The Conversational Firm

Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media

Catherine Turco

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541954
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Comportement organisationnel

A fast-growing social media marketing company, TechCo encourages all of its employees to speak up. By promoting open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy, the firm has fostered a uniquely engaged workforce and an enviable capacity for change. Yet the path hasn't always been easy. TechCo has confronted a number of challenges, and its experience reveals the essential elements of bureaucracy that remain even when a firm sets out to discard them. Through it all, TechCo serves as a powerful new model for how firms can navigate today's rapidly changing technological and cultural climate.

Catherine J. Turco was embedded within TechCo for ten months. The Conversational Firm is her ethnographic analysis of what worked at the company and what didn't. She offers multiple lessons for anyone curious about the effect of social media on the corporate environment and adds depth to debates over the new generation of employees reared on social media: Millennials who carry their technological habits and expectations into the workplace.

Marshaling insights from cultural and economic sociology, organizational theory, economics, technology studies, and anthropology, The Conversational Firm offers a nuanced analysis of corporate communication, control, and culture in the social media age.

1

THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

MY FIRST MEETING with TechCo’s founders was a casual lunchtime conversation in the company kitchen. Eric and Anil were both wearing jeans and identical gray T-shirts bearing the TechCo logo. Their similarities seemed to end there, however. Eric is tall—a good bit over six feet by my estimate—and he has the lanky, athletic build of a guy who, in his midforties, still likes to shoot a few hoops after work to unwind. With glasses and a thick head of dirty blond hair making its way toward distinguished silver, he has, like many successful CEOs, an executive presence. But he also has an endearing, boyish quality that bucks convention.

“Sometimes I get flak for pushing too hard to rethink things,” he admitted with a hint of mischievousness that day, and he remained in a state of nearly perpetual motion throughout our meeting. In one moment, he was leaning back, his chair perched precariously on two legs, one knee bent so his foot could rest comfortably on the table’s ledge, the other foot bouncing below. In the next moment, he was lunging forward, draping his tall frame across the table to make a point. It was the body language of someone impatient with the present, searching for a better way.

Anil, by contrast, sat up straight and was nearly motionless. A self-described introvert and the company’s chief technologist, he admits to preferring digital communication over face-to-face interaction, computer coding over personal contact, and he remained silent through much of the meeting. Compared to Eric’s very physical presence, Anil can seem almost incorporeal, but his quiet contemplativeness has a captivating quality, and employees describe him as a brilliant and kind, if somewhat enigmatic, figure. When he did speak up during lunch, it was to pose a counterintuitive question or to suggest an unconventional take on the topic at hand, as if he were using his distance from the world to rethink it. Despite all the surface differences, I came to see that he and Eric were made of similar stock after all: “It’s in their DNA to question things,” an employee later put it.

What they questioned, they explained to me that day in the kitchen, were all the conventional ways of organizing a firm. They did not want TechCo to be an “old-school bureaucratic” organization. They wanted it to be a “radically open” one. When I asked what it meant to be more open than bureaucratic, Eric answered, “We just want to give a lot of freedom to people.” Then he and Anil elaborated.

Being open meant limiting formal, hierarchical control. Instead of imposing top-down rules to govern employee behavior or having managers supervise a worker’s every action, Eric said, “I just want to trust that people will use good judgment and decide for themselves. We don’t believe in hierarchy.” Instead of centralized decision making by executives, being open meant “radical transparency” and “tons of sharing” of information with the workforce so that employees could participate in the firm’s decision process. “We think bad decisions get made when people lock themselves in a room and make a decision in secret,” Anil explained. Being open meant a workspace in which managers and employees all sat together instead of being segregated by offices and cubicles. It also meant giving employees free access to company property such as food and lounge areas.

In short, openness meant a lot of different things to TechCo’s founders, and almost none of these things were what you would expect to find in a conventional corporate firm. What Eric and Anil defined as “open” directly subverted many elements of Weber’s classic bureaucratic model. In fact, what they described sounded more like the open, democratic model to which many antibureaucratic, anticorporate collectives have aspired in the past. I asked if they had a similar ideological or moral agenda, and they were quick to clarify.

“Don’t get us wrong,” Anil said, “We’re red-blooded capitalists. We do this because we think it’s good business, because we think it’s going to be more profitable in the long run.” They explained that social media had created new expectations for openness in the market, and it was their unabashed aspiration to build TechCo into a large, profitable (“billion-dollar-plus,” as they put it) corporation. Being open was simply what a firm had to do these days to achieve that level of success.

“It’s how you have to run a business today,” Eric said, and the two returned to this point several times. Toward the end of lunch, Anil remarked, “Technology has radically changed how people live and work, but most companies haven’t caught up.” Six years earlier, that very insight was what had inspired them to found TechCo.

The two had met in graduate school in the mid-2000s. Both were captivated by, and early adopters of, social media at the time. They joined all of the then-emerging sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), started their own blogs, and spent countless hours thinking and talking about the implications of these various technologies for individuals and for businesses.

Eric had worked in enterprise software sales before graduate school and left the experience feeling that few companies were adapting their sales and marketing efforts to how customers, especially the younger ones, communicated and behaved online. With the advent of social media, Eric believed that gap would only widen. Meanwhile, Anil was already having success on these new platforms. He may have been an introvert in person, but Anil found it easy to converse on social media. His thoughtful, witty tweets had quickly attracted a large following on Twitter, and his blog took off, gaining thousands of followers in just a matter of months. Both men became increasingly convinced of the tremendous power and reach of social media.

From these experiences, and from their mutual entrepreneurial ambition, a business idea began to emerge. After many late nights and long discussions honing their plan, the two decided to build a company that would sell software tools and consulting services to help businesses market themselves and their products on the Web and through social media. Over the ensuing years, as they sold their vision and TechCo’s products to other companies, they came to embrace openness as the organizing philosophy for their own. To understand how they arrived at that philosophy, however, we must look more closely at how they understand the social media revolution and its implications for the corporate world.

CHAMPIONS OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

One hot summer day during my time at TechCo, I stepped from the blistering heat outside into a large conference hall to see Eric and Anil looking cool and relaxed on stage. Before them were more than five thousand corporate marketers, managers, and executives who had gathered for the company’s annual user conference.

Over the past few days, a team from TechCo had transformed the city’s typically drab convention center into a monument to our hyperconnected age. Massive digital displays now lined the walls. House music was being pumped in from somewhere (or maybe everywhere), and purple-hued black lights illuminated the otherwise dark space, their soft neon glow giving it a distinctly virtual-world feel. Attendees recharged their multiple devices at strategically placed power stations while they recharged themselves with coffee and conversation on nearby sofas. And, at every turn an army of young TechCo employees, marked by their matching T-shirts, stood ready to demo the company’s software on slick, flat-screen monitors or to direct people to their next destination.

During the coming week, participants would hear talks on such topics as the future of mobile commerce, how to manage a millennial workforce, and best practices in social media marketing. The conference hashtag would trend high on Twitter as attendees posted thousands of tweets about the presentations they saw, the people they met, and the experience of it all. For the moment, however, everyone’s attention was fixed on Eric and Anil. Soon they would unveil three new TechCo applications on the floor-to-ceiling digital screens behind them. But first they began with a reminder of the revolution afoot.

Their message was clear: Social media has radically transformed the market by radically transforming the conversations customers have. In the past, if people were dissatisfied with a product or service, they called or wrote a letter to the company’s customer service department. Today they tweet and post their complaints for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Twitter followers and Facebook friends to see. Individuals also use these platforms to log their pleasure with products and services and to recount positive client service experiences, becoming a sales and marketing channel unto themselves. When prospective buyers want to learn about a product or service these days, they are as apt to turn to one another as to the company itself by scouring online reviews and polling their social network connections for information and opinions. Simply put, through social media customers now direct a whole set of conversations that corporations once controlled.¹

Addressing the crowd of corporate managers before them, Eric and Anil argued that businesses must meet customers on these new terms and join the conversation on social media. Instead of broadcasting messages through conventional channels like television ads, mass mailings, or telesales, businesses should be active on all of the platforms their customers use. Businesses should respond to comments, share useful product information, and draw people into ongoing dialogue. By speaking and acting as people do on these platforms, firms will become more open, human institutions and less faceless bureaucracies. As Eric and Anil unveiled three new software applications that let companies integrate their sales and marketing activities with a range of social media platforms, they reminded the audience that TechCo products are designed to help do all of this.

In reality, Eric and Anil’s vision for corporate change goes one step further than what they articulated in their speech that day. TechCo’s founders believe that to respond fully to the profound changes being wrought by social media, firms have to do more than just buy TechCo software and transform their external communication strategies. Firms have to transform themselves internally as well. For starters, Eric and Anil note that traditional bureaucratic practices inside an organization cannot support the speed and volume of external communication necessary to engage with today’s customers. Employees need to be given the freedom and the information to converse with customers directly, and that means a more open and less bureaucratic approach to management is required. Furthermore, today’s customers are today’s employees, and they are carrying their expectations into the workplace, looking for firms to embrace the social media revolution and its associated openness in their internal structure, practices, and culture. This is especially true of millennials, the fastest growing part of the workforce and a group that grew up on social media.²

From Eric and Anil’s perspective, the millennial generation and its digital natives present an opportunity that corporations must embrace. Firms that accommodate the habits and expectations of this new generation will attract and retain its best workers and gain a competitive advantage. With digitally savvy buyers rendering the conventional ways of doing business dead, TechCo’s founders argue that it makes sense to “underrate” experience with those conventional ways and “overrate” experience with the very technologies and modes of conversing that are revolutionizing the marketplace. For these two champions of the social revolution, digital natives are their most skilled and loyal foot soldiers.

Accordingly, our tour of TechCo starts by meeting one of these foot soldiers and observing her at work. Doing so will help us ground Eric and Anil’s visionary rhetoric. By stepping away from the founders’ words and looking directly inside the firm they have built, we can begin to see the precise nature of the organizational revolution they are enacting and just what sort of change social media is capable of bringing about. This inquiry will continue throughout the book as we discover and deconstruct what exactly openness means at TechCo, what actually is being transformed there, and what all that means for our general understanding of the corporate firm.

FOOT SOLDIERS OF THE REVOLUTION

“I went to an electronic music festival this weekend,” Emma said as we walked into one of TechCo’s glass-walled conference rooms. She dropped into a chair and adjusted its height for her small frame. “I don’t even like that stuff really, but my whole generation is into it so I wanted to check it out.”

As she spoke, her eyes shifted momentarily to two TechCo colleagues walking past the room. They glanced in without breaking stride. Returning her gaze to me, she said, “I like learning about different social worlds like that, so it was cool.”

In fact, Emma and her whole generation have had an unprecedented ability to create and explore new social worlds. Digital natives, they have been communicating and connecting on social media and networks since childhood.³ “Facebook came out in high school,” the twenty-three-year-old told me that morning, “and I was on chat in middle school.” As her attendance at the electronic music festival attests (she had heard about it from a friend’s tweet, she told me), these tools have infused her life and those of her generation with a level of communication and information access previously unimaginable.

Until entering the workforce, however, Emma had taken this for granted. A summer internship at an advertising agency opened her eyes: “It was run by a bunch of old fogies and there was just this disconnect between what they were doing and where the world was…. Before that, I hadn’t thought about things I do naturally as skills I was bringing to a job—like email, social media, social networking, how I consume content all online.”

Then she came across TechCo. “I saw on LinkedIn that someone I knew from college had taken a job there. So I went to their website.” Then to their blog, their Twitter feed, their Facebook page, their online videos. “I fell in love,” Emma recalled.

The company seemed to behave and communicate just as she did. “When they spoke on social media, it was as if it was speaking as a human being. It wasn’t like you were talking to a corporation. It made it more human. They were fun. They used slang and referenced memes. They replied to people’s comments on Twitter directly…. Everything the company did just had a very open, human feel. Any blog post would have a link to the personal profile of whoever wrote it, and people’s profiles were just very clearly linked to the company. What the people seemed to be about was what the company was about.”

And what the company was about resonated. By providing software and services to help companies connect with customers through social media, Emma believed TechCo was “helping people change how they worked, how whole companies were run.” She saw that her ways of communicating and connecting—those things she did so naturally—could be a path to transforming “old fogies” like those at the advertising agency. Most of all, TechCo seemed to embrace these new ways, both externally with its customers and internally with its employees. “It just seemed like a place I had to work.”

* * *

Several mornings later, I went to find Emma to observe her daily routine. After she had fallen in love with TechCo online, she had applied for a job and was hired to work in customer support. She had been there for almost a year now, and I was excited about the opportunity to see her generation at work—to observe the supposedly new ways of connecting and communicating they modeled and that TechCo embraced.

Like everyone at the company, including executives, Emma sat out in the open in one of several vast, high-ceilinged workrooms. To this day, the business still operates out of an old, converted furniture factory, with workrooms like this scattered throughout the complex. The rooms hold anywhere from thirty to more than one hundred employees, and all have largely the same layout: exposed brick walls punctuated by drafty steel windows; large, flat, workbench-like desks arranged side by side, forming long, regular aisles; workers sitting shoulder to shoulder and face to face, with no cubicles or walls separating them—a wide-open landscape interrupted by little other than an occasional weathered wood beam.

I had heard the staff talk reflexively of “working out on the floor,” and as I walked through the space that morning, it was hard not to recall the nineteenth-century factory once housed there. But something distinctly modern had clearly colonized it since then. Glass-walled conference rooms now lined the workroom’s perimeter. Digital displays hung from the lofty ceiling. A sea of laptops and large-screen monitors floated atop the workbenches. And in front of them sat Emma and her peers.

TechCo’s fifty or so other “support engineers,” as their official title designated them—or “reps,” as they were more often called around the company—all sat together in one room. Recent college graduates in their early to midtwenties, reps were staffed in staggered eight-hour shifts and fielded calls from customers with technical questions about TechCo’s software. D...