“The DNA of today’s corporate structures is a century old, by and large, and like a tree trunk grown around an old bicycle, company cultures have slowly assimilated external societal changes without really changing. Part of this is specifically about technology and its role in propping up old, cascading hierarchies and other artefacts of ‘traditional’ corporate life. Far from realising the hopes and dreams of cybernetics, the centralised, command-and-control approach taken by the majority of IT functions in large firms has, if anything, reinforced the impersonal, process- and politics-based culture of large firms. But partly, of course, this is just a matter of time and patience. Email has been around in companies for over 30 years, and yet so many people even today struggle to use it properly. Perhaps social tools need the same amount of time to become so normal that they are effectively invisible.”
“…I think we under-estimated the sheer level of inertia and resistance to change that exists in many companies. So much waste of human talent remains in the way that companies continue to operate, that we cannot claim to have succeeded.”
More here http://postshift.com/2013/07/12/after_the_shift/
