Powerful and disconnected?

Just finished this piece by Shel Israel on the significance of personal involvement in business blogging. As he puts it:

[...] by adding some personal information, it helps me as one of those customers, prospects, co-workers, etc. see a real human inside that labyrinth of organization where you work. [...] I may want to know enough of your personal life to understand that you are a human. [...] As we wrote in naked Conversations, “We live in an age when most people don’t trust large organizations.” But blogging lets us break down the large organizations into real human units of energy and it makes a great deal of difference in how the overall company is perceived.

I’ve been beating the same drum with the things I’ve posted about trust and the individual in conjunction with blogging. Blogging is in many ways symptomatic for a general trend towards individualization, a trend that acknowledges the social component of any kind of human interaction. In that vein the Edelman Trust Barometer released last month found that the trend to rely more readily on peers than on corporate or political leaders continues. “Someone like me” is the person we place the most trust in - a view that makes perfect sense when you think about how leaders in large organizations usually communicate. The distance between them and us makes us assume that they don’t know anything about us and that they have a hidden agenda when talking to us.

Here’s an interesting observation David Brain of Edelman made in an interview with the FT (see here and here):

This year “a person like me” is the most trusted source of information across the EU, North America and Latin America. In the the US trust levels are at 51 per cent and in the UK, Germany and France they average 45 per cent. We believe that the web and the rise of social networks has been a big driver of this. It has had a democratising effect if you like in that the “answers” can now be found to many questions from sources other than the old institutions. I think we are seeing an erosion of deference in all fields.

I’m sure you’ve read more than enough about Web 2.0 with all of its associated hype (I know I have), but even if Brain is quick to draw a connection between trust in peers and the social web the overall trend cannot be overlooked. As technology allows us to connect with virtually everyone we know virtually all the time, and in addition to that to connect to others with whom we share interests, beliefs and passions, we are increasingly fed up with the inflexible, rigid structure of a traditional organization. And we’re especially weary of those at the top of the pyramid because we question the power they posses because they are up there. In our new, “me-centric” organization - the social network - everything else is aligned around us, while a traditional organization ultimately revolves around itself.

One problem is clearly the perceived distance between those in power and us and it is likely the prime reason there are blogging CEOs (if too few). But I wonder if the role of leadership in general is not about to change significantly. Quote Richard Edelman:

The era of the rock star CEO is over - now it is about quiet competence and strong leadership with employees, customers and investors. 

I guess that would make Steve Jobs the last of his kind…