Mgmt 101

Now that my time in college is coming to an end I am beginning to look back on all the different directions that my education has taken over the last five years. After the chaos of choosing a school and not having a direction in mind as to what my major would be I think I have told my friends that I was majoring in every department at one point or another. For some time during my sophomore year I thought I was going to be a management student and took a number of classes in that department. Now after finishing Groundswell by Chalene Li and Josh Bernoff I don't know if management 101 will be as beneficial and timeless in the information it provided as i thought it would be.

In the final few chapters of Groundswell they discuss more of the company specifics and the future of groundswell; one theme that jumped out to me and seemed very significant was the change in management style that social technologies require. The book outlines six dimensions to see how an organization is changing due to the obstacles that they face and one of those is culture. Li and Bernoff say, "How much progress has the organization made on the cultural changes - from top-down to bottom-up - that social applications require" (257). Change in organizational structure is crucial for social media tools to effectively take hold in an organization.

Li and Bernoff give examples of how companies such as Best Buy, Razorfish, Bell Canada, and Home Depot (as a few) effectively implemented some sort of social media within their organization. They outline the crucial role that the top executives played in the creation and acceptance of the social media. While these organizations created their internal social media effectively "highly conservative top-down cultures and heavily regulated industries that fear moving forward" are much quieter in the realm of social media (260).

While my management 101 class seems to be out of date as organizations are forced to be flat and transparent and that is no longer as much of a decision for management, I am now curious how this will continue because of some of my classes that I have taken in the past year. Having taken a number of courses on intercultural dimensions and how different cultures relate to one another, I have learned that power dynamics are very important. Geert Hofsted developed six dimensions to define a culture, one of which was power distance. He defined that as the extent to which a culture accepts or rejects power and a hierarchical system. I am curios as to how the groundswell will change cultures in which strong leadership and authority is expected and accepted. All this brings me back to what Li and Bernoff showed at the beginning of the book:

We will see how these different countries with different participation accept the change in leadership that comes with social media and how they shape it to fit their culture.