Your Friends Are Not A Network 1

On September 7, 2011, in Five Scenarios, Futures, HR Trends, HRExaminer, by John Sumser

Your friends are not a network part 1
Last week, I went to the Dreamforce conference. It’s Salesforce.com’s annual gathering of the clan. It’s a convention of people who sell stuff to sales people and the sales people who buy that stuff.

I went hoping I wouldn’t be beaten to death with motivational posters and welbutrin laced energy drinks.

The place was a madhouse, rich in testosterone and adrenaline. Real booth babes in real booth babe outfits. Three men for every woman. Reptilian vibes. And vendors. Hundreds of vendors. Metallica in the late night street party.

Really, angry hard metal for the contemporary salesguy. And suits. More suits than you usually see in San Francisco.

LinkedIn was there selling business intelligence. Not too many folks from our neck of the woods. I only saw Jason Corsello and Sean Rehder. They were both hunting for innovation that could be applied in our market.

It was intense and the opposite of most HR conferences.

My personal epiphany came as I was browsing the Dreamforce Bookstore.

Along with Logo-ed Salesforce.com goodies. There were about 75 different management best sellers in great big stacks. Books about networks, lots of them. Books about using social media. Even more. Books about measurement and analytics. Tons.

Everything was available in a Dummies edition. Everything.

What I realized is that everyone has begun to sound the same. Our contemporary paradigm is nearly set in concrete. It goes something like:

“Social networks, based on  social media, are the path to the future. Everyone you know is only six degrees of separation from everyone else. This is ushering in a new era of flat organizations, greater informality, deep flexibility and customized personal experience. We are at the edge of an astonishing epoch because networks and collaboration are the key to an explosion of creativity and a thunderstorm of patents following the death of the PC and the rise of mobile tools. We will crowd source the economy with location based gamification”

That’s what they all said.

That view of the world has become so conventional that it has to be wrong. It is so pervasive that it has to be about ready to change.

Arthur C. Clarke is credited with  the futurists paradox: “Any likely future sounds so unlikely that the forecast will be ridiculed. Any future that sounds right is inevitably far from the truth.”

There, at Dreamforce, I realized that we’re on the verge of a future that is nothing like our view of it. The networked view has run its course.

Keep your eyes on this space. We’re wrapping up our first ever comprehensive analysis of social media in the HR and Recruiting sectors. The report will be available for sale on the 15th of October.

About the author

John Sumser

John Sumser is the founder, principal author and editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer Online Magazine. John explores the people, technology, ideas and careers of senior leaders in Human Resources and Human Capital. John is the also principal of Two Color Hat where he routinely advises Human Resources, Recruiting Departments and Talent Management teams with product analysis, market segmentation, positioning, strategy and branding guidance.

Visit Authors Website

If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!

 
  • http://twitter.com/garelaos Gareth Jones

    Good point John, nice post.  The socially networked landscape is still in its infancy, still a blank canvas, raw and relatively untapped or shaped in real terms.  In fact, everything we see before us right now represents merely the maturing of the internet and not, as seems commonly proposed, the result of the social phenomenon. When the internet first smacked us in the face we couldn’t have predicted where we would be today.  Some tried of course.  But it took 10 years before even the most basic of the tools we see today to emerge.

    So yes, we are on the verge of a future that will look nothing like our vision of it – when what is happening right now matures into something.  Give it another 10 years and we might just begin to see sight of it.

  • http://twitter.com/williamu william uranga

    Agreed.  Steve Jobs crowd sourced – um, nothing…

  • http://twitter.com/aaronlintz Aaron Lintz

    Wow, that sounds like a wretched place to be.   Your worst fears were confirmed about the darker side of sales even among the most tech savvy/innovative companies.  They are still using the old playbook by selling with fear and greed.  That message is tired and fails to reach the rest of us.

    Meanwhile, everyone is coming to grips with social media as a business tool.  It is an echo chamber of ideas being voiced by few then repeated by all.  As someone who hops between HR, Sales, and Marketing (sometimes in the same sentence) I feel it is all a matter of expectations.   Start by lowering yours, so the delta between the message and audience can shrink.

  • http://marcomhrsay.com/ Kevin W. Grossman

    More than we even realize, John. Much more.

  • Ken Hedberg

    Sounds about right – sort of the opposite of the wisdom of crowds.  John, are you getting a sense of what might be next?

  • http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

    I’m reasonably sure that the next thing contains generous amounts of regional and intimate. It will most certainly be a response to massive data overwhelm. My guess is that there will be a heightened value placed on personal responsibility and creation rather than consumption

    The buzzword/marketing shift happens every ten or twelve years. Another way of telling that it’s coming is that all of the cars begin to look the same.

  • http://www.strategic-hcm.com Jon Ingham

    I don’t think it’s wrong, but I agree it’s not fully right.  Even in IT circles there are big disagreements about what social networking’s about, what it’s for etc.  And 75 management books aren’t much – just think about all the HR ones that get published every year.  We’re going to have to read a lot more before we’ve cracked this nut.  You add non-technology stuff to this and we’re only just getting started.

  • http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

    I agree that we’re just beginning. My sense is that the current metaphors are really getting in the way of our ability to see things. Early automobiles were understood as horseless carriages and phones were understood as a method for transmitting music into the home. My take is that the current view is that far off. I’d be interested in understanding what you think are the right pieces, Jon.

    John Sumser
    HRExaminer
    415.683.0775
    My profiles: [image: Facebook] [image: LinkedIn] [image: Twitter]
    Contact me: [image: Google Talk] johnrsumser [image: Skype] john.sumser

  • http://www.eriss.com Barbara Nyegaard

    John, I cannot agree more about “massive data overwhelm” – and I’m in the data business. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling barraged with data and so-called “connectedness”. My sense is that this moment is SO much about “more”, consumption and data (relevant and irrelevant), and that anyone who can honestly say they have a handle on all this inflow and activity is, well, maybe,someone I’d like to meet and look in the eye. But, for me, all this ”noise”  is serving a purpose, i.e. prompting me to slow down, have more meaningful conversations with friends and customers, take the time to re-examine what is important in my life and my business, and appreciate the creativity that can come from some good ol’ quiet time.

  • Gerrycrispin

    Love the post…especially the one from one of my favorite authors- Arthur C. Clarke. 

    One of his lesser known novels, Imperial Earth, was written in 1975 in time for the 1976 bicentennial and posed an interesting viewpoint of some future centennial celebration w/o the advantage of the last 30 years. In it, every child, upon reaching puberty, was welcomed into the community of men and women by being given a small device the size of an…iPhone. The device symbolized that you were now plugged into the network and you could reach… or be reached by anyone in the universe but, it also represented a major change in your responsibility to use the device responsibly. 

    I think it is the unintended consequences of what we do today that will end up generating the greatest differences between what we imagine the world to be and what it truly becomes.

     I would suggest that almost all the focus of the current social network discussion is still on what we do to others…how we use the the tools to influence sales or hiring or ‘someone elses’ decisions as opposed to how decisions might be made if the consumer, prospect, etc. actually had easy access to all the information. If I could see individuals dying from smoking in real time, would I smoke? If I could actually see the actions of a manager I’m considering working for and see him berating, belittling or stealing credit from his employee, would I apply? What if I could correlate a politician’s actions to his statements and examine his source of income simply by asking for it, would I still vote for him or her? 

    How would true transparency change incentives for firms to do [relationship wise] what they only claim today? Not a world we are currently discussing. The dat though is beginning to be available and only missing someone organizing analytics for the individual rather than the firm. 

  • http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

    That’s really perceptive, Gerry. Transparency is rapidly becoming a two way street on which much of the future of human interaction will depend. As status becomes more measurable, all sorts of things are going to emerge.
    Figuring out how to manage privacy and what the way we manage our privacy says about us as individuals and organizations is going to be an interesting evolution.

  • Pingback: Your Friends Are Not A Network 5 | HR Examiner with John Sumser

  • Pingback: HRExaminer v2.35 | HR Examiner with John Sumser

  • http://www.ayeright.com/ Stephen O’Donnell

    I’d go further and say that the Social Network, as we know it, is a mannerly construct I.e. not real. As Woody Allen might say, it’s a travesty of a farce of two mockeries of a sham. That’s not to say it’s uninteresting or not useful. It’s just that so many people are making up their own dance steps, and telling us that’s how it should be done. We’ve gotten to the point where real live people are using SEO techniques with their own collection of friends, as if it were merely a network to leverage.

    What I’m keenly interested in is the Push-Back; how each person’s own social network makes them behave. You make think you are leading your “Followers”, whilst they are collectively driving your every move. I think maintaining an awareness of how we are all be pushed, pulled, manipulated and leveraged is really important, as is being OK with all of that. We are not only selling, we are being sold to.

Page 1 of 11
More in Five Scenarios, Futures, HR Trends, HRExaminer (437 of 888 articles)