Day: 24 March 2006

Don’t cross the river if you can’t swim the tide

Don’t try denying livin’ on the other side……America, Don’t Cross The River

 

Great band. Not just about a Horse with No Name. Incidentally, I’d always wondered why an American band that made original music, writing it, playing it, singing it, would call themselves America. And it was only recently I found out that they were all children of US servicemen stationed in the UK, and it all made sense.

Reading The Man In the Doorway’s recent post, and reading Steven Johnson’s article in Time (see previous post), got me thinking again.

You “organise” within a firm to achieve a small number of things:

  • to prioritise the allocation of resources towards achieving some agreed goals
  • to handle conflicts within matrices
  • to deal with issues escalated up a hierarchy
  • to monitor and review progress against plan
  • to refine the allocation process as a result of feedback
  • to refine the allocation process as a result of new stimuli

When you do this 19th century “organising”, one of the things you rely on is the flow of uncorrupted information. Fundamentally what you are doing is making decisions on a plethora of things because of your position in the hierarchy.

Which is fine when it works. Time for an uncommercial break, “a word from our sponsor”.

Ten of my favourite Drucker short quotes:

  • Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things
  • It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right
  • Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
  • So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
  • We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn
  • In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from
  • There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
  • The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question
  • No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.
  • Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation

Leadership and learning. Two things that don’t happen too well in hierarchies.

Ok, we’re back. Where were we? Oh yes, Malc’s post on magical numbers. In my comment I pointed people at George Miller’s famous paper, always worth a read, which you can find here.

And with that at the back of my mind, I was reading Steven Johnson’s blog, and a few more scales dropped from my eyes.

I spoke before of organisational hierarchies being up-down and networks being sideways and Conway’s Law and the implications for social software.

And until today I didn’t really get one thing.

When people complain to me or criticise blogs and wikis and IM, the usual reason they complain is because they don’t like the “non-work” element in such things. And my usual response has been that I’m not prepared to control or tabulate watercooler, restroom or coffeeshop conversations either.

I just didn’t realise they don’t like those things either. The people who object to social software actually object to social anything at work. Except under their control.

Don’t try denyin’ livin’ on the other side.

Now ask yourself this question: In the offices of the future, which skill set will today’s kids draw upon in their day-to-day tasks?

I love Steven Johnson. The headline above is from an article he’s published in Time Magazine, which you can find here. It says everything I wanted to say about learning from our children, only better. I particularly like the following: (all emphases mine)

“Any time a new technology comes along, an implicit cost-benefit analysis gets made. The trouble with the current debate about Generation M is that we have a phalanx of experts lined up to measure the costs but only a vague, intuitive sense of the benefits.”

And

“this dramatic spike in digital participation is, for the most part, sharpening the minds of Generation M, not dumbing them down. But it’s hard to see that improvement without the right yardstick. The skills they’re developing are not trivial. ”

And

“They’re learning to analyze complex systems with many interacting variables, to master new interfaces, to find and validate information in vast databases, to build and maintain extensive social networks crossing both virtual and real-world environments, to adapt existing technology to new uses. And they’re learning all this in their spare time–for fun!”

Read it. Read all of it. Because tomorrow’s staff, customers, competitors and CEOs are all Generation M. Well, maybe just the odd CIO as well.

And if we want to attract them, retain them, develop and release their potential, then we need to design systems that will help them do that.

Right now, we are still looking at how better to design bridles and bits while the metamorphosis of the car is complete.

I guess I could say “legacy costs”. Or “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Or “Henry Ford’s faster horses”.