How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The title of my post today is a quote from the New Your Times interview with SunGard President and C.E.O Cristóbal Conde titled Structure? The Flatter, the Better by Adam Bryant . The idea of flattening your organization and introducing platforms and cultures that spawn creativity and innovation through coolaboration and social networking tools hits me right where I live! He made many good points throughout the interview but his focus on collaboration was the most noteworthy.

Mr. Conde praised the social platform Yammer for opening up the conversations within his company on a global basis and allowing his teams to share ideas.

I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything. You have to work on the structure of collaboration.    -Cristóbal Conde

On Monday I talked about the evolution of the Social Business and focused on the Project Greenlight effect of managers using social and coolaborative platfrom to surface innovation and to act like movie producers green lighting the best of the best ideas it seems the Mr. Conde sees things in a similar light.

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.   -Cristóbal Conde

Congratulations to Mr. Conde for seeing the upside of structured social networking within the enterprise to drive his company forward.