The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social

Chapter 3. Organize Your Armies

It used to be so simple.

Decisions were made according to an organization chart that classified people according to their functional role. If you were low on the chart, you just carried out the orders handed to you from higher on the branches. If you were higher on the chart, you handed down the decisions and were accountable for whatever happened below you, rarely getting your hands dirty in the details. Businesses sorted employees into silos like marbles into jars and kept each of those silos functioning like their own individual little fiefdoms.

But the increasing speed of business calls for broader leadership and collective accountability. We need a distribution of decision making and authority throughout an organization to make us quicker, more nimble, more responsive to the demands of immediacy. We need not just new roles, but teams that communicate faster, with more fluidity and less friction. To move faster, we simply have to shatter the bottlenecks of process and control that have historically created a sense of security and consistency. It's time to organize our people and communications in a way that allows the elephant to dance much lighter on its feet.

So, Who Owns This Stuff?

One of the continuous discussions and questions surfacing in the social media chatterbox is that of "who owns social media?" Is it marketing? Public relations (PR)? Customer service?

The answer is ... yes. For the long-term, anyway.

There's a point at which we're going ...