Seven lessons WikiLeaks teaches us about new business

This excerpt from the Montreal Gazette lists important lessons for the future. Steve.

Here are seven lessons that WikiLeaks teaches us:

1. Transparency first.
If your default position is to hide information and keep it secret, the new world is going to cause you many sleepless nights.

2. You are media.
Any individual can have a thought and then be able to publish that thought in text, images, audio and/or video to the world for free (or close to it).

3. Publishing has changed.
This ties directly into the last point. We may not like it, but WikiLeaks is a publisher of content and a media channel.

4. Information travels fast.
Legal or not. It's no longer about crisis management of better public relations, we have shifted to the real-time Web.

5. Decentralization is real.
While WikiLeaks has passed the massive amount of content over to some major newspaper media outlets to turn the information into snackable content for the mass public, the structure and organization of WikiLeaks points to a new regime. The new company is (and can be) a decentralized organization -one that runs on a handful of laptops and smartphones. They are a credible competitor. The idea of a few people working from their local Tim Hortons when compared to another business with a fixed address and infrastructure used to be seen as both laughable and unprofessional. No more.

6. Credible Anonymity.
This will become one of the biggest trends we will see in the digital channels. Think about it this way: When reading a customer review on Amazon about a book, who would you trust more: Sarah P. from Chelsea, Que., or an anonymous reviewer who says he works for one of the biggest book publishers in the world and that he reads three to four books a month, but can't identify himself because the book he is reviewing is from a competitor? I would choose the anonymous bookworm. For all we know, Sarah from Chelsea is a lunatic who walks the streets with Kleenex boxes for shoes. Who do we know at WikiLeaks? What do we really know about Julian Assange? Even with these pending criminal charges, does that make the content they are publishing any less credible? As social media allows individuals to open up, publish their lives and share everything, there will be many other places where anonymity will prevail, and the content will be as (if not more) credible than the content where full disclosure is happening.

7. We are not ready.
The shocking part of WikiLeaks is how everybody else (those who do not understand Internet culture) is reacting to it. They are not used to this type of organization. They are not used to the way it looks. They are not used to the way it feels. It's awkward and because of that, it feels strange and threatening. It validates that we are not ready for the massive changes that are happening and that will continue to happen

With all of this in mind, can't we look to the ongoing WikiLeaks saga as an amazing opportunity for businesses to listen, understand, grow and adapt? These are all strong indicators of the future trends we are about to see in corporate culture.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Seven+lessons+WikiLeaks+teaches+about+business/4006867/story.html#ixzz1A4nBNOs6Seven lessons WikiLeaks teaches us about new business