National Learning Institute

Leadership in a Wiki World

Rod Collins

Reviewed by admin Sun 14 Nov 10

Bob's Rating:

Leadership in a Wiki World is about knowledge – how it is shared, how it is used and who owns it.  The underlying theme of the book is that collaboration is now driving, people, organisations and ultimately, the economy.

It’s also about how organisations are structured and how they are managed.  Collins cites three developments that have changed the way organisations and people do, and manage business today:

-   The social technology of the command-and-control organisation cannot keep pace with the speed of change in today’s faster moving markets.

-   The internet has created the unprecedented capacity for mass collaboration.

-   The ascendance of knowledge networks and the decline of facilities.

Collins makes many good points about the changing nature of how organisations might best be structured.  In particular, moving from hierarchical to process driven where the emphasis is on customer satisfaction rather than maximising shareholder value.  He suggests that “the emergence of business processes as the new focus of work and the identification of organisational learning and mass collaboration” are critical core competencies managers need to develop.

There are two points that some readers may not agree with about Leadership in a Wiki World.  Firstly, in developing his argument, Collins gives mainly service organisations as examples.  Secondly, most of the examples given are US based companies.  It may be that there are many other non-service companies outside of the US that have been doing what Collins suggests long before the internet (and particularly the social media revolution) took hold.  For example, Nokia, Samsung, Tesco, Swatch are non-US companies that use the process-driven and collaboration models to build and develop their business.

I found the book a little dense, with some repetiveness (obviously to reinforce important points).  There is so much good information here however, that the challenge will be to get managers, (and particularly today’s younger techno-savvy managers who want their information in short, sharp bites) to read the entire text.  Noting this, the author has some good suggestions for reading the book, depending on one's digital orientation - whether you are a "digital native" (born after 1975), "digital immigrant" (born before 1975, techno-savvy but reared in the hierarchical and mechanical thinking of the industrial age) or  a "digital stranger" (also born before 1975 but who sees the computer as a sophisticated machine and the web as the world's best reference library).  A clever way to involve all readers.

Having said that, this is a good book.  Not only does it have many sound messages for today’s manager, there’s also some good practical “How to’s”, such as the Work Thru exercise (similar to processes mentioned in Marvin Weisbord’s “Productive Workplaces” – Jossey-Bass 1991).  I would recommend this book to any thinking manager and to organisation OD people who are vested with the challenge of adapting their organisation’s structure to satisfy the needs of today’s educated (product/service) client.