11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era. Нилофер Мёрчант

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      1 Connections create value. The Social Era will reward those organizations that realize they don’t create value all by themselves. If the industrial era was about building things, the Social Era is about connecting things, people, and ideas. Networks of connected people with shared interests and goals create ways that can produce returns for any company that serves their needs.

      2 Power in community. Power used to come largely through and from big institutions. Today power can and does come from connected individuals in community. Power can come from the way you work with others, such as one party offering a platform to the multitude of creators. When community invests in an idea, it also co-owns its success. Instead of trying to achieve scale all by yourself, we have a new way to have scale: scale can be in, with, and through community.

      3 Collaboration > control. Organizations that “let go at the top”—forsaking proprietary claims and avoiding hierarchy—are agile, flexible, and poised to leap from opportunity to opportunity, sacrificing short-term payoffs for long-term prosperity. No longer can management espouse the notion that good ideas can come from everywhere, while actually pursuing a practice in which direction is owned by a few. No one will tolerate an “Air Sandwich” in the organization, where debates, trade-offs, and necessary discussions are skipped. Instead of centralized decisions, there is distributed input, decisions, and distributed ownership.

      4 Celebrate onlyness. The foundational element starts with celebrating each human and, more specifically, something I’ve termed onlyness. Onlyness is that thing that only one particular person can bring to a situation. It includes the skills, passions, and purpose of each human. Onlyness is fundamentally about honoring each person, first as we view ourselves and second as we are valued. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. Some of those experiences are not as “perfect” as we might want, but even those experiences are a source of ideas and creativity. Without this tenet of celebrating onlyness, we allow ourselves to be simply cogs in a machine—dispensable and undervalued.

      5 Allow all talent. “Doing work” no longer requires a badge and a title within a centralized organization. Anyone—without preapproval or vetting or criteria—will create and contribute. And this fundamental shift changes how any organization creates value, and how many individuals gather together—much like gazelles organize into a herd. This talent inclusion—across ages, genders, cultures, sexual orientation—is essential for solving new problems as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Be the one to enable that connected individual in your enterprise, through systems and leadership, and you win.

      6 Consumers become co-creators. More and more companies embrace consumers as “co-creation” partners in their innovation efforts, instead of as buyers at the end of a value chain. Consumers, traditionally considered as value exchangers or extractors, are now seen as a source of value creation and competitive advantage. This collaboration shares power between the participants as we start to recognize value creation as an act of exchange, not simply a one-way transaction. As an exchange, all parties need to do it sustainably as each must have equilibrium to stay viable.

      7 Mistakes can build trust. Reach and connection in the Social Era start to be understood as a relationship similar to falling in love, following an arc of romance, struggle, commitment, and co-creation. These are not easily controlled by one party over the other but are a process of coming together. And the relationship gains strength from trying new things and the resulting failures, for it is in the process of making mistakes—and the ensuing forgiveness—that resilience develops. Any vulnerability we feel along the way actually begets trust in the marketplace. And though they are difficult to forge, such robust relationships are more likely to endure the inevitable ups and downs of the market.

      8 Learn. Unlearn. (Repeat.) Rather than viewing change as an aberration, we understand it as a natural part of the organization’s development. Adaptability is central to how organizations and people thrive in the Social Era. In psychological language, the key to adaptability and personal growth is resilience. In biology, the equivalent term for adaptive skills is plasticity. In financial language, the term we might have used in the industrial era was liquidity, because it could measure how an organization was able to withstand the unexpected. In the Social Era, the term to use is flexibility. Our goal is to learn our way into the future. Instead of viewing strategy as a set end point, it becomes a horizon to aim for. Instead of asking employees to each simply man their own oar, we must encourage their capacity to navigate, to tack and adapt as conditions shift. Instead of perfection and getting it right the first time, innovation can be continuous, and core rather than episodic.

      9 Bank on openness. Protecting intellectual property allows a company to keep its edge, to erect barriers to entry from competitors, to establish entirely new markets. At least, it used to. Then along came the Social Era, with its networks through which open, connected ideas became powerful, even catalytic. It’s the difference between holding our ideas in a tight, closed fist or holding out our hand, open to what happens next. We might imagine that if we hold an idea tight enough, we’ll end up with a diamond. But when we hold open an idea as if in an open hand, we are unlocking the vault of limitless human capabilities to create new and better ideas that are owned together.

      10 Social purpose unleashes ownership. The social object that unites people isn’t a company or a product; the social object that most unites people is a shared value or purpose. Purpose is a better motivator than money. Money, while necessary, motivates neither the best people nor the best in people. Purpose does. When people know the purpose of an organization, they don’t need to check in or get permission to take the next step; they can just do it. In that world, purpose and community are integral to what and how they create value. Nonprofits, causes, and similar organizations have leveraged the power of people and purpose for years. (Having little or no money, they had to.) But business hasn’t been able to see the upside of purpose. With social purpose, alignment happens without coordination costs. Social purpose makes customers and team members more than transactions and payroll recipients. It allows people to “tear down that wall” between who is “inside” and “outside” the firm, creating a more permeable organization that unleashes the inherently collaborative nature of work—like a herd of gazelles running leaderlessly, daringly, across a plain.

      11 (There are no answers.) While these are the working notions of the Social Era rules, the key is to figure out how to create value in a demanding, ever-changing market. Don’t assume any set of rules is fully baked. Accept that your job is to stay alert to what happens next to figure out what assumptions need to be tuned. Listen, learn, adapt.