The Internet is an interactive medium that many companies are forgetting. The advent of the Internet has accelerated the pace of work, fostered collaboration, and fostered the development of partnerships. People are facing new ways of working and leading. How can companies achieve the best results?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is an authority on organizational change who has advised companies and government organizations on organizational reform and other issues. In the interview below, she advises managers to reassess their attitudes toward the Internet. She also talks about how successful companies are seizing new opportunities.
Most importantly, Kanter explains why the Internet is not really about e-commerce, but about changing the way you work and how you communicate with your customers.
A lot of people are talking about the rise of e-business and e-commerce, but you are emphasizing a new idea: "electronic culture", can you explain to us why?
I call it e-culture because I have a deep interest in culture, people, organizations, and not just on a technical level. E-commerce is just a small manifestation of the Internet, and it is another form of mail-order activity via the Internet. This is not a qualitative shift at all.
What's really changed is the way people communicate with each other in organizations and the global networks that weave us together. Transparency on the Internet is also key - the fact that information can travel everywhere so quickly is amazing.
It's an interactive medium that people at many companies are forgetting about. We can send messages, we can put products online, which means others can send their responses, feedback, and requests as well.
Direct access is everywhere, a shift even for companies and nonprofits that never send anything online. They had to operate as if they were putting on a show before a huge, invisible audience scattered all over the world.
We had to work faster and more collaboratively. We have to work more rigorously on the big and the small to change the heavy bureaucracy that has been shown in the past.
It's a new culture, a new way of working. There is money to be made in this new way of working, but whether this is just a business experience is a profound question.
You have worked with many companies of all sizes and types. What similarities do you see in the new cultures that these companies have built since the advent of the Internet?
The similarities between successful businesses, regardless of their size and country of origin, are striking in that they incorporate technology into their business ideas and are creating value for their customers.
They operate more like offline communities to help build online communities. This online community is a customer community, such as eBay's user community; or an employee community, where employees can share best practices around the world -- which is what many companies are currently trying to do.
Successful companies are beginning to bridge geographic, divisional, functional, and national distinctions in an effort to create some level of membership within the company. I've seen this in small companies, and I've seen it in big companies like Cisco. It's a darling of the tech world, and it's operating on a "One Cisco" model.
Second, successful companies are more web-oriented. They make partners part of their community, doing a lot of collaborative work with the entire network of partners, not just a single partner, but all partners as a network leading to a common goal.
There are a lot of traditional company managers who say, "We also have partners, we also have networks, so we've done that." But you'll find that there's an essential difference between them, and that's what's important to the network. A change in the concept of understanding with partners.
What is the true value of the Internet? How will it affect the organization's behavior?
The Internet has made it even more necessary for partners to work closely together and use the Internet itself to create a seamless exchange platform. After all, your customers don't care how the ideas came about, all they care about is the product they get.
The people responsible for partnering and networking are becoming increasingly important, and ten years ago they didn't even exist in most companies. This is a very new role that requires extraordinary diplomacy. The type of people who act as ambassadors for my company, I call them "collaborators". Like astronauts exploring outer space, collaborators are explorers of cyberspace, explorers who create new opportunities for links and relationships, and explorers who generate new opportunities through collaboration.
To provide value to customers, technology companies have to build what I call a "space station" for the Internet age, like IBM, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, to provide a platform for everyone else who uses technology . And it's a complex relationship that needs to be crafted, and the companies themselves are collaborating more closely.
The relationship goes beyond the collaboration between Walmart and P&G as a supplier, it's about co-planning, co-developing technology, an exchange in the everyday sense.
Can you give us some examples of companies rushing to apply the Internet to their business and making some real mistakes?
By the way, I write in my book that there may only be three types of companies in the Internet age: ".com" companies, ".com" companies, and "want-to-be.com" companies company of. This is just a joke, because many pure ".com" companies, Internet companies that simply run online commerce, are dead.
And the companies that "enable .com" themselves are companies that provide information technology and services, and they have become the largest e-commerce companies in the world. "Want to be a .com" refers to all other organizations, be it hospitals, schools, or corporations, that are trying to introduce information technology to its advantage. For them, there may be a transition problem.
There must be someone to steer the transition, guide the transition, and monitor the actions that go into the transition. It is not good enough to say that transformation is everyone's responsibility. There must be a process to drive change. Using existing, well-known methods for dealing with unfamiliar things helps people stay focused on the task they are doing, rather than figuring out how to use a new method without even thinking about it how to achieve the goal.
What can companies do to avoid the internet and ultimately make a successful transition?
There are many classic ways to make a successful transition. You can overcome any transition difficulties, for example, you can hand over a project to a group of amateurs who work part-time and form a committee. It doesn't require managing time and resources, and you don't need to bring in new talent. This works well for hospitals, government agencies, public schools, universities, and more. When you start a new project, you need to organize a dedicated group to work on it, understand the project, and take responsibility for it.
Then there will be some resistance, some from the way the company or institution is organized, which may be spread across geographically dispersed, each controlling their own territory, taking care of their own profits and losses, and managing their own departments. New ideas, whether they include the Internet or anything else, don't hit a company out of the blue according to established patterns. New ideas require shortcuts and unprecedented collaboration.
For example, Arrow Electronics, one of the world's largest wholesalers of electronic products, established Arrow.com to sell its own electronic equipment on the Internet. Arrow.com decided to separate itself from the rest of Arrow and was spun off from the company. Although it needs some independence and autonomy to get started, the problem is that Arrow's customer is likely to one day need to use the Internet, and then need to be served by its sales representative, and need to know if he or she belongs to the same system within the same company . So being too independent is a real misunderstanding.
As companies take the time to adapt to the Internet, they will naturally encounter obstacles, both technical and human. How can companies overcome these obstacles and facilitate their own transformation?
The story of kitchen supplies supplier and retailer Williams-Sonoma illustrates how companies can overcome these obstacles even though they are late to the Internet. It took the company several years to realize the importance of e-commerce, despite its extensive experience in direct selling.
Williams-Sonoma is an excellent example of a tortuous path from initial rejection of the Internet to first-round success with the Internet. Through two unplanned pilot projects, the company's CEO went from initial skeptic to supporter.
So the first lesson for us is this: When in doubt, start with small experiments. Pick an experiment that represents success but does not require significant reform, and choose an experiment that demonstrates the merits of the reform. Don't bet the entire company and don't waste time. Take action, simple and fast, to change initial doubts with concrete and positive action.
The second lesson: new adventure projects require dedicated groups, space and autonomy. Project teams also need to be responsive to business realities. At the same time they need sponsors within the wider organization to support them, because a lot of the work they do can go wrong.
A third lesson: recognize that e-commerce requires many systemic changes in the way we work. Connect new cyber risks to the company's mainstream business. That's where the synergy is, but it's where the barriers are. Without good relationships, without diplomats able to move through the various parts of the agency, this obstacle will never be overcome.
A company doesn't change just because it builds a website. Success requires a more comprehensive innovation, a rethinking of the way an entire organization is organized and how it works, a comprehensive challenge of assumptions about customers, internal and external communication, decision-making, operations, management behavior, employee motivation and retention—and then Identify a new method. Fundamentally, it's not a technical problem, it's a human problem.
One of the challenges companies face is finding and retaining the best talent. Traditionally, employee loyalty seems to be on the decline, so how do you rise to the challenge?
In the information age, talent has become an even more decisive asset. This is ironic, but true. We had to brush up on some old lessons and relearn how to build loyalty and commitment at work, but the approach was completely new.
Building commitment in the internet age requires following the "3Ms" because people are no longer loyal to life.
The first M is Mastery, which means mastery. Give talent the latest job, the best tools, and a sense that they can succeed. Help them learn and they'll want to stay with your company. Building long-term commitment depends on the nature of the work itself, opportunities for growth and development, opportunities to speak up and be heard, and that feeling of being different. The new generation in the workforce is reluctant to become vassals, and they are more than willing to take control of their own destiny.
The second M is Membership, the member. Make people feel like they are an integral part of the group, not "cogs in the wheel". Respect their individuality, pay attention to their needs, and help them bond with each other if they have a family that includes work flexibility.
The third M is Meaning, meaning. People want to do meaningful work that they feel has a purpose. The existence of the company itself should be meaningful, and the contribution of the company to the world around it should be meaningful.
What are your best words for leadership change?
In this networked information age, we must constantly challenge our assumptions while accepting new information.
Leaders must be excellent communicators, not just online, but in person. One of the things that stood out to me about Cisco CEO John Chambers was that he woke up earlier than the rest of the company, gave impromptu speeches, and asked executives to do the same. Cisco may be the company with the most extensive use of networking technology, but it still emphasizes face-to-face leadership and communication skills. The most important personal characteristics a leader can bring to any reform effort are tact, persuasion, enthusiasm, and trust in the eyes of others.
It is also important to build coalitions and leadership in groups, find your supporters, bring supporters to the forefront of reform, and then gradually use them to help develop others' awareness of the importance of reform .
Originally adapted from HBS Working Knowledge (http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu) "Evolving for Success" with permission. Copyright 2001 by Harvard Business School Press. Translated by Zhai Shu.
