Posts Tagged “Productivity”

A large part of this year’s summer vacation involved college visits with my high school senior. I had plenty of time to reflect on all the things that have happened in her lifetime as I drove through cornfield after cornfield, and she slept soundly with her iPod blaring. One of those thoughts was a wake-up call for me.

About the time my daughter was born, I gave a speech at the annual meeting of the National Food Broker Association about technology changes and business. I can remember showing a mockup of an e-mail message and talking about how e-mail would change how business would operate.  I remember the following line in particular:

“I estimate the average age in this room is about 40 years old. My guess is that many of you have never used a personal computer. There is now this thing called e-mail and many of you will think that your secretary will take care of your e-mail just as she has always typed your memos. The reality is – most of you have 25 or more years in the workforce. If you think you can avoid using a personal computer for the next 25 years – good luck. There will be plenty of 20- and 30-somethings who will be happy to compete for your job.”

Guess what? I am now the guy in the audience. I’m the one who is at risk of falling behind. The scary part is, I’m an early adopter of technology and I struggle to keep up with the pace of change.

So like e-mail from the early 1990s, what is the technology innovation with the most potential to disrupt how businesses operate in the 2010s? I won’t claim it is No. 1, but Web feeds or syndication is good choice. It is those little buttons:

If you don’t know what they are, you need to. The 3:44 video explains it better than any text could:

Think about some of the changes that are enabled in a business environment:

• Collaboration and Innovation – Technology becomes another glue to connect knowledge – relationships are no longer the sole connector. An engineer working in a widget factory in Poland can easily be aware of developments in the widget factories in South Korea and Tennessee. New communities develop throughout the organization, and traditional boundaries blur.
• Productivity – Access to information directly correlates with an ability to perform in a work setting. Syndication fundamentally changes how information can be provided and increases in productivity should be expected. At a minimum, managerial spans of control can be expanded.
• Rethinking the Internal Communication Function - The internal communication function typically works as a mass-media broadcaster today. Messages are controlled and broadcast over a few channels of distribution. With corporate blogging and syndication now available with virtually no barrier to entry, message control is gone and channels multiply wildly. Doesn’t this change the work of Internal Communications?

You might want to try to figure out those orange buttons before some whippersnapper is competing for your job.