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.
Earlier this year I wrote a column for the Enterrpise Systems Journal on the linkage between knowledge management efforts and innovation. You can find the column at:
To succeed with knowledge management, organizations should focus on getting better at reinventing the wheel instead of avoiding it.
The rant that provoked this column was in response to the frequent justification of knowledge management efforts on the grounds that "we don't want to reinvent the wheel," which I finally got tired of hearing. It's one of those phrases that sounds like it means something useful until you actually take a look at it.
First, equating "knowledge" with "wheels" gets you on the wrong track by confusing knowledge with something vaguely product-like. I can't think of many knowledge work processes where you could simply take a piece of finished work from elsewhere in the organization and drop it in place. At the very least, you need to understand the current situation and the available knowledge work "thing" well enough to come up with a way to adapt or apply the old thing in a new situation. Any attempt to sidestep that process is guaranteed to lead to trouble. Don't encourage it by laziness in comparing knowledge work deliverables to wheels.
Second, if you are really doing knowledge work, then your customer, be it someone above you in the organizational food chain or a paying customer, is not interested in and will not pay for yesterday's answer. You need to divine their unique perspective and explicitly connect your knowledge work deliverable to that unique situation. The value of having organized access to prior knowledge work deliverables lies in improving the quality and the speed of applying that knowledge as an input to the process at hand, not as a deliverable.
There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard- working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard- working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.
General Erich Von Manstein (1887-1973) on the German Officer Corps
You can also map this quote into the following matrix representation:
One implication certainly is that you want to keep the average IQ up in your organization (setting aside all the limits on accurately measuring or assessing something as complex as intelligence for the moment). My own theory is that it also suggests that you want to keep your organization relatively small to maintain some degree of control over that average IQ. You may also want to keep the distribution of IQ in your organization as tight as possible.
The laziness/diligence dimension is the more interesting of the two in the context of knowledge work organizations. Common organizational practice is biased in favor of diligence, while laziness doesn't get the respect it deserves. Granted, the appearance of blogs such as Slacker Manager is a hopeful sign, as is the recent spate of activity and commentary around the importance of innovation and creative thinking for knowledge based organizations. But our Puritan/Calvinist heritage still dominates reward and evaluation systems. Regardless of the actual importance of thought and reflection to long-term organizational success, you are better off looking busy than looking like you are thinking. Even organizations that exist to promote reflective thought (e.g., universities, research institutes, think tanks) fall into the trap of encouraging diligence at the expense of reflection/laziness.
I don't yet have a fully workable solution to the problem of carving out sufficient and appropriate time for thinking and reflection. More often than not, it gets relegated to plane-time, travel-time, and after-hours time; essentially bypassing the organizational problem. I've found that mind-mapping, either by hand on on the computer, is one form of thinking that can be done in public without triggering unwanted negative perceptions. Setting aside time to maintain some form of journal (whether in the form of a blog or more private diary) is another thinking/reflecting discipline that is both productive and not immediately threatening to the activity police.
Here are some questions I think are worth exploring in this context.
What alternate terms than diligence and laziness could we use to better frame the issue?
How important is it to carve out times and places to engage in visible laziness within organizations?
Is this a problem that needs to be solved at the organizational level? For which types of organization?
What barriers to innovation, if any, does a bias toward diligence create?
Over the course of one year, we will be conducting a survey of organizations that are supporting emergent behavior in the enterprise using social-media tools. The organizations do not need to use wikis per se, but they must be supportive of emergent behavior at the management level. To nominate an organization for this series, please comment here.
When people hear the name Robert Scoble, many think about the groundbreaking blog he wrote for Microsoft before his recent departure for Podtech. From our perspectve, his work for a Microsoft interactive portal called Channel 9 is just as noteworthy. An early innovator in DIY, off-the-cuff video, Scoble trolled the Microsoft campus, capturing scores of staffers in their real-work environments, unscripted, sans handlers, and it was really effective. If Scoble's blog put a human face on the company, Channel 9 presented many others.
That effort continues today on Channel 9, which has developed into a really impressive forum -- incorporating blogs, wikis, videos and polls -- for all sorts of Microsoft watchers. And by tapping so many staffers to participate in this open forum, Channel 9 has enabled Microsoft to support emergence in a really interesting way. Many people you see on Channel 9 are the new, emergent leaders at Microsoft, who now have a direct channel for connecting to the outside world.
The book length version of The Long Tail has now been published. Based on Chris Anderson's seminal Wired article, the book expands and elaborates on the article's thesis that one consequence of network economics is to reset the balance in markets between hits and the rest of the distribution. Anderson also began a blog on the Long Tail as he conducted his research, which has become its own resource on the topic for those interested in it.
In most markets, sales/popularity follows a power curve with a tiny handful of items, "the hits," garnering attention and sales. In physical markets, hits dominate and drive management attention and thinking. In markets that bypass the barriers of the physical, such as Amazon or iTunes, the dominance of hits shrinks. Sales from the tail of the distribution, in aggregate, come to rival sales from the head.
Where the initial Wired article identifies and labels the phenomenon, the book strives to work out the implications. While I think it occasionally oversteps the evidence, on balance it succeeds in opening up the concept and its consequences. I confess I was dubious, although unsurprised, to see Anderson take his long tail lens to Wikipedia. Yet, in the end, his analysis did shed substantive new light on a phenomenon that is more often used as poster child or whipping boy depending on the writer's agenda.
If you have products, services, or ideas that would benefit from finding their market, the Long Tail is a concept you had best understand and The Long Tail is your best starting point. I'm sure it will end up in the head of the sales distribution to Anderson's well-earned benefit. Be smart and make the effort to actually read it and think through its application to your circumstances so that you might benefit as well.
Over the course of one year, we will be conducting a survey of organizations that are supporting emergent behavior in the enterprise using social-media tools. The organizations do not need to use wikis per se, but they must be supportive of emergent behavior at the management level. To nominate an organization for this series, please comment here.
Note: To be fair to the other organizations that we are surveying in this series, I did not consult my Future Tense colleague, Dave Desforges -- a manager at SUN -- for this week's entry. Of course, I hope that Dave will contribute to what we know about Sun's ambitious blogging initiative:
--CEO Jonathan Schwartz is perhaps the best known and most visible CEP blogger today, and he got there the emergent way (he began blogging as COO).
--More than 2,000 SUN employees are blogging today, and you can track some of that activity here.
--The blogging initiative closely resembles I.B.M.'s -- a "inside-out" approach where the company provides a company-wide platform for blogging.
As a recent article in USA Today observed, "businesses talk a lot about becoming more open and transparent, but they will be watching Schwartz's experiment to see how much transparency is feasible in business, where trade secrets are protected and warts hidden." We'll be watching, too, as SUN, IBM and a few others in the technology world conduct the first experiments in large-scale, company-supported blogging.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
