4. Challenges to Socializing Business

The key issue is whether or not you believe software alone is sufficient to engineer fundamental business change. In some cases, perhaps it can; but in general, simply grafting new tools and systems onto existing business culture and practices is unlikely to result in the change we are looking to achieve.

—Lee Bryant, Dachis Group

We seem to be at a difficult intersection in the history of organizations. We have two trends, each dangerously unaware of the other, moving swiftly down their respective paths, heading for a collision.

On one path is social media. In Chapter 2, “We Can’t Go Back,” we identified the deep ways that social media shifts both commerce and society at large. Our collective capacity to ...

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