Colin Powell once said:
โGreat leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.โ
Background
The meme forest fire of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business is blazing wildly across all geographies of opinion.
Weโve got Enterprise 2.0 in one corner with no shortage of opinions and Social Business in the other corner with even more opinion. There are too many blog and article entries to point back to, although I am partial to Cordelia Kroossโ post entitled โ
To Reach Mainstream, We Need to Talk Mainstreamโ.
As Iโve mentioned earlier, there is even a
Quora question/answer/discussion burning finger typing calories.
The โphrase-fatherโ of Enterprise 2.0 has also
weighed in.
My Thoughts
Individuals in roles that are coined community managers, social media/networking/learning leaders, consultants, VCโs, 2.0 bleeding edge personalities et al, can easily drift in between the terms Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. The problem, obviously, is the rest of the
adoption curve. Personally, I donโt think either term resonates with the business and/or executives.
Enterprise 2.0 (although it originally had me at hello) got the ball rolling for all of us. We should be thankful to Andrew McAfee for this, but 2.0 monikers are yesterdayโs pet rock and even I have to evolve and stop using it. Iโve had to explain the term Enterprise 2.0 more often than I would have liked over the past 18 months, and if Iโm doing that too often, then something is definitely not sticking.
Social Business (although a vernacular enhancement) is saddled and thus hampered by the first word โฆ social. We canโt simply tack on the word โsocialโ to business and expect anyone to understand its underlying intention. Yes, I personally get it, but hearing itย for the first time or executives trying to run an organization, it seems to imply that business wasnโt social in the first place. (and it most certainly is)
My Idea
If Colin Powell suggests we should debate, argue and debunk to get to a consensual solution, Iโd say weโve done all that over the past six months or so debating two terms, and not a unifier.
Collaboration.
Letโs call it โCollaborationโ.
As the noun of the word โcollaborateโ, it embodies what Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business strives for, which is people working jointly together to address business, human, customer, employee or societal challenges and opportunities through technology and in person.

Collaboration pays homage to the patois lineage of the Latin term
collaboratus, past participle to the word
collaborare which is signified by the simple phrase โto labour togetherโ.
In an interconnected, networked world filled by countless technologies, and new ones coming afloat each day, we are all โlabouring togetherโ to achieve common understanding of intellect, of ideas, of results, and so on through said technologies.
And โCollaborationโ is something that will make sense to anyone on the adoption curve, regardless of role or title because it is starting with a term they already inherently understand.
โOh, itโs two or more people working together, collaborating on stuff. Yah, I get that.โ
We do have, however, some history to overcome with the term collaboration as it has some pejorative linkage to
Nazi occupation of Europe in World War II and so-called โcollaboratorsโ within the occupied country itself assisting Germany at the time. I believe, nevertheless, that we all can work together (hint hint โฆ collaborate) and overcome any negativity associated with its former association and use Collaboration as the term to describe Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business.
Collaboration.