A little while ago I met Irit Oz and Ron Hirshfeld, two amazing folks who were in the US to bring their concept of employee engagement and the information revolution to fruition.
At my company, we are on the cusp between small, and thinking about being “not small” pretty soon now (this “launch point” is one of my passions in the small business community). We are working with a strategic planner to write the story of our business, as a pathway to bringing out our true goals as entrepreneurs and as a business.
Preserving employee and company culture is one of the hardest things about this stage of growth, which is why our strategic planner introduced us to Irit and Ron, and why I invited them to present their concepts here for your reading and reaction.
Did Our World Turn Upside Down?
A guest post by Irit Oz and Ron Hirshfeld.
Do you sometimes feel that you are holding your business intact with your bare hands? Do you set goals that seem reasonable to you and find yourself pushing your target dates or compromising on scope continuously? Do you feel sometimes that getting things done, the way you want them, is almost an impossible task? Did you ever get to a point that you’ve asked yourself, “Did our world turned upside down?”
If you have, you are not very far off. Our world did turn upside down is some way. Sounds crazy? Let’s look at the facts.
It is common knowledge that in the last 10 years we went through a revolution which most experts call “The Information Revolution.” Did you ever stop and think, how did that revolution impacted me and my business?
Revolution is a very strong word, and it is used to describe extremely impactful events. If we look at the revolutions that we had in the last few hundred years, we can understand why.
Each revolution has profoundly changed our way of living. The agriculture revolution has enabled 90% of human kind that used to work in agriculture to change profession, while the industrial revolution brought us comfort that we didn’t know before and triggered more than 50% of the population in our world to move from rural to urban areas.
For most people over 30, we probably don’t need to elaborate too much regarding the technological revolution. If we just take five minutes to think how we grew up without internet, cellphone, GPS, automatic windows, microwave, etc., we would finish these five minutes extremely grateful.
What was the impact of the revolution that we went through over the last 10 years? The Information Revolution?
One thing that most people are aware of, is that it brought us to a state where almost every knowledge that we want, we can have within seconds in the palm of our hand.
It doesn’t matter if you are a cook who is looking for a good recipe, a traveler who is searching for cheap flights, a software engineer who is looking for a particular way to implement an application, a lawyer who is searching for a specific legal case, or, God forbid, a terrorist who is looking to prepare a bomb. You can find everything you need very quickly using your computer, your tablet, or your cell phone.
That was not the situation 10 years ago. Ten years ago the teachers in school were the source of information, the managers in the organizations were the ones to teach you how to do your job, and the leaders in your country were the ones letting you know what the hell was going on.
Today, on the other hand, teenagers can learn what ever they are interested in from the comfort of their home, any employee can learn how to do their job from experts around the world, and any one of us can, very easily, check the facts that politicians are telling us.
If you look at the situations in organizations today, the information is no longer flowing from top-down. The people who are dealing with customers, production, inventory, programing, etc. are the ones holding the important knowledge.
If knowledge used to flow almost exclusively from top-down, it is now coming mostly bottom-up. This seems very trivial when we look at the facts, yet let’s take a moment to absorb this critical and astonishing concept. If the flow of information has reversed, what does it mean about the role of management? Can we keep doing the same things and succeed? As the great Albert Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
If we are no longer the source of information for our employees, how can we get them engaged? If they have the knowledge, do we know how to retrieve it from them in order to make wise and knowledgeable decisions? Did we adjust the way we conduct business to support the new reality?
If we hadn’t, wouldn’t that be a disaster? Wouldn’t that be something very noticeable, something that would possibly threaten our survival, something that would make us feel as if our world has turned upside down?
Yours Sincerely,
Irit Oz & Ron Hirshfeld
Employee Engagement Experts
OH (Irit Oz and Ron Hirshfeld) are two unique individuals with 50 years of combined experience and hundreds of success stories. They have ONE purpose: To help transform your organizational culture to support your business strategy and assure that your desires become your REALITY. Learn more at http://ozandhirshfeld.com/.
