· Collaborative Communities

: Image by dfarber via Flickr

This is a three part series highlighting an MIT podcast (but you can watch it here), where John Chambers, the CISCO CEO discussed innovation and what’s involved in building the next generation company.

John Chambers makes some serious points around collaborative communities in our future. That is, we will be a part of many different communities centered around personal and business interests. Of course, this is already happening, but Chambers says content in the future will find us within our communities instead of us looking for content. This ability of technology will change advertising models and business processes at lightning speed.

Even at Cisco, their new endeavors are run by collaborative community groups called “councils”. When they are ready for a new launch of a product or service, they form a “council” around that launch and make it happen. These collaborative groups are quicker and more effective. And they ultimately make better decisions than the upper management team at Cisco because the council has the ability to access anyone in the company from around the world, discuss any topic visually and make decisions that immediately impact business processes and customers. No more running decisions through the management team, and letting red tape kill an innovative product that must get to market quickly.

Facebook and Twitter are the beginnings of our collaborative efforts, but the business efforts will only improve from here forward. In fact, there is some innovative company somewhere right now developing far-reaching products to assist businesses in making decisions collaboratively in ways we can not now imagine. Is that your company? Are you ready to do business collaboratively in these fast-acting communities? Tell me in the comments.