There was much excitement when I saw that much talked about presentation that somehow seemed connected to Google Me and Google’s approach to social. But the sounds made recently by Darth Scmidt don’t really give cause for delight.
While it doesn’t make sense to talk ill of something even before launch, the ‘social layer’ does sound underwhelming. It doesn’t help that Mark Zuck recently hinted that ‘social is not a layer you can add’. ( What is interesting though is he also said in the interview “We’re trying to build a social layer for everything”) He should know about what works in ‘social’, because whether you love or hate Facebook, it is definitely a creation (and creator) that demands respect, on various parameters.
Somewhere towards the end of his post titled ‘The Forever Recession‘, Seth Godin, while talking of the ‘recession of an industrial age with its imperfect market communication’ paraphrases Clay Shirky and states that ‘every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing’.
I thought about this statement in the context of Google and Facebook, and also remembered an earlier post at GigaOm which showed the difference between the way Facebook and Google work. And that prompted me to wonder whether every age has a unique organisational and workforce culture that best fits it, and the entity that grasps it, succeeds.
This is not just a Google-Facebook question, but one that I’d consider across domains and categories. The leader in an earlier era would try to capture that culture mojo and would most likely fail because it tries to add to what it has been doing so far, where a start from scratch is what is warranted. The interesting part is also that the time between ‘revolutions’ seems to be consistently decreasing, so how do brands and organisations carry their success across?
until next time, a revulsion for revolutions?
One thought on “Culture Bridges”