Comments on: Social Networking Policies – Balancing Collective Wisdom With Individual Stupidity http://www.intranetexperience.com/ourblog/2009/03/social-networking-policies-balancing-collective-wisdom-with-individual-stupidity/ Topics relating to Intranets, portals, enterprise content management, internal communications, and social media in the workplace Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:19:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Peter Laird http://www.intranetexperience.com/ourblog/2009/03/social-networking-policies-balancing-collective-wisdom-with-individual-stupidity/comment-page-1/#comment-13 Peter Laird Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:14:55 +0000 http://www.intranetexperience.com/ourblog/?p=140#comment-13 In about 1997, the company I worked for held a corporate "risk" retreat. It was a successful company, but revenues had stagnated. The CEO and CTO owners held a big all hands to talk about risk and innovation. They encouraged employees to take more risks to drive more innovation. One brave employee stood up and asked "a lot of innovation is happening out on the internet, how about giving employees access to it?" The answer - "some employees are going to abuse that privilege, and then I will have to fire them. So, no." In other words, we don't want to take a risk. In hindsight, what an awful decision that was. In about 1997, the company I worked for held a corporate “risk” retreat. It was a successful company, but revenues had stagnated. The CEO and CTO owners held a big all hands to talk about risk and innovation. They encouraged employees to take more risks to drive more innovation.

One brave employee stood up and asked “a lot of innovation is happening out on the internet, how about giving employees access to it?”

The answer – “some employees are going to abuse that privilege, and then I will have to fire them. So, no.” In other words, we don’t want to take a risk.

In hindsight, what an awful decision that was.

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