Winner: Harvard Business School, Loser: Major Corporations
It was exciting this morning to realize midway through an interesting post on Enterprise 2.0 (i.e. the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise environment) that I was actually reading the blog of Harvard Business School faculty Andrew McAfee. If discussion of blogs and wikis is making it into mainstream business education, that's pretty cool. Hurray for HBS for incorporating this into their curriculum.
But the topic of the post was, unfortunately, the perception the MBA students had, based on prior work experience, that those who use Enterprise 2.0 tools heavily, "will be perceived as not spending enough time on their 'real' jobs":
So I should have been less surprised when my students talked about the negative perceptions associated with E2.0 contributions. They were likely just relating how these contributions would have been seen in their former companies. In environments that value 'busyness' enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts can be seen as laggards, goof-offs, and people who don't have either enough to do or enough initiative to find more real work to do.
Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don't want to be seen as not busy enough.
Boo for companies valuing busyness over collaboration.