The Blog

  • March 20, 2013
  • Two Steps Back: The Social Revolution

    We have this idea of modern computing that is closely tied to social media and rightly so.  Social media is a kind of glue that ties us together in new and bigger configurations than our own human capabilities can.  But it is also the unspoken issue in the Yahoo brouhaha over working from home; the idea whose name shall not be spoken.  How else to explain the ultra retro edict — anachronism, really — that all Yahoos must report to the brick and mortar in person rather than “telecommute” another anachronism implying the possibility of only a simply bi-directional interface between the individual and the mother ship?  Bi-directional?  How quaint.

    Why is the whole discussion about, and pardon me here, another anachronism that jumps right out of an episode of “Mad Men”, the “water cooler” conversations that pit people face to face sharing information?  The pundits and press revel in the Yahoo situation and the “need” to have people report to the job to share their precious ideas.  Have they never understood social media?  We must presume that the denizens of one of the great pioneering companies of Silicon Valley have a passing notion of what social is all about, which makes this situation all the more perplexing.

    But have they not heard of the Dunbar Number? The maximal number of people that each of us has brain power and time to interact with on something like a serious basis?  That number is somewhere between 150 and 220 relationships and it is the basis, derived through trial and error, of human associations from army companies to medieval monasteries.  After that?  Forgetaboutit.

    Actually, after that, is what social media was made for.

    It is eye opening and somewhat disheartening that the press and punditry have saluted Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer’s, old school idea and edict and one cannot help but wonder how far it sets back the social enterprise.  On one hand it says, yes we are a leading edge Internet company, but no, no, no, even we won’t eat that dog food.

    James Surowiecki of New Yorker fame and author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” makes the point in this week’s edition, that the Yahoo campus is a ghost town on Fridays and that the company has a need to bring its fraying threads back together.  Fair enough.  That there is need for greater collaboration at Yahoo is no surprise.  Quick, name the most recent Yahoo innovation!  Time’s up.  I can’t either.  But saying that all or even most errors will be corrected, no check that, saying that anything will be made better, from the olly, olly oxen free of touching home base is to confuse cause for effect.  It is also to turn one’s back on the progress that’s been made in social collaboration software in the last decade.

    The best we can hope for from this Dracon-ization (not to be confused with polyester-ization) is that there was a transparently obvious method to the madness lurking all along.  That after a period of pain and shakeout — and downsizing — some workers might again be allowed to work free of the campus tethered by nothing more than a wireless Internet umbilicus through which they can collaborate and share ideas via modern collaboration technology.  Or not.  It is doubtful in the short run that the collaboration gains accrued from face time will outnumber the resentment, RVs and resumes building up in the San Jose corridor.

    And what about the future?  There will surely come a day when daily commuting, already burdensome because you simply can’t afford to build roads wide enough to accommodate rush hour, will become prohibitively expensive from fuel prices.  Then the social commuting productivity techniques and business models that could have been learned from an intensive effort at righting the S.S Yahoo will be revealed by their absence as another missed Yahoo opportunity.

    In lieu of that it would make great theater for a company like Salesforce.com or Microsoft’s Yammer or any of a dozen other collaboration vendors to take Yahoo under its wing and do a makeover a la “Restaurant Impossible”.  Yahoo is, at this point, “deliciously low” as Professor Higgins might say.   A corporate Eliza Doolittle waiting to be discovered and taught only the rudiments of modern corporate communication before re-emerging from its doldrums changed for the better and ready to engage the world.

    A great opportunity is being wasted here and opportunity, more than anything else, is a terrible thing to waste.

    Published: 11 years ago


    Discussion

    • March 20th, 2013 at 7:56 am    

      Dennis, my first reaction was like yours but I think there are a few other mitigating circumstances here. Most importantly, it’s one thing if people use the collaborative tools but the stories being released seem to indicate that the VPN logs showed a very different story. Yahoo was a broken place and if it costs them some people and scares off some recruits, well, Yahoo wasn’t going to be able to capitalize on those people. I blogged about the comment an acquaintance made with reference to this situation, and so many more: “Good people in a bad system become bad people. Bad people in a good system become immediately evident.” http://doctordisruptive.com/2013/03/19/pardon-my-disruption-march-2013/ Only by fixing the system does Mayer have a chance of righting the Yahoo ship…and eating the dog food.

      • March 22nd, 2013 at 11:32 am    

        Agree, but you don’t fix the problem by going old school with everyone. The point of the social revolution is to be able to get down to the individual. The problem for Yahoo is that they don’t have the social infrastructure to do this. The work at home issue is an opportunity to build the social infrastructure that the company needs to solve business problems that many companies have. Going old school doesn’t solve the problem and delays the needed evolution. At the end Marisa will have only cut costs and payroll without evolving the company. The crisis is an opportunity going wasted.

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