I’m pretty fed up with read­ing advice on lead­er­ship and man­age­ment in busi­ness organ­isa­tions from people who have clearly never done either. Increas­ingly, these are the same people who view social media as hav­ing a determ­in­istic effect on busi­ness and insist that busi­nesses “don’t get it”. Oh, really?

Photo From white­forge

In the next breath we are told by the expert how Web 2.0 and social media are driv­ing a revolu­tion in “people-to-people” inter­ac­tion, closer cus­tomer rela­tion­ships and cus­tom­isa­tion of products and ser­vices to fit the cus­tom­ers needs. Aban­don your man­age­ment and factory-thinking — they tell us — lead your know­ledge work­ers in to the new dawn of the revolution.

If you were alive before 1990, have read any books over the past 20 years and/or don’t rely on the inter­net as the sum of your know­ledge then you may be shak­ing your head slightly by now. Cer­tainly social media tools are rel­at­ively new, but enabled by cheap com­puters and fast net­work con­nec­tions, which are made pos­sible by the factory-thinking of mass-production, engin­eer­ing and glob­al­isa­tion. Exper­i­ence has shown that those engin­eers and pro­duc­tion units require a bit of good man­age­ment, some busi­ness pro­cesses and, yes, leadership.

So what is new here? Not much. It’s a sales pitch that attempts to rein­vent mere tools as a strategy that will revolu­tion­ise the way busi­ness is done.

Social media is an import­ant tool that is inform­ing mar­ket­ing and help­ing busi­nesses, cus­tom­ers and cli­ents to find out what each other are really about.