Full Circle Associates

Can I just say "amen?" AMEN!

Over on Knowledge Board Euan Semple has a terrific post, All you need is love.. Here are a few bits that I especially liked, but go read the whole thing.

Some time back Cluetrain author David Weinberger wrote that the motivating force behind the internet was love. It was the basic human desire to connect that made it all hang together...

...OK we just about get away with "loving our job" our "loving success" but start talking about loving colleagues or loving customers and you'll have people running for the door. And yet isn't this what makes great people and great places tick. A deep sense of connection with each other, a depth of purpose beyond the every day that sees customers as more than merely stepping stones on the way to returning that value to the shareholders?...

...Love is also the powerful force you unleash when you start to introduce social computing inside organisations. Some are concerned about the disruptive effects you should expect but the disruption results from stronger stuff. The stuff David was talking of. The desire to connect at a very deep human level. To see colleagues as intrinsically linked and capable of pulling together in ways that those who promulgated scarcity and competition as organisational drivers will never begin to understand.

Over the last four years of watching the BBC's internal forums grow to their current population of half the organisation I have seen so many examples of love and connection - some of which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I mean real examples of people selflessly helping each other, genuine affection and concern shown between people who more often than not never physically met, and as one of the participants once said a greater sense of 'one BBC' than any of the corporate initiatives that came and went over the years.

Maybe love does have a place in business after all. Maybe more and more of us will start to have the courage to begin to talk about what really matters to us about work and our relationships with each other and to push back the sterile language of business that we have been trained to accept. Maybe we will realise that accepting love into the workplace reminds us of the original purpose of work - not to maximise shareholder value but to come together to do good things, to help each other and hopefully to make the world a better place.

Oh yeah, baby, its love.

Tags: love, community, social_computing