The #Social Era

That’s what I’m talking about:

The companies thriving today are operating by a new set of rules — Social Era rules.

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It’s helpful to call this new context the Social Era to emphasize a point: while in the industrial era, organizations became more powerful by being bigger, in the Social Era, companies can also be powerful by working with others. While the industrial era was about making a lot of stuff and convincing enough buyers to consume it, the Social Era is about the power of communities, of collaboration and co-creation. In the industrial era, power was from holding what we valued closed and separate; in the Social Era, there is another framework for how we engage one another — an open one.

Nilofer Merchant, who wrote this, has been thinking about the possibilities of “communities and collaboration and co-creation” for how businesses are organized for some time. She has a blog that’s called Yes and Know; and she has just published an ebook called 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #Social Era.

 Her ideas apply directly to law firms as we are coming to be.