Here’s Another Workplace Futures Conference Worth Considering

May 13, 2009 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Economic Development, Management, Technology Management, Work Design

I’d like to encourage anyone interested in the future of work to consider attending the Worktech(tm)09 Conference in New York City on May 20. It’s being held at the Time and Life Building at 1271 Avenue of the Americas.

Our across-the-pond colleague and fellow futurist/author Phillip Ross, CEO of Cordless Group in the U.K., is behind Worktech, which has been held annually for the last several years. He’s an expert on the impact of new technologies on work and the workplace - and a very dynamic speaker.

Dan Johnson, head of global CRE Workplace planning for Accenture, and a member of our Workplace Innovation and Performance Network, will also be a speaker. He’ll be describing Accenture’s new workplace strategy and highlighting a case study from Accenture’s Tokyo operations.

There’s lots more in both speakers and networking opportunities.

You can register for the conference here, and download a pdf brochure about the agenda and speakers here.

Unfortunately New York is too far away from the west coast for me to get there, but I’d love to hear about the program from any of you who do attend. It looks like a terrific contemporary review of what’s happening in the workplace (and beyond) right now.

Small Businesses’ Natural Innovators

March 23, 2009 at 8:53 am · Filed under Culture, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Talent Management, Technology Management, Web 2.0

Intuit and Emergent Research recently released a research brief on small business innovation.

The research focuses on the key factors that drive, enable and amplify small business innovation.  The report is part of the ongoing Intuit Future of Small Business research series and the first of several research briefs on small business innovation.

A key finding of the research is that small businesses have six inherent attributes that make them natural innovators.  These are:

• Personal passion: Personally invested, most small business owners are willing to try new approaches to make their business more successful.
• Customer connection: A deep and direct relationship with the market and customers helps small businesses understand customer needs, identify new opportunities, and fix problems quickly and efficiently.
• Agility and adaptation: Unlike large corporations, small businesses can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and implement new business practices.
• Experimentation and improvisation: When pursuing new opportunities, many small business owners and managers aren’t afraid to experiment and improvise, accepting failure as part of the path to success.
• Resource limitations: Small businesses are adept at doing more with less. And these resource constraints lend to their innovative mindset.
• Information sharing and collaboration: Small businesses traditionally rely on strong social networks to share information and inspire innovative thinking. Online social networks extend and amplify this practice.

These attributes provide small businesses with the ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions and identify and exploit new opportunities.

The research also shows that small business innovation is not limited to tech or high growth firms, but used broadly by small businesses of all sizes and in all sectors of the economy.

Interestingly enough, one of the research findings is that small business owners and managers do not consider themselves or their business innovative.  Most feel that innovation is something that only large corporations or venture backed companies do.

But despite not describing or seeing themselves this way, most small businesses are natural and continuous innovators who strive to improve their businesses and provide increased value to their customers.

The entire report and related materials are available at www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness.

Simple “Why’s” Regarding Enterprise 2.0

February 16, 2009 at 1:53 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management

With thanks to Luis Suarez of IBM Spain for pointing to Laurie Buczek of Intel outlining the company’s reasons and path towards the large-scale adoption of social computing

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• Employees Want to Put a Face to a Name

• Too much time is lost to find people & information to do your job

• Getting work done effectively in globally dispersed teams is challenging

• New hires want to have a way to integrate into Intel faster

• Restructuring and employee redeployment impacts Organizational Health

• We reinvent the wheel over and over again

• We learn more via on the job training, then we do in a classroom

• We need to deliver radical innovation in a mature company

• When the mature workforce starts to retire, they carry knowledge out the door

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IBM on Web 2.0 Used for Business

January 17, 2009 at 3:03 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

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Tim O’Reilly & Co Come to New York: Web 2.0 Gets Real

September 20, 2008 at 2:35 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, Management, Web 2.0, social networks, social tools

CNet’s Caroline McCarthy has captured the essence of the Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week that was underway as Wall Street events and corporate failures hurricaned through global financial markets, the economy and prompted urgent actions by Hank Paulson and company in Washington. We all lived a week that I couldn’t imagine a script writer envisioing.

With 2 decades experience  in the technology world being part of,  and watching, technology companies both aspire and fall, (starting with PRODIGY the online service), I couldn’t help but wonder as I walked the Web 2.0 Expo halls how many of these companies will be around this time next year? 

I counted 150 plus Web 2.0 Expo booths including the Long Tail Pavilion.  Among them were  a handful of the now global brands and companies that through decades have both created the computers and applications that laid the foundation for the Web, and impress by adapting and sustaining through changing economic and technology times:  Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.  Then there were the next generation companies–Amazon, eBay and Salesforce– who drove new business models leveraging the Web, and continue to do so in the case of Amazon and Salesforce by promoting utility computing via the cloud. What lessons they all offer the Long Tail pavilion participants if only their management will take a moment to look around and back.

In retrospect I wish I had tallied the number of times I saw “social” plastered on banners and product feature lists. Given the themes in a recent piece colleague Victoria Axelrod and I published  about “Open Net∞WORKing Organizations” (for India based Effective Executive Magazine), CNET writer Caroline  McCarthy captured my observation that labelling your product “social” in this environment is not enough.  Priority one is business models and technology solutions that deliver demonstrable results to enterprises:

“Indeed, most of the buzzed-about companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, as with the Demo and TechCrunch50 events earlier this month, were enterprise-oriented services rather than free consumer applications. There’s a real question as to whether companies will spring for these products in a time of tightening budgets, but ultimately, it’s a positive sign: business models, not cute fads, are at the forefront.” 

Tim O’Reilly, in his Thursday morning “Web Meets World” keynote,  translated this message into a call for individual action, specifically that people in the room “build technology that solves real problems and makes a difference.” 

Next year,  2009 it will be 20 years since Tim Berner’s Lee invented the World Wide Web,  transforming the way we work and business is conducted. Connsidering the technology themes emerging from Web 2.0 Expo, in the context of financial industry crises and reorganization, and Tim O”Reilly’s call to code to good purpose, it seems we have indeed entered both a new, more grown up,  eyes wide open and wiser world for the technology business.  Have we?  I wonder what you think.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Visual Networking & Telepresence:The Future According to Cisco’s John Chambers

September 4, 2008 at 9:19 am · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Videoconferencing, Web Commuting

Did anyone else hear John Chambers interviewed on CNBC Wednesday September 3?  The video is available here.

In response to a question from Australian telecommunications company Telstra’s CEO Saul Eslake about new ways for companies to grow organically, Chambers talked about the growth in video, telepresence and visual networking and it’s potential to increase productivity. 

Chambers made the case that the load on Cisco’s network grew 400% last year with rising use of video a key factor.  He forecasts generally 200-300% network load growth with  increased use of video and telepresence. 

Cisco’s CEO argued that while there has been a lull in U.S. productivity growth following the 3-5% during 1996-2004, he forecasts increases going forward driven by the Internet’s second wave built around visual networking and collaborative capabilities like wikis, blogs, discussion forums and telepresence.

Clearly given Cisco’s WebEx and other collaboration tools acquisitions Chamber’s promoting telepresence has a clear business agenda. Still the discussion about use of telepresence and visual networking in the context of a challenging high fuel costs, slow growth economic environment makes the case for less physical travel and increased technology enabled collaboration compelling.

John Chamber’s forecasts make Celine Roque’s recent post here about Are the reasons against telecommuting valid? a must read especially her closing call to action:

“..these obstacles should be seen as challenges and opportunities for businesses and their employees to grow together and actually make things work.”

No doubt the technology to support remote collaboration will continue to arrive and to compete enterprises must figure how to leverage and adapt organizationally. 

~ Jenny Ambrozek

It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects.  At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most. 

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip ... ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And today I am thinking about "the future of work".

It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.

David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization.  He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) .  We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems.  And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.

But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism.  As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment.  A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).

There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now.  A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles).  It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".

Generally, I agree but with reservations.  Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).

Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.  Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

[ Snip ... ] 

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.

Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”

And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.

Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

[ Snip ... }

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.

And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.

But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

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