I have eaten more hummus than I care to admit. Really. It’s a bit obscene. The hotel serves it 24 hours a day. They will bring it, and it alone, to your room at any time. No questions asked. I tried to rationalize this by equating it with my peanut butter addiction in the States, but the Middle East makes it so much easier to be a junkie. Try ordering hummus the next time you go to T.G.I. Friday’s (I’ll admit I go there, why can’t you? )

“Hi there, welcome to Friday’s! Can I start you off with our new Buffalo Mac and Cheese Stick Potato Skin Egg Roll Salad?”

“Uhhh, no thanks. Although I have been in the market for a shiny new a stent, would you mind bringing me some hummus instead?”

“I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve anything like that here. ”

“(Sigh)…Fine…I’ll have the Sesame Jack Chicken Tostada Pot Sticker Mini Burgers”

But I had a conversation last night that blew my mind. I went to a restaurant named Cinco De Mayo and the following ensued.

“Hello. What do you want to eat?”

“I would like the Chicken Fajitas and hummus as a starter”

“Fine. You pay cash?”

Now this is what I am talking about! Yes sir, I would like hummus as a starter. I want it for desert too. Hell, I wanna toss it in a glass with some Knob Creek and have myself a Hummus Julep. That’s the taste of freedom is what that is. Yeah I know you think I am some picky American, but it’s _on the menu man_. What would you do? I think you would get the hummus.

So what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0?

I saw a comment in Clearstep today that made me think of this experience. In response to a discussion entitled “Building the Business Case for Enterprise 2.0″, Nial Cook replied with:

My advice: don’t bother trying.
For social software to work, you need to deliver value to the individual before you try and deliver value to the organization. So build an employee case instead. Start by explaining the value that will be delivered to the employee, to other employees as a result of each additional persons’ participation, and then - and only then - the resulting benefits to the business as a whole.

I couldn’t agree more. One of the biggest battles I see beginning to rage is the push to have E2 implementations matter to “Corporate”. To me that doesn’t make any sense. Sure, they need to understand the benefits, but they should also understand that their benefits are byproducts of user benefits. These things work because of users. Not a mandate from Corporate. So focus on defining their value, and their value alone. Conversely, try convincing a normal user of the individual benefits of your latest ERP implementation. It’s sort of hard…

So as Jay and I deploy our various communities and wikis, it’s about getting hummus with your fajitas. It doesn’t make any sense really, but it’s what I want. Answer the questions in this order…What is valuable to the users? And then secondly, how is that valuable to “Corporate”? If you start the other way around, your implementation may need a stent as wel.