Vision, Mission, Values, Brand. Those unifying cornerstones of Corporate Culture are due for review, maybe upheaval, as we progress ever more online.
Why? Because most large Firms I know have a Corporate Culture defined ‘offline’ which seems to evaporate online. They can be confident in real life – but are geeky, awkward and a little old fashioned online.
The two worlds are different, but the online one is ballooning in importance and Corporate Culture just isn’t keeping up with the change.
Twitter offers a chance to refresh Corporate Culture, thanks, among others, to my friends at Comcast who popularised the idea that company culture changes because of Twitter.
Here’s how: Twitter makes a Firm think in terms of short items, not annual reports, stock market filings, press releases or brochures. Brevity is valued. They need to be engaging on Twitter – so Firms are learning what it’s like to be interesting and win ‘traction’ with the outside world. And then they need to react to events, which means they need a responsive decision-making structure, devolved responsibility, empowerment on the frontline.
These can be truly testing criteria. They pull against every sinew of control which a Firm rightly needs to exert. Empowerment means risk. Responsiveness means quicker, rather than considered, decision-making, which increases risk. And being engaging online means being anything other than ‘corporate’ in the use of language and content. It actually means being different and unusual – and again, that often fights against control and introduces risk.
But hey, there’s a balance: the benefits outweigh the risks in many cases. The cost advantages of an underlying internet business model are now coming through in every industry from heavy manufacturing to entertainment, from space exploration to mining and from pharma to finance.
The universal benefits of the internet business model can only be fully gained by also opening the door to an internet culture.
So I predict we will see Firms pledge again their commitment to traditional values such as integrity, diversity and quality, and they’ll follow through on these with more conviction than before. They are bedrocks. But they’ll also start to embrace values such as relevance, response, brevity and even levity. And Twitter will be the learning and proving grounds.
