"Companies Say No to Friending or Tweeting at Work" is the headline in The National Law Journal.  According to the article, somewhere between 54% (according to a Robert Half survey) and 76% (according to a ScanSafe survey) of companies block employees from connecting to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Plaxo, etc.  The reasons sound so traditional – starting with lost productivity and moving on to fear of data theft.

And of course, there's the bogeyman to worry about too.

In the 1940s and 1950s success was all about mass production.  Show up for work on time, don't be late, don't be absent, and do your job.  We had assembly lines to operate.  Making stuff meant we needed to get people into the plant, and have them do their job.  The more efficient people were, the more things a plant could make – be it cars or washers or televisions.  So control everything the employee did on the job to make sure each minute is spent welding, typing, adding, inspecting or whatever their task.  Fredrick Taylor became a business guru, running around with stopwatches calculating how to get more work out the door by controlling everything workers did.

Have people noticed that its 2009?  Today, there are places where such focus on task implementation is important.  But most of those places aren't in the USA.  Those kinds of jobs have moved elsewhere.  Even in America's manufacturing plants (and in most plants in the developed world) it is more important that an employee be thinking about their work.  More gains are made by intelligent application – new ideas for processes or activities – than from Tayler-ist style efforts to whip people into working harder and more efficiently.  Would you rather have a drone employee (a human robot) or a smart employee thinking about how to be more productive and successful?  Sweat shop behavior doesn't make more money in a world where intelligence and insight are worth a lot more than hours in the chair.

Yet Lock-in to old efficiency notions still remain.  In the 1930s there was a movement to ban adding machines for fear the tapes (the old white tape that ran out the top) would be stolen by employees.  Better to stick with humans doing the adding – less risky.  When PCs came along practically all IT departments wanted to ban them – saying that they posed an inherent risk to productivity (people might use them for things besides work) and employees would capture data on them and leak it to competitors.  When the internet emerged in the 1990s huge numbers of employers banned access because they didn't know what people would do on the web and they feared everyone would be shopping all day, or emailing their friends.  And who knew what kind of information they would leak about the company!  In each instance, a tool that dramatically improved business performance was met with "this will hurt productivity.  And don't you think this poses a serious risk?"

For those who aren't looking for the bogeyman, this presents an opportunity.  Those who first adopted adding machines quickly improved performance – and those who adopted PCs improved productivity (spreadsheets and word processing gave early adopters huge advantages) – and those who adopted the internet rapidly sold more to new customers while finding more low cost suppliers and automated lots of business processes in their supply chain taking down operating costs.  These innovations created Challenges to old ways of doing things, but they also created huge opportunities for those willing to Disrupt old patterns and use White Space to see how they could improve their business.

Every day millions of people are starting to use – and millions more are increasing their use of – social networks. You can get an incredible sense of the pulse of many communities.  You find out what's going on with customers, potential customers and colleagues incredibly fast.  These networks help sift through billions of megabytes of data and bring critical items of importance to you (and your business) remarkably fast.  They act as a new distribution system for information – think of them as a water cooler on steroids taken to the "nth" power.  These are not on-line solitaire environments, these are places where people exchange information and learn.  Really fast.

Today, having informed employees who can take action separates winners from losers.  Those who want to be in the forefront of competition are already thinking about how these environments connect them with critical information.  Help them connect to customer and vendor communities.  Help them improve productivity by increasing the pace of information exchange.  If you aren't afraid of the bogeyman then you have an opportunity to get a leg up on the fearful by not only accepting, but encouraging the use of social networks.  The faster you "get it" the better off you'll be.  It's likely to introduce ideas for Disrupting your business during this downturn and opening White Space to get you growing again!

Postscript –

An article in the recent New Yorker Magazine "Not So Fast" takes a deep look at Fredrick Taylor and the history of "scientific management."  According to the article, Taylor and his colleagues often made up their data, and their conclusions, and the results they promised were almost never achieved.  Interesting reading on how the myth was created, and became legend.  Perhaps sending most of what was taught for decades as "business best practice" at leading business schools in a seriously misguided direction.  Well worth a read for those with time to pick up a little history – and some insights to how business myths are developed and promulgated.