When HBS foolishly chose not to offer him tenure ten years later, I persuaded him to join me at Diamond, where he ended up becoming my boss again. Calling John "quite bright" is along the lines of describing Tom Brady as a "pretty good quarterback." If you are at all interested in how technology and strategy fit together, John is someone you would best pay attention to.

John Sviokla's blog. As part of my work as a DiamondCluster Fellow I've spent a lot of time talking with their vice-chairman and Global Managing Director of Innovation and Research John Sviokla and listening to his presentations. We've also produced a few episodes of a podcast together. Prior to DiamondCluster (a consulting firm that merges technology and strategy consulting) John was a professor at Harvard Business School (not when I was there as I recall). He's quite bright and helps me understand big businesses and organizations.

John has recently started blogging at a somewhat regular pace (a new long post every day or so). Given the disclaimer that I have a financial interest in DiamondCluster, that I do consulting for them, that I talked with John about his blog a few weeks ago as this was starting, and that he pointed to me today when writing about Motorola wikis, etc., etc., I have to tell you this because I think I'd be doing my readers a disservice if I didn't: John Sviokla's new blog is really worth reading. He covers technology and business in a way that will help people in both worlds. He brings interesting perspectives that remind you of those moments in business school when after 60 minutes of discussing a case in class it all starts making sense -- there's a way of looking at things I hadn't considered.

His blog is "Sviokla's Context" and it has an RSS feed.

John is trying to add his voice to the blogosphere. I think it's a welcome addition. A nice sign of the times as a blog may be pushing aside the white paper at a major consulting firm. [Dan Bricklin on John Sviokla]

You must read ...

The New York Times Magazine, December 4, "Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep." By Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, etc.).

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 challenge the notion that collaboration will increase simply because of the availability of a new set of interrelated tools, or Web 2.0. This is the same trap that allowed thousands to think of e-learning as a fast and cheap alternative to other options, when in fact it is a complex and viable approach, but not always fast, nor easy, especially when you want quality outcomes. Good elearning requires a shift in operating culture. Likewise, collaboration requires a cultural shift...

I believe there is a great deal of potential to distributed collaboration. I'd go so far as to say it will be a required competence and essential business/organization activity. It will be facilitated to some extent by tools. But it won't happen without us increasing our skills, practices and intentions for collaboration.

Here's one angle into this: People need to gain power (and be rewarded/recognized as powerful) for sharing information vs. hoarding it. When you become an information sharer, you have to be searching constantly for more information to share. You can't stop sharing, because then your power disappears (vs. hoarding where your power is mysterious and can be milked for years without actually doing anything). This information has to be valuable, and you will increasingly need to look for it outside of your traditional organizational boundaries. That is when you will see a dramatic shift in listening (and responding) to customers and other audiences. The good news is that this process (especially with blogging and other network-building tools) is underway.

I copied that comment here because I'd really like to get your feedback on it, particularly as it relates to the debate about the new age organization referenced by Regina below. Can you point me to some examples where this process actually occured?

-an organization less like an army (hierarchical, focused on winning) and more like a family/community (collaborative, focused on well-being of members) than today's large organizations;
-better able to deal with complexity;
-has a flexible definition of 'work' that is purposeful and meaningful to its people;
-is accessible, inclusive and diverse;
-is responsive to the communities it operates in;
-is self-managed, innovative and entrepreneurial;
-generates deep mutual respect and trust in its people;
-is resilient and agile, and capable of 'acting in the moment';
-attracts people skilled at collaboration and inclined to work collaboratively;
-has a self-determined, shared set of values;
-is committed to "not being evil";
-is amoeba-like (permeable borders, good sensors, able to change shape when necessary, a strong guiding nucleus, and replicable;
-is attuned to and responsive to customer needs (rather than "trying to sell them something they don't really need or want");
-accommodates needs and conflicting demands of its people, using principles of reciprocity;
-motivates and engages its people;
-cross-pollinates people, ideas, knowledge, points of view;
is transparent and authentic;
-is not location-based or location-dependent;
-uses sustainable, cradle-to-cradle practices, and does more with less;
-engages customers and other partners in design, development and decision-making, to tap into the wisdom of crowds;
-has rotating leadership, with leaders who see where the future is going before others do, and inspires others to act on that vision, and who are able to translate the complexity around them into simple truths that have meaning, direction and predictability (rather than encouraging the cult of leadership and the messiah complex of many of today's leaders);
-accommodates and leverages the skills and qualities of women;
-finds and clears away obstacles that prevent its people from doing their best;
-learns from nature;
-teaches people to communicate extraordinarily well, and encourages authentic, powerful conversations;
-recognizes our responsibility to leave a legacy for our children, and pays attention to them and learns from them

As far back as Jethro and Moses in Exodus, we've applied hierarchy to bring complexity under control. Many have characterized Jethro as the world's first management consultant. One of the reasons that hierarchy works so well in organizational settings is that is addresses the problem of information overload on managers, where middle managers serve to consolidate and route information through the hierarchy.

However, computers are not people and hierarchy is not the only, or necessarily the best, solution to information management problems. Reed, along with J.H.Salzer and D.D. Clark, wrote a seminal paper in the early days of the design of ARPANET and TCP/IP called  "End-to-End Arguments in System Design" that laid out the reasons that hierarchical solutions were a bad idea in designing a network of the scale and complexity envisioned for the ARPANET. Those design insights were baked into the basic architecture of TCP/IP and are one of the core reasons that the Internet has grown as widely and rapidly as it has. If you hope to understand how the net and network thinking in general will continue to impact the future of work, this had better be one of your starting points. "End-to-End Arguments" is a pretty technical paper, although it is manageable; you might find  "The end of End-to-End?," also by Reed, a better starting point.

More recently, David has been exploring other notions about how markets and technology interact in ways that don't necessarily mesh with our default assumptions. In particular he's done interesting work on why eBay and other internet companies have thrived but handing significant power over to their customers with the notion of Group Forming Networks.

Currently, David is back at MIT at the Media Lab leading a research program on Communications Futures. A good starting point for this work is the program on Viral Communications (pdf) David is doing with Andy Lippman of the Media Lab.

Like other thinkers, the value of looking at what David is up to is twofold. First, the ideas themselves are powerful. Second, watching how someone smart tackles problems can give you insights into how you might tackle other problems more productively.

In the recent news about layoffs at HP, several sources noted that Alan Kay is among those getting a pink slip. It struck me that Alan is a perfect embodiment of William Gibson's observation that "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." He is the prototypical example of someone who has been living in, and creating, our future for the past 30 years. Taking some time to examine and reflect on his thinking is time well spent.

Alan was one of the scientist/engineers at Xerox PARC. Much of the technology we use and take for granted today traces its lineage to work Alan and his colleagues did in the 1970s at PARC. Alan is an engineer not an academic; more interested in building things than in writing papers for journals. If you ever get an opportunity to hear Alan talk, take it. In the meantime, there are some worthwhile starting points on the web I can recommend:

• The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet. (June 1997). If you have the bandwidth, you might also want to check a streaming video of Alan's acceptance speech for the ACM Turing Award.
• The Power of the Context - Draper Award acceptance speech.
• Computers, Networks, and Education.
• Revealing the Elephant: The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education.

 Alan is also fond of aphorisms. Two of my favorites and among his best known are "the best way to predict the future is to invent it," and "point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

So, maybe it would be fruitful for companies to rethink how they define jobs or assign job titles. Perhaps, rather than saying "you work in technical support" or "you are a marketing person" they should uncover the frame through which their employee or potential employee views the world and place him or her in the loosely-defined work boundary that best fits them. Of course, that requires rethinking how we partition out work.

This past week, I have run across three different sources that brought these types of boundary battles back to mind. The first is the concept of "productive friction" as explained by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown in their book The Only Sustainable Edge. The second was the use of "collaborative sessions" in product design, as described by Sasha Verhage on the blog Boxes and Arrows (found via CPH127). The third was Tom Peters' directive to include designers and women, for example, in decision making in his Change This! Re-imagine Manifesto.

All of these sources speak to the need of getting out of the rut of throwing the same old people at problems and expecting to get something other than the same old solutions. Heterogenous groups may be more difficult to manage, but the results could be more creative and effective.

Basically, this article boils down to being able to manage of the dilemma of short vs. long term growth. This really is not a new business challenge. These are the typical dilemmas senior management teams are dealing with every day. (If you have quarterly reviews with your shareholders like we did at Oskar/Vodafone, you quickly learn that short term results are as important as the long term results. I don't think that will ever change...)

This dilemma seems as old as the hills to me and there is no either or solution. It is a both and scenario for executive teams. You have to be able to do both even though they may seem inherently contradictory. You have to also able to show and prove to boards that you encompass an overall "systems perspective" in how you are approaching your short and long term results. Boards want to see the connected picture and it is the senior's team job to help them see it. (At every quarterly board meeting at Oskar, each member of the executive team reported results and long range views for their areas which provided an overall longer term company view.)

Our perspective at the Work Design Collaborative and Future of Work (my home base) is that the future isn't a given, that we (all of us together) are creating it every day with the choices that we make, both individually and collectively. So a big part of our focus is on identifying and reporting on those leading-edge examples to help everyone else make more informed choices.

Now, by way of introduction, Charlie Grantham and I (that's the "we" and "our" that I keep referring to) came together about four years ago to build a small think tank (so small that Charlie calls it a thought pool) designed to help organizations achieve the holy grail of integrating and coordinating three critical functions (and assets) that typically don't get along with each other very well (if at all). You can check out our bios on the Future of Work website, at www.thefutureofwork.net/principals.html.

Those functions are, not surprisingly, Human Resources, Information Technology, and Corporate Real Estate/Facilities Management. We believed then, and are convinced now, that effective strategic integration of those three areas can reduce the cost of operations and workforce support by 30% or more while creating work environments that attract and retain the best and brightest talent.

That may sound like Nirvana, and hype, but its true. Today we know organizations that have achieved cost savings in excess of 40%.

But the future of work is about a whole lot more than cost cutting. The real, and long-lasting, benefits of embracing new work patterns, adopting alternative workplace strategies, and leveraging new workforce values and expectations have a lot more to do with attracting, retaining, and leveraging creative talent.

We know that's going to be THE theme of the decade as the global economy becomes more and more focused on creativity, innovation, and knowledge work - and as knowledge workers become more and more "in charge" of their own careers.

There's a big workforce shortage staring us in the face as the Boomers retire and shift to part-time independent careers, as our educational system continues to ignore the needs of the Information Age, and as the economy heats up. Oh, and by the way, those talented knowledge workers have a whole new set of expectations and values that don't include being loyal corporate citizens any more.

I'll be writing a lot more about those issues, challenges, and opportunities over the coming weeks and months. And Charlie will chime in occasionally as well. We're convinced there is a revolution underway, and we want to help our clients and readers not only prepare for it, but lead it.

So stay tuned for a series of thought pieces and provocative points of view on what the future of work might look like - and what I at least hope it will look like (which is not always the same thing).