Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
Dave Winer may work best with a river of news approach to RSS feeds, but I seem to fall more into the "compost heap of knowledge" school. I finally got around to an item from Tom Peters' blog from earlier this month, which pointed at a Sunday New York Times article that never reached the top of my stack that particular weekend. Peters declares that it "may be the best article on business strategy I've ever read." Granted that Peters does have a predisposition for hyperbole, I think he's on to something this time and I would second his advice to "read every damn word in the article." You should also make the effort to read Tom's take on the article as well, which begins:
You simply don't beat NEBRASKA 70-10. And a lightly regarded QB doesn't pass for 643 yards against Kansas State—before being pulled early in the 4th quarter. And you sure as hell don't do all this in Division 1-A with a coach who topped out as a bench-rider during his junior year in high school in Cody, WY. [tompeters! ]
The article is a feature piece on the unorthodox coaching strategies and success of Mike Leach, head football coach at Texas Tech. It's a very different riff on the relationship between strategy, leadership, and talent than you usually find. Leach and Texas Tech don't get first or second crack at the best talent. Not when you you've got UT and Texas A&M to compete with for starters. Here's how one NFL Coach summed it up:
Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."
I'm a huge advocate of getting the best possible talent as a starting point, but Leach offers a pointed reminder that what you do with talent is more important. And it's much more than simply cheering them on to do better than they think they are able. It's also about digging deep into the real depths of strategy. Go read the article. For extra credit, go read what Peters has to say. Then put both of them down and think about it.
"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." Paul Saffo
Last month I had an opportunity to listen to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future speak at the CIO Magazine CIO|06 The Year Ahead conference in Phoenix. I was there as part of CIO's Enterprise Value Award Process Review Board and as a facilitator for several of the breakout sessions. Paul was the MC for the 3-day event and his opening talk offered his rules for forecasting. They're worth having handy if you find yourself in a position to have to make some bets on what might happen next.
Before sharing his rules, Saffo made the point that he thinks of himself as a forecaster not a futurist. In his categories, a futurist is an advocate for a particular future, while a forecaster is an observer trying to understand and bound the uncertainties generated by events and trying to frame the choices that might influence the outcomes. Saffo used the following image (actually his image was much nicer - this is from my notes, but you get the idea).
Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator concept video in contrast with Doug Engelbart's Demo Video from 1967. I think what Saffo was driving at was the distinction between setting out a vision that will drive inventors and innovators on the one hand and recognizing that a salient event has occurred that opens up uncertainties that you ought to factor in to your planning.
Rule 2. Overnight successes come out of twenty years of failure. If you're not paying attention, you're going to be surprised a lot. This is where Saffo began to offer his take on the role of S-curve kinds of phenomena and how to account for them in your planning processes. Two points that I took away here. One is that there early stages of these curves is when you typically have the most leverage, if you can find a curve that will make it to the knee. Nothing terribly new there. The second, which I hadn't thought about as much, was the difference in planning errors depending on where you were in the curve. I'm used to thinking only in terms of the tendency to overestimate how fast things will happen in the early stages of development. I've been less tuned in to the equally likely tendency to underestimate speed and demand changes past the tipping point. BTW, one of Saffo's specific observations relative to this rule was that he's paying more attention to Robotics as potentially the next big thing.
Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you've lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay "How to stop worrying and love the internet."
Alan Kay has talked about this in the context of why we've had more success at dealing with smallpox than with AIDS. If you are dealing with something that is operating on exponential terms, then the rate of growth matters as much or more than the slope at any instant in time. Given our tendency to project on a linear basis our tendency to over or under predict actually depends greatly on when/where you make that projection. With smallpox, the growth rate/infection rate is so fast that by the time you make any projection you are likely to be over predicting. With a slow growing epidemic such as AIDS, early stage linear projections will under predict. The corollary, of course, is that the surprise factor in slow-growing exponential phenomena is much higher.
Rule 4. Hunt for prodromes. Learned a new word. For you non-medical types, a prodrome or prodroma is an early symptom or leading indicator. This is William Gibson's observation that the "future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
Rule 5. Be indifferent. Don't confuse your desire for a particular outcome with its likelihood.
Rule 6. Tell a story or, better, draw a map. Trying to package your insights into a story (or scenario if you need to justify your consulting rates) helps reveal gaps, risks, and opportunities present in the events you are trying to understand. It can also help you get a better grasp on the potential wild cards. Saffo was more keen on the value of trying to find a way to capture your insights into something more graphical/visual. The value there is that those representations can help you highlight important relationships more easily and they raise the possibility of revealing 'whitespace' where you might find important opportunities to exploit or risks to minimize.
Rule 7. Prove yourself wrong. The essential wisdom of the scientific method. Understand and resist the natural human tendencies to believe. Be careful not to rely on a single element of strong information. Look for lots of pieces of weak information that collectively reinforce your insights. Your search for strong information should be for that one piece of evidence that proves you wrong. Look for the one thing that will make you look stupid if someone else brings it up after you've gone public.
It was a well spent morning listening to Paul, as was the opportunity to interact during the breaks.
Imagine for a moment that you’re the newly-appointed CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You are standing at a podium in the company cafeteria, dressed in your brand-new $1500 Brooks Brothers suit. You’re holding your first open meeting with your new company’s employees.
You’ve just delivered a few opening remarks about how pleased you are to have joined the organization, and how much you’re looking forward to working with everyone. Now you turn to the staff with a smile and say, “So, what’s on your minds? What can I tell you about myself and my vision for the company?”
And the first question (from a 30-something kid in khakis and a sweater) is:
“What makes you worth a million and a half a year when I’m only getting paid $50,000?”
One of the blogs I've been reading on a provisional basis recently is "Inside Higher Ed." It provides an interesting contrast to the Chronicle of Higher Ed'sWired Campus blog. Both offer valuable perspective on the life of knowledge work and knowledge workers that goes well beyond their specific focus on the world of higher education.
In a column from November, Scott McLemee reflects on a 1959 essay by the sociologist C. Wright Mills "On Intellectual Craftsmanship." You can get your hands on a copy by buying a copy of Mills's The Sociological Imagination. At the core of Mills's recommendations is the notion of maintaining a file or journal, which ought to sound quite familiar. His description is worth sharing at length:
In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies underway and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it to directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture 'fringe-thoughts': various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experiences.
You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experience is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.
The primary value of today's tools and technologies for blogging, wikis, and the like is that they eliminate technical and usability barriers to maintaining and investing in the kind of long-lived knowledge asset that Mills is describing. Secondarily, these tools make it easier and more productive to engage in the kind of active reflection and learning Mills talks about.
What the tools don't do is provide the discipline and support structures to help you keep at the long-term investment in becoming a better knowledge worker. Or provide a nice, neat ROI argument that you can bring to your CIO or CEO.
Hylton Joliffe alerted me to a great piece in the latest issue of Newsweek on the "secret sauce" in Google's management practices ("Google: Ten Golden Rules"). It's a great recipe for leveraging the talent in your knowledge workers. I wrote about the same issue briefly just last week at the Future of Work blog, stimulated mostly by Intel CEO Paul Otellini's new insights into Google as a recently appointed Google director ("Intel's Inside Scoop on Google"). Getting the most out of your knowledge workers is clearly the key to success in the future. And Google's a terrific role model. And for a more comprehensive Google story, be sure to check out the December 5 issue of Business Week ("Googling for Gold ").
I just posted this note over at my own Future of Work weblog but wanted to share it with FutureTense devotees as well.
I am very pleased that several of the Future of Work corporate members (Forest City Covington, Agilent, Boeing, and IBM) and the Business Community Centertm concept that Charlie Grantham and I are promoting are mentioned in the December 12 issue of Business Week ("The Easiest Commute of All" - paid subscription required to access), now available online and scheduled to be in print on newsstands everywhere on Monday, December 5.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple's famous 
Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you've lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay "
