Alumni Impact

Guest post by Mike Diliberto ‘09

Entrepreneurs are everywhere.  Today, an entrepreneur is just as likely to be found in a large, multi-national corporation as they are to be working out of a home office as a one-person company.  This is nothing new, as innovative solutions are often found by those that are closest to the problem.

The difference today is that these entrepreneurs are able to leverage new tools to help bring their solutions to life, and spread the word of their innovation across their company.

The emergence of technology that empowers these entrepreneurs has enabled even a solitary voice among thousands to not only be heard, but to affect change across entire organizations.  In the past, a worker in a large corporation was simply a cog in the machine, and had little opportunity to change the order of things at their own company.  With the rise of low cost web based and open source tools, today’s employee is empowered to push change through the ranks.

In their 2008 book Groundswell, Forrester researchers Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explore the impact of these social tools when used by internal employees as well as a customers.  In their study of an internal collaboration site launched at Best Buy, it was revealed that this ground-breaking employee social network was launched using open source tools, completely outside the purview of the Best Buy Information Technology department.

Years ago, employees would simply lament the time and energy that it would take to get something like this done; nowadays, it is far easier to launch a new initiative using freely available tools and then ask for forgiveness later.  The boundaries, real and social, that once prevented entrepreneurs from thriving within a large firm have now begun to recede.

In our personal lives, many of us have felt the touch of social technology.  Using sites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, we connect to our friends, family, and even like-minded strangers, perhaps united by a common bond of a hobby or favorite sports team.  We are slowly changing the social construct of human interaction in our personal lives, and inevitably these changes are making their way into the workplace.

Many of us have heard the stories of entrepreneurs that got their start when they were laid off, downsized, or made redundant;  being freed from the boundaries of their corporate jobs, former employees allowed their entrepreneurship to flourish.  Today, entrepreneurs are being unleashed without leaving the boundaries of their jobs.

In the workplace, social technology enables connections that center not on sports teams or hobbies but on projects and tasks.  Just as in our personal lives, these social tools encourage the creation of ad-hoc groups, except now these groups are drawn together by their shared entrepreneurial pursuits.

I predict that these changes will begin to alter the social construction of the corporation as we know it today;  moving us steadily from a top down, command-and-control hierarchy to something far more flat and egalitarian.

Byline:

Mike Diliberto researches enterprise social search and collaboration at MindTouch, a San Diego based provider of enterprise collaboration software.  He graduated from Thunderbird with a Global MBA degree in 2009.  He is a Thunderbird Alumni Ambassador and the chapter leader for San Diego. You can follow him on Twitter @mikediliberto

Posted: 04|8|10 at 5:45 pm.
Filed under: Alumni.
Pinging is currently disabled.