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About a month ago the summary of McKinsey’s research on the use of the Web and social computing tools in the knowledge-based workplace made the rounds of the blogosphere and the Web. It brought to mind an article from the January 2006 survey “Knowledge and the Company” in The Economist titled “The New Organisation” to which I have pointed several times over the past two years.
Why did that particular article come to mind ? In the context of McKinsey’s research summary, for two reasons.
The first because the article started out with several paragraphs that took us back to the 50’s and William H. Whyte’s famous “The Organization Man“, noting that basically organizational structures and basic management techniques haven’t changed much since then, whilst juxtaposing that with the increasingly obvious facts that with the Web, web services and tools and mobile devices many (if not most) knowledge workers are continuously connected and ever-more densely interlinked … today we euphemistically call it ‘networked’.
The second because towards the end of the article The New Organisation McKinsey and Mercer (two high-end blue-ribbon management consulting firms) were cited as demonstrating rapidly growing interest in, and awareness of, the emerging new landscape for networked knowledge work.
In my previous posts pointing to the Economist article I have somewhat sarcastically noted that these firms knew a good market space to grow into when they smelled it (sarcastically because I have been aware of and following practitioners who have been talking and writing about this for almost ten years now) … the granddaddy of them all Stafford Beer, and people like Bill Ives, Euan Semple, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Stan Davis, Verna Allee, Chris Meyer, Jim Ware, Arie de Geus, Tom Stewart, Hubert St. Onge, Tom Davenport, Jim McGee, Dion Hinchcliffe, Gary Hamel, Larry Prusak, Dave Snowden, Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, Niall Cook, Lee Bryant, Matthew Hodgson, Patti Anklam, Jenny Ambrozek, Anne Marie McEwan, Ross Dawson, Cindy Gordon, Marc Prensky, Karen Stephenson, Valdis Krebs, Michel Bauwens, Nancy White, Dan Rasmus, Robert Johansen, Michael Schrage, Tom Malone, Jessica Lipnack, Luis Suarez, and on and on and on. If I know you and I’ve left you out, please forgive me; there’s so many it will get boring if I keep thinking of and listing them (it probably already has). Shameful egotistical plug … I count myself as one of them, albeit probably on the farm team.
So … given the arrival and settling into place of what’s called Web 2.0, I think that the McKinsey summary mirrors what many leading thinkers have been saying for some time about the impact of the interactive participative Web on the workplace. It’s useful, as it offers a fairly concise overview of the core issues associated with the shifts in leadership, management and basic organizational effectiveness management; and because it’s McKinsey, it provides an imprimatur of legitimacy to the ongoing discussion of and refinement of strategic and practical implementation issues related to this massive era-defining shift in the way work is perceived, designed and carried out.
To be fair, people at McKinsey have also been paying attention to knowledge work for quite a while now. Anyone remember the name Brooks Manville - closely associated with McKinsey’s knowledge management practice back in the day ?
To help us all understand even more clearly, here’s a video clip explaining McKinsey’s Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.
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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:
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.
As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, The AppGap last week hosted a discussion called “5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done.” Moderated by AppGap contributor Anita Campbell, who was joined by leading commentators Jonathan Fields and John Jantsch, the webinar explored and shared insights on handling workloads that, in many cases, have only increased and gotten more stressful in these challenging economic times.
The major takeaways the discussion sought to explore:
See the end of this post to access the recording of the great conversation - hit play to hear it in place or download it as a podcast for later listening.
We hope you find it of interest and want to take the opportunity to point you to several other webinars The AppGap has hosted: Should your Business be friends with Facebook? from last June and a broad discussion on The Future of Work from early last year.
[This note is cross-posted from the Future of Work blog]
There’s a great new story just published today in Business Week detailing how some organizations are turning to “telecommuting” and flexible work programs as a way to reduce costs and retain employees in these difficult times.
The article (”Telecommuting: Once a Perk, Now a Necessity“), by Michelle Conlin (editor of BW’s Working Life Department), highlights how SCAN Health Plan, BDO Seidman, and Capital One are using flexible work options to cut real estate costs significantly.
The really encouraging side of the story, though, is how many employees relish the reduction in commute times and the rebalancing of their lives (no surprise to us, but still a benefit that’s not widely enough recognized).
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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Via Hylton Jolliffe of Beeline Labs, a link to this May 2008 gabfest. Actually, I remember writing something about it at the time … perhaps The Wisdom of the Organization Crowd ?
It seems clear to me that most of these "25 Stretch Goals For Management" can arguably be informed by the emergent organizing principle I call "wirearchy". For example, all of the following are elements of management that are addressed in the article "Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?".
It also seems clear that we will, collectively, not go back to the existing models of management, although the process of transition to these new goals is really only still in the early days. As I re-read the list of stretch goals I am reminded of Peter Vaill’s book "Learning as a Way of Being - Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent Whitewater" and I end up thinking that any competent OD (organizational development) practitioner will have been talking to organization / management clients about these issues for at least the last decade. That is the core message of "Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?" … that the transformation of management is available and accessible from organizational development principles but probably needs some re-framing.
By the way, I don’t like the implications of the term "moonshots" used in Hamel’s post. I do not see these issues as "moonshots" but rather as an intensification and amplification of changes that have been underway for some time now but that many or most organizations are struggling with because of legacy structures and the accompanying assumptions about how activities are and should be managed.
What do you think ? Are networks here to stay and will their impact on traditional management continue to accumulate ? Will social computing be the medium that helps these necessary changes take place, or will the changes be forced onto traditional management whilst they go kicking and screaming, full of resistance, into the future ?
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25 Stretch Goals For Management
In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century.
The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge; distinguished social commentators including Kevin Kelly, James Surowiecki and Shoshana Zuboff; and a number of progressive CEOs, including Terri Kelly from WL Gore, Vineet Nayar from HCL Technologies, and John Mackey from Whole Foods.
Before arriving, each of the 35 attendees participated in an hour-long interview. The double-barreled question:
What is it about the way large organizations are currently managed that will most imperil their ability to thrive in the decades ahead; and given this, what fundamental changes will be needed in management principles, processes and practices?
[ Snip ... ]
First, that "management" — the tools and methods we use to mobilize resources to productive ends — is one of humankind’s most important social technologies.
Second, that the "management model" that predominates in most large organizations is now seriously out-of-date. This model has its roots in the late 19th century, and was invented to solve one overriding problem: how to get semi-skilled human beings to do the same things over and over again, with perfect replicability and ever-increasing efficiency. This was, and is, an important problem, but it is not the most important challenge for today’s organizations.
Third, that we must, therefore, reinvent management in ways that will make large organizations fundamentally more adaptable, more innovative and more inspiring places to work — that will, in short, make them as human as the individuals who work within them.
After two days of sometimes contentious deliberations, a set of "moonshots for management" began to emerge. These challenges are described in full in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, and are summarized below:
1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.
6. Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.
12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.
15. Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.
22. Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company’s boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.
25. Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.
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Tags: wirearchy, learning, management 2.0, organizational change
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Last fall, I started thinking out the various roles and approaches of social software vendors. I was intrigued by a conversation with with Duncan MacPherson, co-founder and co-CEO of Pareto Systems and Pareto Platform. Pareto’s web-based subscription model has been augmented with a free social networking platform called my8020.com. my8020.com implements social capabilities within the application:
I thought this was an interesting pick-up on bringing social elements into a niche application. Then this past week I spoke with A.G. Lambert, VP of Saba. Saba, with the Human Capital Institute, published just this last week a research report* on opportunities for adoption of corporate social networking. Currently in Beta, SabaSocial brings social features as those listed above into the context of Saba’s talent management system. Historically an eLearning vendor, Saba purchased Centra in 2005 to become one of the leading vendors of talent management solutions. A key aspect of these systems is that they maintain information about individuals’ skills and courses taken while managing the flow of courseware itself. SabaSocial can build on the richness of these profiles as it adds the social element.
I posted some time ago a taxonomy I borrowed from Tony Byrne, that summarizes the different paths by which technology vendors bring our social sides to life. There are the “pure-play” vendors, Facebook and LinkedIn, that start as standalone social networking sites and are looking to build APIs that corporations can plug into. Next come the social/collaboration vendors (like Jive) that start with the assumption that work is social social networking features and integrate work capabilities (project and task management, groups, discussion forums, and so on) onto their social networking platforms. So this offering of Saba that brings the social element into an enterprise-wide application looks like another signal that there may come a time when the lack of social networking in an application may present the barrier to entry of a product into the market.
It is interesting to see how these two vendors approach the social network integration. It’s not just in the selection of specific social tools to bring to their customers, it’s also in the understanding that networks are how works get done in successful businesses. As MacPherson said when I spoke with him, the social networking mindset embodied in my8020.com is “not to connect with the masses, but to manage my core relationships and make it possible for them to generate business for each other.” In the case of Saba, the social element adds richness to employee profiles and makes critical expertise searches more effective.
“Work is conversation” is a tenet I adopted over fifteen years ago in Digital management workshops based on the work of Werner Erhardt (see interview excerpted from Industry Week of June 1987). Nothing happens outside of speaking and listening. So the advent of social networking — conversational capability — into all the tools we have makes perfect sense. Work happens when ideas are being connected, relationships are being developed, learning and innovation occur, and the right people are found at the right time in the right context.
Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
Among the Web-based tools he's reviewed: Zoho, QuickBase, and TrackVia.
Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”.
The AppGap has hosted a series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers intended to illuminate how new apps and approaches are changing the way we work and help companies and individuals implement better collaboration, project management, and productivity practices and solutions. Access, via the links below, the recordings, each about an hour long, of the discussions.
- 5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done
- Should Your Business be Friends with Facebook
- The Future of Work
Need help in getting organized? Want to keep things from falling through the cracks? Check out this free and simple to use online "To-Do List" called Intuit Task Manager, offered by our sponsor Intuit QuickBase. Sign-up is easy so you can get started with it right away.
Intuit's QuickBase, the sponsor of this blog, has just been named an Editor's Choice by PC Mag. Check out the review which calls QuickBase a "a surprisingly simple and elegant application."
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