Just watched a great 4 minute video on YouTube highlighting Best Buy’s use of Web 2.0 tools to help retail employees brainstorm ideas and deliver better service to customers. I have a lot of respect for Best Buy and have worked with them in the past.

Best Buy management understand that the nature of work is changing. It has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time-pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile and less dependent on geography. A growing number of firms are decentralizing decision-making functions, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies which empower employees to communicate easily and openly with people inside and outside the firm. In doing so, they are creating new corporate meritocracy that is sweeping away the hierarchical silos in its path and connecting internal teams to a wealth of external networks.

For Brad Anderson, Best Buy’s CEO, supervision and even management in the old sense is outdated. He notes: “The Net Geners we hire have enormous knowledge, unprecedented information, and facility with tools that in some areas is superior their seniors.” So the job of management is more to create the context whereby they can be successful, rather than to supervise them.

Every company should be thinking along these lines.