on the other side. If contributors, in the meanwhile, lose their job, see their incomes decreasing, suffer from more pressure, there are chances they question the way the system works and stop participating.

Today, one of the major barrier to involving people in such dynamics in the workplace is that they don’t get anything from it (either qualitative or quantitative) or the fact managers have no interest in letting “their” resources contributing to other’s value. If we want intrapreneurs employees we’ll need to understand all the consequences of the system and reward people with more than just fine feelings (should I add lots of employees are  in the red at the end of the month). In the same way, the day when internauts will become mature enough to understand that by “liking” a page they contribute to marketing actions for free, they help Facebook making money, they even destroy some job…they’ll question the “value” of a “like” and claim their piece of the cake. They’ll remind that, in 2012, some said that this economy was generating lot of value but few jobs…and understand why.

In short, when value creation needs less and less formally identified people that bear fruits from it and more and more informal contributors that are not involved in any formal processes, it’s time to create the mechanisms that will balance the system if we don’t want it to collapse.

But things are not that gloomy. We “just” need to focus on how contribution to value creation and rewards works together in an economy that’s is becoming more and more intrapreneurship and value networks both inside and outside the enterprise. It raises the question of “personal business models” for people involved in the system. Making such models possible and define how they work, the balance between people and groups. Lots of challenges in the pipeline for HR…but not only : it’s more than an business issue, it’s a society one.

If no one pays attention to this, one day will come that in the version 2.0 of Maslow Pyramid, everyone is not at the top and that most of those who are asked to participate are not looking for self-fulfilment but meeting very basic needs. What is, today, a nice to have will become a way of living, so it will be able to pass remuneration issues over silence anymore.

NB : this second or background economy does not only connect people but also machines. The role of machine will increase as they become smarter, forcing people to become more relevant, find other ways to bring more added value if they don’t want to be pushed out of the system. To learn more about this point, please read Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. More to come soon on this blog.

Note : This post is mainly bases on my knowledge of the french system but there’s no doubt part of it also applies in many other countries. Those who’d like to know more, laugh or be scares may enjoy this article and all the links it provides.

Despite the fact a wide consensus exists on the need to reinvent the operation and management model, everybody knows it’s far from being easy. In such approaches, people are the slow factor. Their reluctance to change is often mentioned as the main cause but that’s only the visible part of the iceberg. Most of the change process is about unlearning, forgetting wrong reflexes and habits. That’s true for people who’ve been in the workforce for decades but also for the younger. The reason is well known : the “human software” is being programmed from the early years and habits learned young get so deeply rooted that it’s hard to change them afterwards. Contrary, with time, it’s getting harder to acquire new behaviors, most of all when they are the opposite of what has become a part of our unconscious.

In 2006 I wrote on the bad habits we were taught at school, explaining why the damage was already done before people enter the workfoce. Unfortunately, I have not seen any kind of improvement coming and the few smart initiatives are too isolated while we need a critical mass of people sharing the same mindset.

Let’s review some key points.

• Collaboration

I won’t repeat what I wrote in the above mentioned post. But if people are taught young that “one only learns alone”, “knowledge and ideas have to be kept for oneself”, “others should not know what one thinks or does”, it’s easy to understand how they’ll behave once adult. Ok, when we become older, group work is sometimes required by professors. But it’s too late. Rather than thinking together, share and elaborate a common vision, we only divide tasks up according to what each one is better at and the result of the all the individual work is gathered and stacked up instead of being melt. The final result is the sum of all individual skills, never more, what is not what collaboration is about. Of, course, groups form depending on people’s level…a group of good pupils or students will never allow a less talented one to be burden.

• Learning and understanding

In a knwoledge economy, learning, knowing for the sake of knowing is not enough. We need to understand things, make knowledge ours, be able to understand the context to reuse things later, adapt them. That needs exchanges, explainations, discussions, what are the opposite of our model. Of course, writing pages and pages during classes (most of time, nothing more that what’s in the books) may help to learn. But not to understand. Conversations ? Professors know, pupils listen. And the first is infallible so the second should not ask any question implying a answer like “I’m not sure” or “I need to check”.

In the same way, people able to understand the complexity of our world should not be focused on one only discipline, they need of broader understanding of things and their context. Understanding the world, finding relevant models by learning from the past without making the same mistakes needs some historical, economic, geopolitics backgroup…even for future scientists or people willing to spend their lives working with numbers. Our model makes the young starts specializing too young and overlook lots of matters that would help them understand the context around their major.

• Innovation

Innovation is key for the futur of enterprises…and their employee’s. Employees need to be more and more creative to perform jobs where they’ll spend most of their time solving problems. By the way this is an emerging trend : we can see more of more literary or human science minded people hired for jobs usually reserved to people graduated from a business or engineering schools. But when we see the room left for easy-learning matters in our system and the few attention they are given (being good at such matters is not “serious” and is seen as a waste of time), there are few chances things improve. Moreover, pupils get over specialized too young what causes obvious downsides : knowledge is already in silos and people specializing and different disciplines never have opportunity to interact the one with the other. Even if some business, engineering and art schools are beginning to partner it’s too few, too late. And university students are left aside.

• Mastering a digital world

It’s obvious that the new generations don’t need anything from the education system to perfectly master new technologies and their usage. Sure ? In their private life yes, at work no.

The system is happy to count the number of devices available per student. (In fact in “Grandes Ecoles” we have devices per student, elsewhere we have students per device). That’s not enough anymore and, mots of all, this is not relevant. What matters is how these tools are used for collaborative work in a connected context. It implies an adapted educational approach that takes this need into account. When ? In a centry…maybe. Finding, processing, sharing and improving information is at least as essential as writing and learning and the education factory still produces “lost in information” people.

That’s for the 18-25 yo people. But what’s about the younger ?

When we talk about new media at school that’s for two reasons : the danger of social networks and the risk of being given wrong information. So the kids needs to be protected against the first and be kept in an environment of “validated” information ony. What a pity. The world is what it is and the online world is only a consequence of the offline one with its risks and opportunities. Instead of being told (and forced…) to stay away from this dangerous world, pupils should be taught how to move in this word, understand the risks and make the best from opportunities. As for information, the young need to improve their judgement, verify, check, validate by themselves without taking anything for granted. But if the knowledgeable people who teach them see judgement as a risk for their own status….

• Managing one’s career

We live in a world where occupations appear and disappear very quickly. And when they survive they change so deeply over time that people need to continually adapt. So they should learn to permanently learn, detect the emerging trends, improve their skills by themselves, reinvent their job, surf of what emerges instead of sinking what’s about to disappear. They should learn to be very proactive and not to wait that a training falling from the skies (or from the HR offices) come to save their life.

But people are still learning a job rather than to manage a skills portfolio.

• Failing and improving

To innovate and improve one need to learn how to fail successfully. We’re fare frpm that. Grading systems are not designed to help improvement and when tests are handed back, more time is spent to criticize those who have bad marks than to congratulate those who have good ones. Good way to demotivate both. Generally speaking, it’s a system which only purpose is to punish those who make mistakes instead of rewarding those who do rigth and encourage the others. The only fact that getting the best mark (20/20) is nearly impossible because one should understand that, although it’s the goal, reaching it is impossible tells a lot. In the end, the ones thinks “I’m hopeless” and the others “let’s avoid the other”. The day when the performance of a group matters more that the performance of the best elements, they’re lost.

Since failure is final and unacceptable, the system does not raise people able to create tomorrow businesses or fix today’s they joi the workforce. And they behave with their colleagues the same way they did with their schoolmates or the professors did with them.

• Personal development

I already mentioned the subject above so there’s no need to elaborate that much. While, in many others countries, pupils tend to have extra-curricular and socializing activities, here the only thing they are supposed to do when not at school is…doing schoolwork. Even on weekends. Anything that looks too fun, too enjoyable is not supposed to have room. In fact, what is considered in many countries as an age of innocence is considered here as an age an ignorance. Guess what are the consequences on the whole system.

What about “personal development” ? Work first…you’ll think about this useless and time wasting things once you’re adult and have a job.

Of course, I focused on some downsides in purpose and there are things in the system that are more positive. But we need to understand that those who’ll work, run, manage and create enterprises does not become new people in one day once they leave the education system. So, since enterprises and even the society are looking for new values, talents and skills to reinvent part of our world, we should remind that they will only be able to rely on what our education factory is designed to produce.

I let you enjoy this old video. It’s essential that the young that leave the education system are able to make the most of this reality instead of crashing into it like in a wall.

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It would also be interesting to have a look at the skills that will be needed in 2020…knowing how long it takes to fix such a broken system.

The levers needed to build tomorrow’s society and enterprises will be behavioral. They imply an educational system that teaches new behaviors, new values, more openness… We’re already paying the high price of inaction.

He was telling me he heard something very challenging at a panel. Here’s what it was about :

“Are we sure that Yers are connected and networkers to this extent (and it also applies to the following generations) become they grew up in a digital world when internet was a common thing that determined thir behaviors ? Or is it a pernicious effect of a society that is risk averse ? When we were 8, 10, 15, we were able to meet our friends outside, go out for an afternoon or after the school without hearing anything from our parents except “be careful and don’t be late for diner”. Today, with all these kidnapping or paedophilia things, the young are confined at home par parents that are more anxious than ours were and see in Facebook, MSN etc.. the only means to escape from this lock up. They are not connected or networkers by nature but because it’s the only answer they find to face their lack of freedom of move and a world that is overcontrolled by their parents. So it’s the consequence of the reaction to an unfortunate external constraint due to safety reasons”.

Mark told me “I don’t know if this guy is right or wrong but it must make us wonder about some of our assumptions. When I look around me and compare with when I was young, it seems that he’s right”.

And the conversation went on…

- we are both interested in these media and use them a lot so it’s an evidence it’s possible to come to it in a “natural” way, regardless of any generation factor.

- if we have had internet, Facebook, MSN… when we were young and, at the same time, the opportunity to join our friends outside, what would have our choice been ? Obviously, we were quite sure than we would have prefered one hour “outside” with friends rather than one our in front of our computer.

So, even if now that we are 30 and something we use social networks a lot, even if we were interested a lot in computers when we were young, its not sure that we would have used the net as a socializing space if we had the opportunity to do so.

So let’s try to push the reasonning a little bit further. Many “over connected” people seldom have the same behaviros at work, that personal usages seldom bring professional ones and that people even don’t want it to happen.

One explaination could be that as social networking is seen as a way out to lack of freedom embodies by parental authority, it may be logical that it can’t happen under another kind of authority, the corporate one. In short, social networking would be a discharging practice that has to take place out of any kind of regulation or authority, should it be parental or coporate.

At the end it’s another side of the cultural side of social networking. Corporate culture, of course, but local culture too. Generally speaking, it makes us question the relationship between people and the enterprise in a given local and social context. Is the workplace a place for self development or a place for constraints and slavery ? Depending on the answer, could we deduct people appetition for enterprise social networking ?

Phew…. And you ? What do you think about it ?

When an enterprise is asked to invest energy, time, money, it’s legitimate to want to know what it will get in return. More precisely :

- if their will be any return

The answer is obvious : yes

- if this return will be a vague “better something”, nebulous and unseizable or if it will be measurable in a way or another, in a un unit that would not be too eccentric (money for instance…)

Here, my answer would be double. There are things that have a direct impact on opeations and thant can be measured and quantified. For instance the lenght of the innovation or sales cycle, the time saved by avoiding micro-coordination…

There are things that are not measurable by themselves but impact things that are. This is clearly demonstrated by Strategy Maps.The idea is to implement the mechanisms that will ensure that what’s invested to improve intangible will actually impact value creation. In brief, make sure that everything is conherent with the investments and that the way work is done is aligned with that in order investments are made profitable (it’s seldom said but businesses usually don’t suffer from a lack of talent or innovation…only a lack of coherence that impacts the whole value creation process, preventing processes to harness talents and innovation potential).

3°) If this return can be foreseeable in a mechanical and linear way.

Here, the answer is : no. In the other hand, between the exact prediction and the “we can’t predict so let’s five give up” I think there’s a long work to be done by searchers and specialists to be done. Without this work that will help to implement relevant measurement and predicition means, the risk is high to see managers piloting businesses with indicators that have nothing to do with the current reality, the way operations are done and the matter that is processed.

That said, there’s another side of the issue that should also be tackled. Basically, being sure that the investment will bring some benefits should be enough to start a project, regardless of the quantifiable predictability of the benefit. The latter matter when the point is not to choose between doing and not doing but arbitrate the choice between two possible investments. In this case it’s obvious that the chosen one will be the one with the highest return so both possibilities have to be comparable what implies being predictable.

Investments in enterprise 2.0 are not substitutable because they do not compete with anything aiming at achieving the same results using the same means (improve the way a service / product is delivered improving the way human and knowledge capital are used…). This is  not like choosing between two machine tools, computers or software.

So arbitration takes place between “enterprise 2.0″ and “something else”

If “something else” is, for instance, a marketing budget, it tells a lot about how the enterprise understands the way it should interact with its clients and its ecosystem.

If “anything else” is an investment fund, that means that the company chosed to make money on the financial markets instead of on customer satisfaction. This is an unconscious change of business that is sometimes disguised, which limits have been demonstrated in a recent past. That’s often the evidence of a lack of continuity in management and corporate culture that makes that, at a given moment, executives overlook the orginal mission statement of the company to focus on its consequences.

Notice that it does not only apply to enterprise 2.0…

Beyond the ROI question we can often see an arbitration issue that tells us many things about how a given enterprise understands its market, the economic and social context and decides to tackle them by taking shortcuts and desert its primary mission.

So it’s not surprising that companies that undertake radical changes often have visionnary top executives and / or a culture focused on service, clients and the human side of business. And it’s also obvious that the others need to work on a sensibilization program at the highest level if they don’t want  their aversion for the unknown to make them build their financial performance on risky fundations because they have the illusion of mastering it.

I’m still curious to know how “common people” react to this video.

One last thing. Luis draws the word “socialnomics” out the video. This words seems very relevant to describe the ecomic and societal context that is ours today. A meaningful replacement for the faded and meaningless “2.0″  ?

I let you read them before we dig a little.

Media&Internet How Teenagers Consume Media

At the beginning, digital divide was defined as inequality of access to digital tools. There were those who could access them and the others. It’s easy to understand the amount of opportunties for the early users who were able to gain abilities while the computer and, after, the web industry was growing up, while, on the other hand, the other had to catch up with these technologies years later. And some are still running to jump into the train.

Considering my generation for instance, I can see the difference bewteen those who had their first computer in 1985 when aged 10, discovered the web with a 56 ko modem in 1995 and followed this trend and those who had their first computer in 1997 and their first internet experience in 2000. The gap still remain today.

Anyway, at this time things were clear : there were those who could affort a computer (or those whom parents could) and the others. Among them, some see the interest, some didn’t. Then there were those who had cable or ADSL very early and those for whom this technology was not available in their city. Hence this divide.

Today, web 2.0 shows us the divide has a new nature. What means different means will be needed to fix it.

In 2009 I don’t think that, in our countries, affordability is an issue. Both computers and internet are affordable for most people. We can even do, with a phone, things we would not have expected years ago.

Applications are also more and more easy to use. Who once tried to explain to non tech-savvy people how to use a computer running on windows (or even MacOs), how to use Word, Excel, a mail client, or a photo or video application knows how hard it was.

Today eveyone can understand how to publish something on twitter, update a facebook profile, write on a blog. The rising of a generation of  “bloggin’ grandads” and the fact +50 yo people is a growing population on facebook is an evidence. I would not be surprised to learn one day that grandparents will, if not the iniatiators, at least the animators and active members of family social networks like HelloTipi which existence shows that usages transcend generations.

But the divide still remain. Tools are accessible, affordable, easy to use. What’s missing ? Usages and sense.

Everybody can publish something on twitter. But it you make a test with average people, how many of them will answer “ok…I understand how it works. But what for ? I can undersand how to do things…but I don’t know why I would”.

Years ago, everybody could see the interest of a word processor, of a spreadsheet, but found it hard to use it. Everybody can easily use new tools but can’t see why. Ok, milions of people are using them. But it’s still a very low number compared to the people who could use them.

Digital divide is more and more looking like a social divide beacause it’s about the ability and the will to get involved in social dynamics.

We can fear it can become, later, a social divide in the true sense of the word because it  could be a cause of exclusion for those who just can’t get those new social dynamics that are becoming more and more important for professional and businesses purposes.

Many reasons can be found to explain that : what remains of the technological barrier, age, but none of the them can explain everything alone. Not every “Y” are hyperconnected, some seniors are true social leaders. So there’s something very complex behind all that, something related to each one’s personality.

So the social divide depends on each one’s ability to adopt new usages. Less impressive that a divide caused by the unaffordability of technoogy, it may be much harder to overcome, even with new generations.

• growth is not and endless spiral. Especially if you want it to be strong.

• whoever creates value for onself while destroying value for the others will be impacted by the economical consequences of his behaviors one day or the orther.

• Companies are parts of an ecosystem (customers, suppliers, employess…). If a part of this ecosystem collapses, the company will soon follow because when value is destroyed at its periphery, it destroyes its own potential markets.

• Growing by developping new markets is healthier than using financial lever to balance the fact its current markets are finite.

• People, at the same time employees, clients, and member of the society, now want to fully play their part and judge corporate behaviors according to these lessons.

All this things are worth because management and work models will be impacted by these societal facts and, in the same way, being successful in this new context will imply new internal practices. This teaches us, once again, that the current crisis is not as economic as it may seem.

This can lead to predict the advent of business models of a new kind, close to Umair Haque’s smart Growth Manifesto d’Umair Haque. But many people wonder when it will happen and how it may look like. A first example is coming from France with “Danone Supporting Life”.

Just as I was talking with some people from Danone, I heard these words “triple win”. Knowing how hard it is for many businesses to make “simple wins” these days, I asked them what it meant. In the tradition of their corporate culture and Antoine Riboud’s vision, it’s about promoting projects that have tree positive impacts :

• On the company’s environment

• On employees

• On the company itself.

Some people may think it’s an unbearable schizophrenia, but, at the end, it’s only a matter of balance and tuning as Martin Faber said a few month ago. As a matter of fact it’s because businesses were trying to go too far in only one direction and focused on only one third of this “triple goal” that we came to the sitation describe in the first lines of this post : when businesses destroy value around them they compromise their ability to survive tomorrow.

Danone founds important to tool and support this kind of projects, what lead to the “Danone Supporting Life” program. You can find a concrete example of what such a project may look like here (in french). If you can understand even a few words in French, I advise you to have a look at this interview of Jean-Christophe Laugée, who leads the program and have a look at the blog Danone just launched about its initiatives in the field of sustainable develoment, wisely named “Les pieds sur Terre” “Feets on the ground”.

This gave me many ideas. What Danone considers being a “Sustainable Development” initative, seems to be much more to me. In the line of the “Smart Growth Manifesto” and considering internal and external practices have to be aligned, it seems to me that “Danone Supporting Life” is something that should be used to define a new management model, which can apply to many things, from people management to decision making. It would mean that every decision should take into account :

• The impact on the environment of the company, which impacts its future.

• The impact on immediate performance which impacts its ability to be successful today and its health

• The impact on People which are its main wealth

Someone says “sustainable management” ? Anywat, what we are experiencing today shows us what happens when these three variables are not considered jointly.

I would not wan to put “2.0 things” everywhere but, considering corporate culture and values “there’s something social in the air”. And, if we carry on with this approach, in order to see such initiaves proliferate and bear fruits, some of Hamel’s “Moonshots would make sense.

Angel Cabrera suggest we should reinvent the way managers are trained, what makes sense if we consider the very nature of these “triple wins”. If both businesses and B-schools try to go in the same direction, maybe we can get real results. And sooner than if we wait for governments to make things change.

- those who are looking for informations about someone find what’s needed to assess his skills, his ability to do hold a defined job.

- this person appears as the “right person” when recruiters are looking for a defined profile without having any name in mind.

This may also help freelances to find missions but let’s admit it’s more about an applicant to recruiter relationship.

Being one of those who think that a good recruitement is more about bringing together people and companies who really fit the one with the other instead of making a selection, I think that the other side of the relation has to be improved too : the one that helps applicants to have a better undertanding of the company. Recruitment is like waltz or rock n’roll : you’ll never dance very long if you don’t get the right partner.

The current crisis that makes  so many people look for any kind of job musn’t make us forget major issues that will happen in the future.

First, companies still need to hire. If the crisis causes adustments on fragile business lines and industries at the end of their lives, many businesses still need a minimym amount of new comers, specially newly graduated people because they still need this kind of people for specific jobs and overlooking an age group is an HR time bomn.

Second, because one day they’ll have to re-start hiring. And learn how to seduce people again. The whole in a world that won’t believe, more than ever, impersonal discourses and lack of transparence.

Last because many industries and companies are now loosing their appeal and that’s not when the labor market will improve that things will be better for them. It will just be the opposite.

It’s a traditional employer brand issue. I know. But we have to admit that very few companies really did something while the question of the employer brand vs. new candidate’s expectations and pratices born from the net has been discussed for years. So it’s really time to bring answers.

There’s also another global phenomenon that has to be taken into account : the employer brand is not as far as it used to be from theb global brand. The time when having four discourses, one for customers, one for candidates, one for shareholders and one for employees, is over. That means that the employer brand is more and more linked to the “business brand”. A bad product can impact attractiveness. Bad sales and marketing practices ? The employer brand suffers too. And when employees are not happy at work and say their employer is a “bad” one, it becomes harder to sell. The convergence between information chanels made possible by internet makes that it’s not possible anymore to deliver contradictory messages. People react at the same time as shareholders, customers, citizen, candidates… And it’s becoming more and more true as global responsability is becoming a stronger value in society.

The consequence ? As I was told last week by a friend of mine, companies will have to  spread uniformly their values, their identity through their product marketing, their employer marketing and their corporate marketing. The whole while have open and transparent discussions with their audience. What implies they have to do very hard work on themselves, then on the convergence and the socialization of the messages.

This will be one of the major issues for tomorrow’s companies, 2.0 or not. In my opinion it will force corporate functions that have not been used to working together to collaborate and co-build a common message and set of behaviors.

Good luck.

corporate branding, marketing, marque-employeur, personal branding, Recrutement, Ressources Humaines,marque