I had an amazing day at the Dachis Social Business Summit. I have so much to write about it might take me a few weeks to catch up. Especially after surprise guest John Hagel presented. That was the most insightful 15 minutes I’ve heard in a long time.
I’ve been thinking out loud on this blog about what the future of the marketing org will look like inside companies.This has lead me to wonder about the total reconstruction of corporate organization. I’ve researched a lot of different models but there is one area I never looked to: The Middle Ages.
Douglas Rushkoff, who I wasn’t familiar with but if I was a normal PR/Marketing person I probably would have been, as he is an award winning writer, documentary film maker, media critic and accomplished author. He recently published a new book called Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Amazon Link) which we got for free at the summit (see disclosures at the bottom of the post for full FTC disclosure).
Doug, Dachis’ own Lee Bryant and several others referenced the pre-twentieth century corporate driven economies of Western Europe. While this may sound like heresy to many of us American capitalists their point was that we are moving back to a relationship driven economy. One common theme was that we have entered a time where relationships matter. The network is no longer roads or servers, the network is us and we are people who connect with people.
Our current business climate functions the way it does because in order to achieve scale we have to give up intimacy. The twentieth century belief was that you couldn’t have both. The Internet, in theory, gave us both scale and intimacy but social media has fully delivered on that promise.
What was surprisingly absent from the summit was talk of technology. There was some, but just used mostly as examples not recommendations or even suggestions. The general agreement was that our current technology will look nothing like our future technology, but more important than that was that the technology, while enabling, doesn’t matter. Our current processes, value propositions and especially the way we communicate is about to devolve back to the Middle Ages.
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Photo credit via kennymatic
FTC Disclosure Icons via Louis Gray
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