Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution - David Kirkpatrick

This piece by Kirkpatrick suggests that he’s has a personal epiphany out at Salesforce, and wants to get us all excited about the coming revolution when social tools hit the enterprise. However, for those of us that have been writing about that topic for ten years — like me — this piece comes across as rah-rah boosterism rather than reasoned analysis.

Read it for the great quotes by John Hagel, Shoshanna Zuboff, and Mark Benioff. But there is a missing core of analysis here, which you will have to find elsewhere.

The drivers of social impact in business are derived the changes and amplification of human cognition when channeled by social tools, and the way that social density works like an atmospheric pressure on people. You won’t read that here, although Kirkpatrick might do more if he turns this into a book.

Lastly: the Arab Spring has been mythologized into a renaissance of suppressed people, catalyzed by the agency of social media. An uplifting passion play, suitable for several upcoming major motion pictures, I am sure. But for those that are looking closely into the drivers of the unrest there, you will find deep unemployment caused by rising food prices tied to long-term drought in the entire region and food production problems elsewhere. The transition of power that will follow won’t turn Libya and Egypt into Spain and Portugal, after the fall of their fascist regimes. Tunis and Cairo won’t morph into Westernism with something like parliamentary democracies, closely integrated into a neoliberal world, the way that Madrid and Lisbon managed to do. So I suggest that the heated rhetoric about those countries be cooled for a bit, until we can see the shape of what emerges. Most importantly, the drought, high food prices, and endemic unemployment and lack of opportunity for the youth of the Arab world has not been banished with Mubarak and Gaddafi. They will be with us for a long time to come. And youthful hope may soon change into embittered and obdurate anger, unless structural changes in the economy take place, not just a series of political coups unseating pharaonic despots.