The Collaborative Age organization will be open to the outside (see a previous blog post: the organization needs to open itself).
Likewise their social network systems need to open to the outside. That’s even less straightforward.
I was just reading Tony Hsieh’s book on Zappos (‘delivering happiness’) and what struck me is how they leveraged a spirit of collaboration with the outside world through their systems to become successful. Indeed they work with their suppliers in a spirit of collaboration and give them access to sales data which would have been the graal of confidential information in Industrial Age organizations. And it works to leverage the commitment and support of the external world. It becomes aligned with the purpose of the organization.
Likewise a great parameter of Amazon’s renewed success is the openness of their website to the comments of readers and authors.
By opening its systems to the world the organization leverages on the world’s creativity, and avoids creating internal duplicates which are much less deep and responsive.
We don’t know what’s the recipe for opening the right way, at the right time. But experiments like Zappos seems to show that openness should not be feared, as long as the spirit of collaboration is there.
So, when do you open your internal social network to the world?
