eVolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow

Citation

Jones, R. (2001), "eVolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow", The Bottom Line, Vol. 14 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2001.17014cae.004

eVolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow

eVolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow

Kanter, R.M.Harvard Business School PressBoston2001Keywords: Organizational change, Technological innovation, Internet

The foreword to this text provides a cheeky rap song whose lyrics and repeated chorus, encapsulate all the major themes of Kanter's work:

When outcomes are uncertain, answers hard to devise,That's the time to form a team, tap dreams, and improvise.Listen to your audience, build a scene on every hope,Shake up thinking, see new patterns in the kaleidoscope.You don't have to play alone, so start placing your betOn links to lots of partners, near and far across the Net.Join hands beyond tall silos, step out of the lonely cells,Seek a common state, collaborate, for community wealth.

…Get ready for the next step,It's a leap in evolutionFrom the Internet revolution.Just pick a directionIn this world of connectionSo many problems to solve –You've got to evolve.

In her notes Kanter explains that the song was stimulated by her desire to reach people who might not otherwise read a book like eVolve! Kanter strives to take her message from the corporation to the community. The song is simply a translation of the themes of the book in poetic prose.

eVolve! is about the change, a true evolution with associated challenges, that organisations must undertake to succeed in a digital world. Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor, is a renowned expert on organisational management and more specifically, change management. This is not another work addressing the latest challenges in e-commerce; rather, Kanter speaks directly to a multigenerational audience, from online newbie and veteran, to offline observer and non-techie. The Internet must be understood as an enabling medium for all, building on old-fashioned human interaction and communication through networks of relationships. New technologies will enhance this fundamental core communication base, but the relationships are what will remain the soul of e-commerce.

Every organisation, from dot-coms, to dot-com enablers (i.e. Internet service providers) and wanna-dots (traditional companies embracing the Web) must embrace the fundamental power of relationships. Kanter calls this new way of working "e-culture" rather than e-business or e-commerce. E-culture defines the human side of the global information era, the heart and soul of the new economy. New technologies, the Internet and associated network technologies, play two important roles: the stimulus for a new organisational culture (making it necessary) and the facilitator of that culture (making it possible).

eVolve! is not a step-by-step instructional guide to the enabling power of the Internet; rather, it is a compendium of case studies derived from over 300 on-site company interviews and a 750 global company survey, which elicited feedback on the successes and failure of e-commerce from "brick-and-mortar" giants to digital start-ups. Companies included in the survey include IBM, NBC, Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell, representing the venerable offliners, to Amazon, EBay, Razorfish and EarthWeb, representing the Net-born onliners. The breadth of this research provides readers with an understanding of the vast differences between older, more conservative companies, and aggressive, digitally-born start-ups. From this expansive and comprehensive research comes a blueprint for adopting Kanter's core principles of e-culture:

Treat strategy as improvisational theatre Nurture networks of partners Reconstruct organisations as online and offline communities Attract and retain top talent.

eVolve! is must reading for any organisation wanting to explore strategic implementation of technology in the workplace. I am particularly drawn to Kanter's wisdom and insight with regard to creating online and offline communities, as my organisation, a large Washington-based law firm, looks to enabling technologies to advance education internally and externally to its attorneys, staff and clients. The notion of e-culture offers a strategy to cultivate the human skills required for a multi-medium based collaboration between educator and practitioner, with a renewed focus on the learning process and the learner. The behavioural issues that surround enabling an organisation seem a bit less daunting after the reader realises that we're all in this together.

Rachel JonesDickstein Shapiro