Larger than Life

The larger a company grows the more distant it becomes. I think this reality has driven much of the activity behind Digital Transformation efforts, defined as creating greater efficiency and increased customer intimacy through technology… or simply what a small company/start-up naturally does. I’ve written much about the tearing of an internal organization’s social fabric when leadership isn’t mindful of the important human elements of work as they scale their operations. The once close-knit workforce, with little time for pomp, and less respect for protocol loses its openness, agility, trust, responsiveness as hierarchy, politics and procedure replace humanity with efficiency. Unfortunately, these new beliefs and practices leak outside the organization and into the customer-facing business activities. Gone is the true relationship with customers and the sincerity in the actions with them. Not to be naive because of course customers were always the important revenue source. However, conversations with them to engage them for the long-term with two-way influence has shifted to being about getting as many customers in the funnel as quickly as possible.

Once the people who had pizza meetings into the wee hours and met regularly with teammates and clients are now executives wearing 3 title labels on their public profiles and having paid staff post-self-serving articles on their behalf on social networks - with no intention to converse publically. These companies have lost the point of Digital Transformation.

Technology was to create efficiency so they had more time to do the more human work of problem-solving and creativity, to be the all-important real person the system was working out of them.

Technology was to create new, larger spaces to have open conversations inside and out in efforts to maintain the all-important relationships that fueled employee and customer engagement.

Digital Transformation was simply to get small again but unfortunately, it appears instead to have made companies behave in a way that seems more exaggerated or important than usual.

James Tyer and I are writing Social By Design to help companies stay small to grow successful.