Graham Lauren writes about the need for true innovation in organizations, and how social tools like blogs and wikis create the right conditions for it:

Among management thinkers such as Gary Hamel, author of The Future of Management, there is now emerging a consensus about the potential for innovation-driven transformation within the organisation to be unleashed by emerging ‘Web 2.0’-based tools, such as blogs and wikis. The failure of established companies to innovate, he and others contend, can lie simply in the fact that those who need most to be connected to bring their ideas to life don’t yet know each other exist.

Indeed, Hamel contends that, with its potential for undermining existing authority structures within organisations, over the coming years, management as currently practised will largely be replaced by that exercised through the new social technologies of the web. Where it may be “hard to imagine an organization in which authority is a fluid commodity, flowing smoothly toward leaders who add value and away from those who don’t … in the online world, power and influence are the product of de facto leadership, rather than de jure appointments. Hierarchies get built from the bottom-up, rather than from the top down.”