"social" purists, dot.coms, and lessons about toast

The Guardian newspaper here in the UK recently interviewed Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the VP for technical strategy and innovation at IBM, who is about to retire.

What on earth has this got to do with anything?...I can hear you asking yourselves. Well, I found this interview really applicable to what I think I see going on in "social business" trends, and the frequent reluctance of "mainstream" businesses to really commit their business strategies to sustainable, social-value-creating practices.

In this interview Irving (I will call him that, because I refuse to type and re-type Wladawsky) talks about the rise and spread of the internet over the past decade, and he says:

We were very, very excited but I don't think we knew how big it was going to be. People were saying in 1997 that if you were an existing business, you were toast, and that the internet was reinventing all the rules of business, and only those businesses born to the web were going to make it because they had a special sensibility - where they realised it was only about eyeballs, it had nothing to do with revenue and profit and cash. We were maybe among the most aggressive saying No, no, no: anybody can leverage the internet for business value. And of course that's what turned out, that the internet became a major part of every business.

I guess I don't have too much to add to that, except that I think it is a really useful reminder to all those - leaders of businesses, politicians, shareholders, women-on-the-street - who think that today, and here is how things are always going to be. We forget so quickly that things have been different before, have been turned on their heads before, have seemed like the end of the world before.

Just think about this - the 1997 conventional wisdom about the internet was "if you were an existing business, you were toast."

I work with private-sector businesses that are inherently "social" - kind of like those "special sensibility" internet-born companies old Irv mentions above. I think in the case of the internet and the world we are in today, those "special sensibility" companies are essential to prove ground, test models and ideas, highlight areas of value-creation and value-destruction... That's why I am in business, to help these pioneers prove that social value-creation can be leveraged for business value - and that it should become a major part of every smart business.

There is another important lesson here: those who half-assed it - the ones who took a wait-and-see, lukewarm, we'll-try-it-but-we-won't-commit approach to the internet - didn't do so hot. If the world starts shifting and you try to straddle the fault line, you're soon going to end up in a pretty uncomfortable position.

I was talking with a social entrepreneur the other day - someone who has found quite a bit of success in the UK with fair trade products - who echoed some things that I have heard from other people who I would call "social entrepreneur purists". This person said that she found it difficult to trust companies that were publicly owned or entrepreneur owned but ostensibly working toward a double/triple bottom line. She felt that one could never be too sure that the social wasn't being sacrificed for the financial, or just used for window dressing. I hear this from a lot of people - people who, with honourable intentions - believe that social entrepeneurship is best left to the social entrepreneurs, and that mainstream businesses will only corrupt and subvert it. To me, that sounds a lot like leaving the internet to the IT geeks. Not only is it short-sighted, but there is no way to stop the spread of something that can be found to build a better business. I admire the purists' intentions, but I feel their approach is a luxury that we don't have time to afford. It's time to figure out the best way for everyone to play in this field, because they are going to anyway.

So here's my hope: That the business world will not fail to recognise this old story, just because it happens to be dressed up in "social" clothing instead of fancy IT duds. Because soon, just as in the 1997-and-after world, it will be time for the old school companies to step in and play, without looking back.