The digital age is facilitating communications between all stakeholders in a corporation--employees, suppliers, customers and investors. Recently there have been a group of articles advocating for a very open communication policy. The first noteworthy article is by Mozilla Product Evangelist Paul Pouget. The second article is by Paul Weiss, a Partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and a third is on opensource.org here. All the authors are advocating for very open information exchange,and various writers advocate for open financial information, product roadmaps, meetings and strategy discussions. In the case of Mozilla, this type of information is open to the world without restriction.
In certain cases, such as a pending IPO, certain authors advocate for more restricted information policies to comply with securities law in the U.S. The irony here should not be lost on the reader.The argument that these authors and many others make is that open communications fosters better collaboration. I learned management processes and methods in the era before the digital age. I admit that the more modern technologies make it easier to communicate, but it is not obvious to me that easier communications should lead to more widespread disbursement of information in order to facilitate collaboration. We collaborated before email and Facebook and even managed to create such worldwide powerhouses as Wal-Mart, Coca Cola and Telmex. I have not done the analysis, but I suspect that much greater economic and social benefit was created before the digital age than after it started. In other words, we collaborated successfully before the digital age.
The concept of collaboration interests me, but the larger concept of how digital technologies will affect management organization, methods and processes is of much more interest. I will return to this theme in future posts because I want to think through these themes in greater detail.