Full Circle Associates

As of today, Jon is up to #4 of his Ten Principles For Our Interconnected Workplace. He started on January 12th with this intro:

About a year and a half ago I wrote what I intended to be a little booklet that set out one principle per page, just a few bullet points ... ten principles in all ... based on my past experience consulting to organizations about work, workers and management/leadership development.

Principle # 1 - Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has.

Principle #2 - The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization ... more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight.

Principle # 3 - People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long

Principle # 4 - Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control.

I'm nodding a lot here in agreement. #4 is one of the better expressions of power shifts that I've read because it acknowledges the strengths that were borne in the command-and-control era -- the positive stuff like leadership -- but frames them in the network age in terms of a champion. Leadership has a new manifestation in the interconnected age. It is more artful than ever.

I do have some nits to pick, mainly because of the context of some of my work outside of Western cultures, particularly North American cultures. The freedom of access to information and the freedom to have a voice is still huge issue in many parts of the world. This is not just about internet connection, but the control of this ability. I feel this is a critical issue facing the world and one that gets very little visibility on my continent. It worries me. What are the implications?

I'm looking forward to the next six. Keep it coming, Jon!

Technorati tags: interconnected collaboration principles