South African Business Culture and The New Consumer

As a growing awareness spreads through the boardrooms of South African companies that the internet is not only coming, it's already been here a while and it's changed fundamentally the way customers (and employees) think and behave, a ripple of alarm goes out: are we able to survive, even thrive? Or are we corporate Titanics, hurtling full-speed into the pack-ice while the officers waltz blissfully in the ballroom?

And when the realisation finally sinks in that not only their structures and processes but also their corporate cultures are handicapping attempts to adapt to the new digital age, there's inevitably a demand for more and more training.

I have done a lot of what passes for culture change work in my life, and it still irks me when someone asks me to help them develop a training programme that will change the organisational culture of one group or another. It's not that senior managers don't understand that there is much more to engendering such a change than simply training people, it's that they don't want to be bothered with anything more complicated. And they certainly don't want to be in the awkward position of having to acknowledge that they themselves may be a large part of whatever problem it is they have defined.

You can’t change an organisational culture simply by “training” one person at a time (unless of course you start at the shareholders and the CEO and work downwards, but that’s another story). Bottom-up culture-shifts cannot be induced by senior management -- they usually only happen as uncontrolled revolutions initiated by employees themselves. That happens more often these days of course, with the disruptive hierarchy-oblivious culture of digital natives bubbling up into the lower levels of organisations and challenging legacy processes that were installed way before the web-born collaborative age. But the culture of openness and sharing which the web has fostered is, unfortunately, rarely the kind of culture-shift that upper management would like to induce.

Training is not futile -- far from it -- but in order to get the intended culture-shift momentum going training has to be concentrated in time and enterprise-wide in scope. And it needs to have a shifting-culture context already in place if the training is going to take root and grow. Anyone in the corporate learning field knows that training is typically only one component of any performance improvement initiative, just as culture change is but one component.

Organisations waste vast amounts of time and money looking to one-dimensional strategies to solve multi-dimensional problems. There are natural reasons for this: the silo mentality makes it hard for any one decision-maker to influence more than one area; we habitualy measure and reward low-level tactical activities rather than high-level strategic impacts.

The e-business culture shift problem has more dimensions to it than most senior managers are comfortable getting their heads around. Up-skilling is but one of those dimensions: you have to get all of your employees, from top to bottom, to understand the essential technology and process issues, as well as what it means to be an e-business.

But there are so many other dimensions, macro and micro: customers are more discerning, better informed, less tolerant, and a lot less loyal; the media for communicating marketing and PR messages are mutating; competitors are now global, often appearing overnight so you never see them coming; the pace of transaction processes has to accelerate up to real-time, having knock-on effects on systems and the employees and suppliers who use them; corporate strategy-setting processes may be inadequate to deal with the flexibility the rapid disruptive market changes demand; and the impact of all of this is felt through production, logistics, legal, HR, and finance departments.

The primary reason why businesses fail to become e-businesses is management resistance to change; which is also the primary reason why businesses fail, period. So getting a change of culture in place, fostering a culture that embraces change, is vital. But it is typically upper management where that culture change is most needed.

Despite the quaint notion of dynamic leaders at the helm boldly charting new courses, in my experience senior managers don't change unless they become aware of a compelling need to do so. Perhaps this is the point at which a little training might go a long way. When senior people come face to face with just how far adrift of current realities their own norms have become, it's interesting to see who bolts for the lifeboats, who goes back to the ballroom, and who heads for the bridge.

R U really POTY?

I am in two minds about Time magazine's decision to make "you" its Person of the Year. On the one hand I am delighted that a traditional magazine is trumpeting the arrival (nay, overnight dominance) of media based on consumer-generated content, and is acknowledging that so-called prosumers are an important factor in the economy and society. And it's a great ploy to get free publicity. Cuteness sells. Bravo.

On the other hand, it's a cop-out, and an inaccurate one at that. The whole point of POTY was to explore the impact that a specific individual has had on the world over the past twelve months, typically the person who had hogged the media most. And while the award in the past tended to go to someone deserving of role-model status, Time has sometimes acknowledged that bad guys also have huge global impacts.

But to declare that "you" are the person of the year is stretching a point. Firstly, the whole notion is falsely based on the idea that all Time's readers are internet users, and that they also post content online. Er, OK, perhaps Time has readership studies to back up that one, but I doubt it -- the thrust of the editorial is that we all are persons of the year, whether we read Time or not, because we all contribute to online content and communities.

In a typically American moment of self-referential stereotyping, Time manages to disrespect the majority of the world's population. True, YouTube and other forms of social media are wickedly popular in America, as they are in the Far East, but they are unlikely to find a place in the world's history books. There's a presumption that prosumption is impacting the world more significantly than, say, medical research, genetic engineering, religion or politics.

Well maybe it is, if your world is the world of traditional media. In the past couple of years the single biggest agent of change in the publishing industry has been citizen journalism, mainly in the form of blogging and photo/video posting. Bloggers with no editorial oversight or journalistic training have sucked away big audiences from career journalists, forcing traditional media to launch their own blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds, and causing celebrity hacks to work a great deal harder. I recall haranguing MSNBC's Chris Matthews during the US presidential elections two years ago because though he had actually started blogging he did not have an RSS feed. Today, TV journalists plug their blogs on air like they used to plug their books, and seem to be as interested in their Technorati rankings as they are in their Nielsen ratings.

The impacts of prosumption are also being felt in the movie, music, and stock photo businesses, all of which are having to rethink their business models. And of course marketing and PR, never at the forefront of innovation, have started trying to figure out how best to reinvent themselves to exploit changing consumer data-acquisition behaviours.

Will the ripple effects wash over all of us in one way or another, whether we are active social computing users in a G5 nation or not? They probably will, because you can't tweak information flows without also tweaking corporate or organisational cultures. An online customer is an informed customer; a networked online customer is an empowered customer; and an empowered customer cannot be abused by vendors. Large organisations are unable to fragment themselves to provide one level of service to the sophisticated user of technology and a completely different level of service to all others. And since the sophisticated user of technology probably has more spending power than other customers, businesses have to change in order to earn and keep their loyalty. Everybody benefits.

So maybe the career journalists at Time are on to something after all. We unschooled bloggers had better watch our backs.