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.
One of my colleagues at work recently asked which bloggers I might recommend that also deal with the future of work and the changes technology continues to elicit in organizations. His question was well-timed as there are several fine thinkers who have taken to blogging in the last several months that have much to add to this ongoing conversation.
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.
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]
In one of my columns at Enterprise Systems Journal, I started to explore a nagging concern about why organizations have realized less of the potential of technology to support knowledge work than they could. In a nutshell, my hypothesis is that most organizations have not thought through what organizational roles need to be created to best leverage the technology. In my column I made the argument that we need the knowledge economy equivalent of tool-and-die makers. You can find the full column at ESJ:
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.
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.
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.
Back in December I wrote a column for the Enterprise Systems Journal on the notion of triangulation as a key data collection and analysis strategy that is increasingly relevant in an economy characterized by information abundance. My central point was that:
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.
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?”
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.
Several weeks ago I posted some thoughts on what Charlie Grantham and I call the “ReFormation of Work” (Parts One, Two, and Three are available here, here, and here). I was pleased to see the reactions and comments that our admittedly “far out” thoughts stimulated. Not everyone agreed with us but we clearly touched some raw nerves.
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 happens when you combine the disciplines of instructional design, corporate communications, work design and incentive systems? You get human performance technology, a professional practice which seeks to build excellent performance in the workplace. I first ran into HPT, as it is known, via an announcement for an upcoming Ragan conference: Communicating with the Workforce of the 21st Century. I thought it sounded intriguing, so I got in touch with Dr. Diane Gayeski, the chair of the conference, a professor in the field and a practicing HPT consultant.
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.
This research asks the question: "Do managers of flexible workers manage in a different way than traditionally and then therefore have a different competence profile?"
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?
There is a moment in the movie "Ray" that highlights the challenge and potential of managing knowledge work and knowledge workers well. Ray Charles is in the studio auditioning for Ahmet Ertegun, his producer-to-be at Atlantic Records. Ray has been demonstrating his craft in his ability to mimic the styles of other singers and Ahmet challenges him to use his own voice. The result is Ray's first hit single "Mess Around."
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.
Back in May, I wrote about how organizations can shortchange themselves by pigeonholing employees into tightly defined job categories:
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.
Arnold Kling at Econolog offers a few hypotheses on why 20 somethings aren't being used to their full intelligence level (see posts here and here to follow along) His last one struck me:
It takes a lot of effort to challenge employees. It's less risky and less time-consuming to give them scut work.
It got me wondering: If we believe in the hypothesis that managers are overworked, is this responsible for them simply just not having the time to nurture and challenge their employees? (be they 25 or 55) Is this not the equivalent of eating your seed cord (unhappy employees leave)?
At least in my experience as a manager in the professional services industry (PR agency), I spent the vast amount of my time managing client relationships vs. my team. Billable hours were the focus, and, given we were always understaffed (this was the late 90s boom years in Silicon Valley), I have to admit my junior staff didn't get the amount of attention from me they probably needed. It was sink or swim, learn by osmosis. Some thrived, others left. And in the end, I left too, completely frustrated and burned out.
The GILD Blog linked to me the other day on my BNET Blog and I think what they are doing is quite a good idea and yet another interesting application for the future of blogs within a business - as a follow-up to training. It is a blog for participants who attend the GILD program (Global Institute of Leadership Development) which is part of Linkage - a very big conferencing and publishing company. (I actually have no intelligence on the program's effectiveness, etc. - I just think the follow-up approach makes alot of sense.)
The premise of the blog is looking at the program learning from a variety of angles; it gives those who attended a place to come back to, to discuss their learnings, to process how they applying learnings and skills back at work, and to maybe express their struggles and frustrations with the dilemmas associated with being leaders in today's organizations.
(I actually recommended this same idea to a client after we designed a very large leadership development initiative. The client was extremely concerned about the follow-through application piece after the "training." If you don't use it, you lose it?? We recommended "learning pods" where employees could meet in-person and on-line to discuss what they had implemented and how it all worked in practice , or didn't, etc. (And of course these days you could podcast follow-up messages, lecturettes, stories to amplify points, key learnings, etc.) We also recommended implementing a blog to let the managers continue to collaborate on the program learning in their daily life post training. Unfortunately because of other organizational stuff the recommendations are in limbo...but the client thought these were pretty neat and cool approaches to test out.)
A side note: The GILD Blog also points us to two other blogs - one that references companies that are doing "corporate blogging" and the other that references CEOs who blog. I believe this could definitely be helpful for job candidates when making a decision where to work - do I want to work for the company and/or a CEO that strives for transparency via blogging?? It seems like it is a progressive management practice that can no longer be ignored.
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).
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
