The Twitterprise - 2009 is about our Corporate Cultures, NOT the Technology

I follow @marciamarcia on twitter...and have done so for a while.  Totally forgot that she also writes for FastCompany. Sorry, Marcia ;-(

She wrote an EXCELLENT article titled "Twitterprise: Bringing Whole Selves to Work".  So much great stuff in it that you must follow the link to get it all in.

The reason I like the article so much is that it truly gets to the heart of all this 2.0 stuff.  After the honeymoon buzz of new technologies wears off, we are still left with the realies of dealing with the people in our organizations.  The technologies are USELESS without the complete and total transformation of our internal corporate cultures.  And this isn't something you can just mandate, or solve by sheep dipping the masses in a Learning 2.0 Course.  In order for the tools to truly be successful people must USE them on a personal level as well as a professional level.  How people do that is completely up to them.  Some will engage more than others, but the reality is that they MUST engage at some level.

In my decade+ of corporate experience I've seen many extremely talented individuals pidgeon-holed into specific job functions that NEVER truly let those individuals shine to their full capacity.  I felt that way at times myself.  In fact, I do believe it was the act of blogging that inevitably pulled me out of the corporate hole that had been dug for me...by my own hands as well as others. 

Being comfortable with who we are is an issue for all of us.  And exposing who we are to the world just doesn't seem right to so many.  I guess for so many decades corporate life has been a "game" that we all played from 9 to 5, and then return the "real world" and our real selves in the comfort of our own homes.  Its all very sad to me.

My hope is that these new technologies will help us all become more productive corporate and civic citizens, as well as better friends, and family members.