I've previously mentioned John Sviokla (Sviokla's Context) and Espen Andersen (Applied Abstractions) who were both colleagues at Harvard. There are three other academics/ex-academics who I find particularly cogent on the topic of managing and leading knowledge-based organizations.

David Maister created and taught a course on managing service-based operations during my MBA days; an area that has since grown to become one of the major organizing themes of the curriculum there. Since then, David has gone on to become one of the pre-eminent consultants to professional services organizations. He is blogging at Passion, People and Principles. Although his ostensible focus in on services organizations, the challenges they face make them a laboratory for the kinds of knowledge work issues that all organizations will face. David is also the author of several of the best books on consulting and professional services, including The Trusted Advisor and True Professionalism : The Courage to Care About Your People, Your Clients, and Your Career.

Another Harvard blogger is Andrew McAfee who teaches in the technology and operations management group, which has become the home of the most robust thinking about these topics at Harvard. His blog title, The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Business and Their Leaders, lacks a bit in the snappy department, but the content is first rate. Recently, he has been leading the charge to map out and define the notion of Enterprise 2.0 in places as diverse as the Sloan Management Review and wikipedia.

Over on the West Coast at Stanford, we have Bob Sutton the author of several excellent books, most recently  Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. His blog is Work Matters. Sutton has been collaborating with Jeff Pfeffer, also of Stanford, to promote the practice of evidence-based management, which, like evidence-based medicine,

means finding the best evidence that you can, facing those facts, and acting on those facts – rather than doing what everyone else does, what you have always done, or what you thought was true. It isn’t an excuse for inaction. Leaders of organizations must have the courage to act on the best facts they have right now, and the humility to change what they do as better information is found. [Evidence-Based Management]

Tool-and-Die Makers in a Knowledge Economy

The full potential of tools to support knowledge work remains unrealized

Given the near total independence that most knowledge workers have in organizations, they have been largely left to their own devices in figuring out how to take best advantage of the technology tools we have made available.  That leads to a great deal of wasted potential. Here's the way I described it in the column:

Applying the tool-and-die maker strategy, knowledge organizations should identify individuals particularly adept at applying tool and technology features to simplifying their own work and give them a new goal of improving the productivity and effectiveness of their knowledge-work colleagues. The knowledge work of these “toolsmiths” would be to understand the knowledge work of others and apply Taylor’s principles of scientific management; to observe how knowledge workers currently worked and to identify, design, and deploy new tools and techniques to make it possible to perform the same work with less effort or produce better-quality deliverables on demand

Essentially, we are missing an opportunity for knowledge work productivity by not taking full advantage of designing organizational roles to take full advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of individual knowledge workers.

Get Better at Reinventing the Wheel

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.

The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

Rating: 5 out of 5

Author: Chris Anderson

Year: 2006

Publisher: Hyperion

ISBN: 1401302378

Tags: network-economics strategy

In organizational (and other) settings where you are attempting to make sense of—or draw useful inferences from—a multitude of noisy and conflicting sources, the principles of triangulation offer a workable strategy for developing useful insights in a finite and manageable amount of time.

In navigation, the more widely and evenly dispersed your sightings, the more precisely you can fix your position. Focus your data collection on identifying and targeting multiple sources of input that represent divergent, and possibly conflicting, perspectives. Within an organization, for example, work with supporters and opponents, both active and passive, of a proposed reorganization or systems deployment to develop an implementation strategy. When evaluating and selecting a new application, seek out a wider assortment of potential references, vendors, and analysts. [Trust, Verify, and Triangulate]

Since that column, I've watched several of the recurring discussions (e..g Doc Searls, Eric Norlin, and Kent Newsome) about the changing relations between MSM (Main Stream Media) and new media forms such as blogs. Thinking about the contrasts between information collection and analysis strategies sheds some light on this debate. We used to live in a world with a handful of authoritative sources we learned to trust. With a bit more sophistication we added verify'to trust. Both those strategies work in a world of small numbers of sources, but breakdown in the world of multiple, conflicting, and contradictory sources. Triangulation then emerges as a viable alternative.

Tags: triangulation, gatekeepers

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?”

I am very pleased that several of the Future of Work corporate members (Forest City Covington, Agilent, Boeing, and IBM) and the Business Community Center^tm 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.

In fact, we really do believe that nothing short of a reformation in management practice is required to cope with the changes that face virtually every organization and the entire economy these days.

Specifically, our experience suggests that your future business success depends directly on your ability to understand the shifts that are occurring and to redefine your workforce, workplace, technology, and business strategies accordingly.

What I discovered was a discipline that, while heavy on published theory, has never really caught on as a major business buzz word. Its roots are mainly in military training, and has strongly rationalist process and assumptions behind it. Given this background, HPT has focused on uniform job/performance requirements, quick and efficient training, top-down management and an emphasis on compliance. Adoption of the practice has often stumbled given its “home” inside the corporation: the human resources and/or training department, generally not known for being a center of strategy with a seat at the boardroom (unfairly or not). Add to that multiple departments all trying to prove they have the “keys to performance”, you end up with people tripping over each other; they have little incentive to cooperate. All of these issues are recognized by Dr. Gayeski and other thought leaders in the field. But they stand by the basic premise of HPT that offers so much promise: the ability to improve department and company performance.

Here's the next seven (big caveat: I know these are broad generalizations, and subject to plenty of qualifiers. But that's okay, since I'm not trying to predict an actual future, but rather stimulate conversation and thinking about what the world would be like if these conditions actually become reality):

8. Work will be more collaborative, less individualistic

People will shift their work activities to their core competencies for approximately 80% of their time. Everything else will be handed off to someone with complementary competencies. Individuals themselves will become less ‘vertically integrated’ and grow loosely coupled collaborative networks to meet their needs outside their core competencies. No more "jack of all trades.’" The remaining time will be devoted to learning new skills and competencies.

9. Corporations will morph into confederations with shared liability

Modern corporations are an artificial legal structure created within the past one hundred years to minimize the risk associated with control of large asset bases. As Peter Drucker so aptly notes, they have out lived their usefulness. The assumptions that have underlain their need are not longer valid.

Primary among those assumptions is that large organizations were required to capitalize the investments required in the ownership of the means of production, such as factories. With a shift to more knowledge work this isn’t necessary for a much larger portion of the working population. Confederations of business clusters will instead move to the forefront. They will be held together by strategy, rather than by ownership of assets.

You can see a condensed list of the findings on Ken Thompson's weblog on collaboration and successful bioteaming.

Basically, the bottom line of the study which is not surprising is that managing remotely doesn't require a different set of skills than managing a team of people on-site. My thoughts on this are if you are inherently a good manager here you more than likely will be a good manager there. All that is required is that one be a good manager and good managers know how to be flexible and adjust to their environments (even though this wasn't named as a competence or skill.)

While I agree with the findings, I think this study didn't fully define the gigantic bucket of Leadership compentencies so it is hard to say what was lumped into that category. One of the things that is of crucial importance in managing a remote workforce (and an on-site team as well) is the manager's job of providing "context." There was little talk about "mindset" and helping teams feel connected to the bigger picture, the brand and the culture.

The other thing that helps make managers good managers is making sure they have tools, systems and processes to support them including on-line collaboration tools and software (although not mentioned too much in this article as a method or means of communication) and good information systems.

The other important element when managing remotely is to ratchet up one's powers of listening and reading clues. (You have to do this at the office too but sometimes things are so subtle that when you are not directly seeing someone the subtleties can be missed.)

When managing a team remotely (which I just did having people in Prague, Nicaragua, Boston, Toronto and New York) I had to pay attention to different kinds of clues during phone meetings - silence, tone, energy level towards the project/work and each other.

What are some of your strategies and ideas for managing remotely? What works for you and your teams? Or doesn't?

This pivot point encapsulates key lessons about knowledge work, why it is hard to do, why it is hard to manage, why much of our management thinking is misleading, and what we might do instead.