The Circle... the Social Business on Steroids!

You probably read a lot of business books.  I do too, but always interspersed with some great fiction. So it's great when a fiction choice merges into one of my favourite business topics... social media.  I've just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers and found it fascinating and frightening in equal measure.

The story follows Mae Holland, who joins the Bay Area campus of The Circle, a global search and social organisation a few years into our future.  To give you an idea of scale, The Circle has already swept up minnows such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and the like through acquisition and is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate as more and more users rely on its services for many aspects of their lives.

Mae's 'onboarding' at The Circle is friendly and frantic and offers a humorous insight into the West Coast start-up culture many of us recognise today.  We follow her (as do a steadily increasing crowd of customers/fans from across the globe) as she learns the ropes and struggles to balance the demands of life on campus with ailing parents and an already strained relationship with a former partner.  After a couple of hiccups, Mae soon becomes immersed in the hyper-social reality that is a job at The Circle, taking on more and more tasks and dedicating more of her time to the organisation.  Every aspect of her daily activities is monitored and shared globally and just when you think it's not possible to share any more... well... no spoilers here.

The Circle offers fascinating insight into everything that's exciting and enticing about the power of social technologies, but, at a time of major media concern re spying and and snooping and the relationship between tech giants and governments across the world, the book also offers some stark warnings about privacy and the implications for the global citizen, as people's reliance on social technologies grows increasingly prevalent.

If, like me, you're fascinated by social business and wonder what the organisations of today could be evolving into, The Circle is essential reading but tells us that, if mishandled, the decades to come could look more like some of the darker chapters of the twentieth century rather than a bright new social future for us all.

Have a read, then we'll work together to try to get social business right.