That idea isn’t going to work.

Why? In a nutshell, social network-based communication is primarily organized around the concept of a “pull” medium — that is, a medium where individuals subscribe to whichever information sources they prefer and find useful. Traditional business processes, on the other hand, use “push” communications, where whoever created the information gets to decide whom it’s most important to. Simply put, the two parties don’t gibe.

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of work in our era has changed. Most people now have jobs based on non-routine work, where the predefined and fixed roles of business process do not reach.

I recently wrote a report as part of my activities in GigaOM Research, entitled “Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them” (subscription required). In the report, I argue that we are drifting away from a business-process defined culture and towards a social network-shaped, cooperative one.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Above we see the variance between process-oriented organizational cultures and network-oriented ones. I consider this part of the transition from post-modern (1970-2005) to what I’ll call post-normal (2005-present and beyond) economic eras. These cultures also differ in the nature of social affiliation, with a loosening of the bonds that tie people together in cooperative cultures contrasted with collaborative ones. People in cooperative organizations will have a higher number on connections, but the proportion of those that are strong ties decreases relative to collaborative cultures.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Some corporate cultures are stuck even farther back in time because they are based on competition. I don’t mean competing with others in the marketplace, like Toyota competing with BMW. I am talking about a corporate culture based on zero-sum competition among workers, where one person’s advancement is someone else’s demotion. These are cultures strongly based on authority-based decision-making, and really are a holdover from the late modern era: the late industrial era.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

In the report, I discuss the “fit” of different psychological profiles, or archetypes, in these cultures. For example, the Entrepreneur archetype (see above) fits well in collaborative and competitive cultures, and fits the entrepreneurial culture perfectly. But Entrepreneurs won’t like working in a purely traditional, “cooperative” culture, because they like to lead collectives that are managed through consensus. A cooperative organization is too loose for them: It’s a connective, and is based on laissez-faire decision making.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

This is the debut of the 3C model — competitive, collaborative, and cooperative. It’s a psychosocial model of organizational culture, and I hope it helps address some key issues in organizational dynamics in organizations today as social technologies and practices are being adopted. Marshal McLuhan said, “we make our tools, and they shape us.” Keeping that in mind, we see the change that social network-based communication is causing.

Businesses are not making these changes on a whim or because individuals are made happier by cooperative work relationships. The fast-and-loose business is most in sync with the digital realities of today’s world, although most companies are still operating principally in a more traditional mode, and may even have a healthy dose of the “frozen-and-immobile” at the core. Nonetheless, businesses must move towards a more cooperative work environment because in doing so they will successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, digitally focused world. Older cultures that cling to traditional business processes will not.

To read the full report, click here (subscription required).

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user ShellVacationsHospitality.

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The new features are together referred to under the Organizations rubric. They include a way to organize employees into teams; visibility for a high-level executive to see what members of all teams are up to; the ability to hide certain teams from the rest of the company; unified inboxes and task lists for people on multiple teams, and roles for IT and other administrators to monitor use and set security and access policies.

The Asana office in San Francisco.

Asana itself is small, with 40 employees. Perched on the ninth floor of a high-rise building outside of San Francisco’s busy South of Market neighborhood, it’s removed from the hustle and bustle. Working at Asana comes with perks, including yoga and skills coaching. Moskovitz and Rosenstein carry no titles other than founders.

If Asana succeeds in penetrating the enterprise, case studies might look back on the company’s way of doing things and suggest that other ambitious startups follow its lead (and, of course, use the Asana software, as Asana does internally). For now, though, the difference between the Asana setting and the corporate world is stark.

Moskovitz and Rosenstein, as usual, declined to disclose revenue, so it’s hard to assess how well the company is actually doing. To date the company has taken on $38.5 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the Founders Fund and others. Tens of thousands of “teams” — companies or business units — use Asana, including Airbnb, Disqus, Foursquare, Pinterest, and Uber. Fewer than 1,000 pay for it.

As a freemium product, Rosenstein said, you “always prioritize gaining more users and growing the company. It (Asana’s profit-and-loss statement) looks a lot like other big freemium companies — same business model. … We want to instead take the market and have everyone use (Asana) as fast as possible. Revenue will help with that, but growth is our number-one priority.”

Everything is going according to plan for Asana, then. But as for getting boatloads of companies to pay for the service and making the company profitable, it’s unclear just how long that will take.

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Based on what it’s seen from its users, the San Francisco startup considers collaboration a really big vertical, cofounder James Tamplin said in an interview.”Many people have tried to build collaborative text editors like Google Docs, but it’s really difficult. Users were using Firebase to synchronize their whole text block, but that’s not as efficient as Google Docs, which just syncs the changes,” he said. Figuring out how to just deal with the deltas and how to handle re-dos and un-dos when multiple people work on the same thing at the same time is a really hard problem.

“We actually replicated a full collaborative text editing library atop Firebase and are open sourcing it [under the MIT license],” he said.

As GigaOM has reported, developers use Firebase to easily create and debug web applications without having to worry about server infrastructure.

If several people are collaborating on a WordPress blog post, for instance, with a a Firepad plug-in, they would be able to work on the same document at the same time, with Firepad tracking edits and enabling re-dos as needed.

Atlassian is using Firepad in a plug-in for Stash, a tool for managing Git code repositories. That add-on lets different team members edit code together. and startup LiveMinutes is using it to build a way to pull content out of Evernote and work with that content collaboratively, Tamplin said.

What Firebase is doing with Firepad is similar to Etherpad, which Google bought in 2009. Firebase competes in a broader sense with companies like Pusher and Pubnub.

Being able to endow apps with collaboration is becoming table stakes for building the next wave of applications,  Tamplin said. “We want the next Twitter or Facebook to be built on Firebase,” he said.

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In an earlier post, I explained how the company is betting on its investment in machine learning and the webscale infrastructure that powers its Bing search engine to fuel its future devices and services. When you consider that any sort of gesture, speech or handwriting-recognition technology incorporates machine learning in order to decipher what human beings are actually doing, saying or writing, it’s easy to see how busy Microsoft has been.

Some of the technology was downright impressive if not occasionally mind-blowing (in theory, at least), while other parts — particularly some of the futuristic tableaus involving hyper-interactivity — seem, frankly, a little annoying. (You can see some examples in the gallery below.)

Showing off: Consumer tech

Microsoft used its TechForum media event to show everything from a speech-recognizing, dual-screen Xbox Live interface (and to hint at forthcoming original, possibly interactive programming from Microsoft) to a research project that allows Kinect to recognize hand gestures in addition to broad movements. The latter would allow for new ways of controlling Kinect-connected devices without controllers or specialized gear (e.g., fake guns) because a gripping (and releasing) motion would replace the press of a button.

Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, said the company used Kinect to teach an elevator in one building when people are planning to board or just standing in front of it conversing. If the elevator senses that someone wants to get on, the door opens automatically without requiring the person to press a button.

And, of course, pretty much all of Bing is the result of machine learning and big data technologies. Qi Lu, president of the Online Services Division, showed off all sorts of Bing capabilities, including one that surfaces reviews or other information from respected voices in the specific fields about which a user is searching. He said that capability requires searching “trillions of pieces of web data” to determine who’s influential and whether their content is of high quality.

The whole event took place in Microsoft’s new Envisioning Center, which tries to simulate what our work and home lives will be like a decade or more out. What’s Microsoft’s vision? Everything — from the LED bulbs to the omnipresent screens to the stove burners — is digital, connected and equipped with sensors, and 3-D printers sit on every desk. It’s everything the 8 million apps we have today are trying to be, only, well, convenient.

Showing off: Enterprise tech

For the business users, Microsoft demonstrated the machine-learning-based Flash Fill feature in Excel 2013, as well as a research project for indexing structured data sets available on Bing and then having Excel automatically recommend them based on the data someone is already working with. PowerPivot, a BI extension for Excel, can now handle 100 million rows of data in-memory versus its old limit of 1 million rows — allowing users to prove models before deploying on a larger scale using SQL Server and new performance-boosting in-memory, columnar store and compression capabilities.

Microsoft is also working on a workspace environment called DataLab that lets users share data, models, experiments and workflows. Technical Fellow Dave Campbell said the goal is to reduce the need for armies of skilled data experts by letting them publish their work for broader consumption — just like what happened with applications years ago. Some of these — such as Microsoft’s own Synonyms Search tool for figuring out what search terms are often associated with each other — will eventually make their way into the Windows Azure Data Marketplace.

We also saw research projects focused on using machine learning to identify in real time faulty microchip wafers (or, in theory, anything) as they traverse the production line and an application that analyzes petabytes of web data in order to determine how viral content spreads across the web. At Microsoft TechFest event the following day (which I didn’t attend), the company apparently showed off even more research projects in this same vein of fancy visualization and interfaces belying some serious data processing.

On the collaboration front, Microsoft trotted out its Lync video-conferencing platform that also lets users collaborate on documents use virtual ink to write messages. The latter appears particularly useful for creating virtual whiteboards, especially when Perceptive Pixel screens are involved. When the meeting is done, Office Division President Kurt DelBene said, everything saves to the cloud and can be shared with whoever needs it.

If I had one takeaway from TechForum, it’s that I wouldn’t want to be any legacy technology company right now — be it HP, IBM, Sony, Dell or even Apple — trying to ride a skyrocketing innovation curve while also having to maintain a multibillion-dollar collection of legacy businesses. Gun to my head, though, Microsoft wouldn’t be a bad choice.

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Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

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With that in mind, we invite GigaOM readers to share their thoughts on which of the key social-technology and business-culture forces will be most disruptive in the enterprise. Fill out the survey below to let us know which trends smart vendors can best harness to gain revenue and market share.

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The rest, as they say, is history. Writely went on to become the foundation the foundation of Google Docs. Schillace went on to lead just about every product that falls under the Google Apps umbrella, leave for a stint to launch a new company, then come back as a member of the Google Ventures team. Box, well, it’s flush with cash and set for a 2014 IPO.

Sam Schillace (Credit: Google Ventures)

But although their paths diverged, Schillace and Levie would find each other again. In 2011, while still with Google Ventures, Schillace joined Box’s technical advisory board along with then-Facebook VP Jonathan Heiliger, LinkedIn SVP Kevin Scott, then-Flipboard CTO Arthur van Hoff and some other notable Silicon Valley names. (Schillace calls himself “the dumb guy to make all the other guys seem even smarter.”) It was good camaraderie and a lot of fun, Schillace said, and “once a quarter they’d bring all their really hard technical problems to you.”

Then, in mid-2012, Box COO Dan Levin asked Schillace to come on as the company’s vice president of engineering. He actually didn’t want to take the job initially, but when he realized the decision was really between continuing to have conversations with the smart people around him — both on the advisory board and within Box itself — he knew what he had to do. ”I really liked the people and I really liked the team,” Schillace told me.

He officially joined the company in August 2012, and is now bringing his considerable expertise to bear on Box’s very pressing technical challenges. With crushing data volumes and millions of users, Schillace explained, “There’s a little bit of a success disaster we’re having to deal with here.”

Laying the groundwork at Google

It’s a good thing Schillace has some experience dealing with some difficult issues, in both technology and business. When he started Writely, even his co-founders thought it was a stupid idea; web browsers then were so primitive. There was no documentation, no standardization (even around how they handled HTML), and browsers were slow and underpowered. The only solution was to “just poke at the browser until it behaves,” Schillace joked.

“The crown jewel of hard problems … is around collaboration,” he explained. Although the Google Docs team eventually rebuilt Writely as a native word processor, Schillace and Writely co-founder Steve Newman didn’t have that luxury. Because the browsers all behaved differently, they had to write some “hairy” logic to merge changes on the server and then send it back down to the user in a format that particular browser could understand. Sometimes, they’d run into what Schillace calls “edit fights,” where a browser would actually fight itself.

“It was totally Wild West,” he said. “We had to invent a lot of stuff even to get it to even work a little.”

Credit: Google

Schillace also knows how to overcome, or at least manage, the non-technical issues that come as a company grows from a small team into something much, much larger. When he started at Google, his team was about 40 people. By the time he left, it had grown to 600.

But despite its size, Schillace said, Docs was never a huge priority at Google because of its minimal effect on the company’s bottom line.

“The only reason we managed to make Docs happen in the first place, really, was Eric Schmidt was such a big supporter and we were kind of tyrants because we were so feral and so much in the startup mentality,” he acknowledged.

Hellbent on earning every dollar possible from their contracts, Schillace and his team worried much more about continuous execution than about following the rules. “Every once in a while we’d get in trouble and Eric would protect us and get us out of it,” he said. “We just sort of shoved through it and made it happen.”

Fast-forward a few years and there’s “not a lot of room for the feral programmer at Google anymore,” Schillace explained. Because the company is so big, everything you do is under extreme scrutiny and it becomes impossible to recover from even small mistakes (e.g., Wave and Buzz) because there’s so much exposure. And as part of such a large company working on such large projects, it can become hard for individuals to stand out or to see the direct effects of their work.

Building a better Box …

Box, Schillace said, feels a lot like Google did when he first came on board there. It’s a big enough company (with nearly 700 employees) that everyone is doing real work, but not so big that all the problems have been solved. He thinks there’s a good two to four years of really fun stuff to work on, and the company can bring in smart people from places like Facebook and Google to help find the solutions.

For Schillace personally, Box’s size also fits in with his current state of mind: He’s done with the emotional roller coaster of startups after spending more than 20 years building them. “When you’re initially a programmer, you learn to program with 10 fingers,” he said. “And then maybe if you go to management you learn to program with 10 people. And then if you go to the level of management that I’m at, you get to program with 10 teams of people.”

But works that’s “fun” isn’t necessarily work that’s easy. Technologically, he said, the hardest problems at Box are dealing with the company’s scale. From a data volume perspective, it’s growing at 10 percent a month, which means it’s doubling roughly every seven months and growing by about a factor of four every year. Box’s storage capacity is into the multiple petabytes now, Schillace said.

On the infrastructure side, that means Box is always working on the next generation storage of scale-out storage architecture. It takes between 6 and 12 months to build one, he explained, but they only last about 18 to 24 months.

In the case of Box, though, its focus on real-time collaboration means mere storage capacity isn’t enough when designing a database. That’s why Schillace’s team ends up building a lot of its own technology to deal with the company’s unique needs. It’s able to buy a few things off the shelf and use some available open source tools, but, as Schillace said, “every company has its own set of tradeoffs you have to make, so you basically end up having to build this stuff yourself.”

And as Box signs up more deals with companies that have tens of thousands of users — sometimes more — it has to make changes around caching and metadata to account for that many people potentially sharing a folder or a document. ”That does strange things to your product,” Schillace explained. “… All complicated by the fact that everything’s moving all the time.”

A sample of Box’s large-enterprise users.

“The other technical problem is, ‘what’s the next generation of the web app itself,’” he noted. “Where do we go with that and what does that need to be in order to be successful?” At Box, for example, the user interface is starting to show signs of stress because of the number of users, meaning its search has to become more functional and certain pop-up menus and lists are getting too big to present.

… and re-imagining content for the mobile world

But even beyond building out Box’s current product to handle the company’s scale, a bigger challenge might be figuring out how to build a collaboration application in the age of powerful mobile devices and cloud computing. Schillace said he’s very proud of Google Apps (the couple of times a week he still gets thanked for it probably doesn’t hurt the pride), but it was essentially just a matter of building traditional office applications of the desktop world for the web, and he thinks Google’s anti-desktop dogma is a bit simplistic.

“The interesting challenge is to have one foot in many worlds at once,” Schillace said — mobile, web and desktop, consumer and enterprise. ”We’re just at the beginning of this tidal wave of enterprise going from on-premise to the cloud … . I think all the boundaries and functionalities of that stack are still up for grabs.”

A debate at Box, he said, is whether to build a full suite of editing applications a la Google Docs, or whether that’s “chasing the last war.” Rather Schillace is inclined to look at what a company like Evernote is doing to enable creation and collaboration “outside of that paradigm of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation.”

All of this speaks to the evolution of documents. They used to be more like artifacts — things like properly formatted business letters with high latency, high transaction costs and “all this artifice around the structure of the document,” Schillace explained. Then the web came, reducing the focus on formatting and adding a collaborative element, but keeping in place a certain level or linearity. With the advent of Evernote and the erstwhile Google Wave, documents have become more abstract, mixing images, text, communications, web pages and whatever else onto a digital canvass.

“Underlying all of this, what’s really going on is the business interaction you want to have,” Schillace said. “The point of the document is you usually either record something for yourself or to have an interaction with another human being. And I think we can gradually start peeling away layers of artifice and try to get down to the raw core of that interaction.”

He thinks mobile devices with their small screens, portability and omnipresence in our lives might present the biggest challenge for achieving this goal. Users probably need a native way of interacting with documents that doesn’t involve opening a Word document and trying to read and edit it on a tiny keyboard. The right test, according to Schillace, might be if a co-worker has a question, “could I answer it while I was standing in line at the store in 30 seconds?”

If someone is going to hit a homerun with the ideal mobile collaboration experience, building it probably won’t come easy and might not look too much like anything we’ve seen before. If there’s one thing Schillace has learned building six startups over 23 years, it’s that good entrepreneurs spot obvious, but futuristic opportunities and start building, knowing they “personally are going to suffer an enormous amount of pain because the world is not ready.”

“The really radical stuff always looks stupid and crazy, ” Schillace said, “but the real disruptions always look like that.”

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Polycom dubs the showcase software for its better collaboration RealPresence CloudAxis. The gist of it is that someone can now connect people who use Skype, with those on FaceTime or even Facebook all in a browser window. Once connected, those users can talk, provide a video and share screens, links and chat. As someone who works with people who are on at least four different services being able to see everyone online is awesome. Even better is the ability to connect with those people without undergoing the lengthy dialog that looks something like this:

Me: This is too much to type. Can we go voice?
Kevin: Sure
Me: Skype? hangout? phone?
Kevin: Facetime?
Me: Arghhh

Most of us have probably been there. But if I have the RealPresence CloudAxis software, after I ask for voice and Kevin says Sure, I can just shoot him a link and forgo some painful “What app should we use?” conversation. And while GigaOM almost never uses WebEx (or GoToMeeting) this service could work well for those type of scenarios since it allows for screen-sharing, all without downloading a client onto the call recipient’s desktop.

Just sign into your presence-aware related services to generate your contacts.

I can’t wait to try it. I spend a lot of time on informal and planned conference calls every day and the experience is one that drives me nuts. If I’m not trying to update Java or download a client to get some fancy collaboration suite to work, I’m negotiating with my colleagues about which server they want to use. And I don’t even want to say how much time a week I spend dialing into conference calls. Interoperability across presence, having built-in collaboration tools like chat and screen sharing and being able to launch the call from a link, all sound pretty sweet to me.

You can start a call with people from a variety of services.

The beta launches Monday, and Polycom plans to sell a corporate license for the technology as well as license it to service providers who can then offer it to consumers as part of a telecommunications package. And while I’m really excited about the product, I think the sales model is far too old-fashioned to work in today’s bring your own device and consumer-oriented world.

I asked if Polycom plans to release some type of limited app for home office workers or individuals to buy if their corporate office won’t shell out for it, mostly because I think this is software I’d love to use. The answer was vague. It won’t now, but maybe one day it would.

With this software Polycom is emphasizing how much it’s willing to change to keep current with a lot of VoIP and consumer technology that’s taking over the conferencing and collaboration space, but I think it needs to change its sales strategy as well. Because if this software does what Polycom says it does, I’d pay for it even if my company wants to stick with WebEx.

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The New York-based company said it’s launching its first product vertical specifically around Apple. Quirky also said it will team up with design-centric shopping site Fab to design and bring to market a new line of accessories for the recently-announced iPhone 5.

Since 2009, Quirky has enabled an online community to work with the company’s in-house engineers and designers to create two consumer products every week.  As part of its partnership with Fab, aspiring inventors can submit ideas for iPhone 5 accessories to Quirky starting today and then members of both Quirky and Fab will vote on their favorite ideas.

In 72 hours, the company said, the first products will be ready to go into production. Fab will start selling the new accessories on its site starting Sept. 19, two days before the iPhone 5 ships (more details here.)

In addition to the Fab partnership, Quirky founder Ben Kaufman said in a blog post that the company is launching a new Apple-focused vertical, including a commitment to launch a new Apple accessory a week and give Apple fans new collaboration tools.

From experience, I can say with great conviction that the world of Apple is home to some of the most aggressive, passionate, tenacious and super-knowledgeable community members around.

So, beginning today, we are committing to launch one brand new accessory product per week, with the help of Apple fans around the world. Beyond that, we will work to produce compelling content, and great tools that Apple folks can use to hang out and talk about their favorite products and dream accessories.

When Quirky announced its funding last week, Kaufman said they planned to boost community engagement with a new focus on verticals. This move – a smart one given just how rabid Apple fans tend to be – is the first step toward realizing that strategy.

Especially considering the amount of money Quirky has raised (and the high level support it’s receiving – Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker and Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss just joined its board) it’s nice to see the company launching interesting partnerships and initiatives.

Launching an Apple-focused vertical also takes Kaufman back to his roots a bit given that the 25-year-old first made a name for himself as an inventor and entrepreneur by creating Mophie, the popular brand of iPhone and iPod products.

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