Author: JP

I’m one of those people who likes the Max de Pree definition of leadership:

• The first job of a leader is to articulate strategy and vision.
• The second and last is to say thank you.
• In between, a leader should be a servant and a debtor to the led.

De Pree’s definition, which forms the basis for his works on servant leadership, resonate well with my personal spiritual beliefs, leaving me with fewer conflicts in life.
I’m also one of those people who believes in “nurture” far more than “nature”; I truly believe that given the right environment, training, opportunity and motivation, anyone can do almost anything.

Given these values and beliefs, I’ve tended to prefer management styles that use mentoring and coaching methods to train and empower, rather than stentorian or authoritarian approaches, or for that matter spoon-fed prescription. I think it is important to teach people to discover their potential, to be able to live up to that potential and then to extend it.

As a result, I’m always on the lookout for tools and techniques that improve my capacity to mentor and coach people. So I thought it was time to review what something like Facebook could do in this respect, speaking from an enterprise perspective. How could Facebook help?

For many years I’ve been looking for a way to simplify role-driven induction, such that I can

• list all the committees a person should belong to
• list all the “meetings” a person should attend
• list all the people a person should normally interact with, staff as well as customers
• list all the applications a person should use
• list all the “permissions” and authorisation levels a person needs
• list all the intranet web sites a person should visit

Of course, I can do all this now. Yes, but not that accurately. IF I use something like Facebook, I can get so much better at doing this. Today, I have to use formal organisation charts and job descriptions to create an artificial model of what the person should do, and then try and overlay that with real-world mentoring and coaching so as to bridge the gulf between theory and practice. I guess it’s a bit like driving a car (incidentally something I don’t know how to do!). Theory is what you need to pass the test, and practice keeps you alive, even gets you from A to B traffic permitting.

With Facebook, I can capture the real-life interactions of a person in an organisation. Whom he connects with, what groups he joins, what events he goes to, whom he converses with, exchanges communications with, what applications he uses, which ones he doesn’t use, what he reads, to a certain extent even why he reads something. Over time, these real-life interactions allow me to model the role far more effectively than I can today.

Over time, I can create a template for every given role. I can try and construct a baseline structure and look at variations between people, see whether those variations improve performance or not. Learn from those variations and pass that learning to the people performing the roles. Find out, for example, who are the “professional meeting attenders” and genuinely and dispassionately work out whether they’re bane or boon. Who the lone wolfs are. Maybe even get some Gladwellian Tipping-Point classifications for the staff.

You can see how the templates could get richer and richer over time, as we add learning and extend the population and timescale.  In turn, the templates form a rich basis for role induction, both for grad hires as well as for laterals. It’s almost as if you can create an unmanned cockpit and dashboard and headphones and everything for a given role, then transfer people into it as needed. Provide a really rich context and structure for what a person actually does in a given role.

When we are able to do this, we can spend far more time on the more valuable bits of human and career development, looking at a person’s communications style, approach to teamwork, to performance evaluation, to conflict resolution, even to goal-setting and refining.

[An aside. I am not interested in reducing standard deviation in performance. I am far more interested in exploring ad exploiting the things that make a person different and distinctive, by simplifying the boring things. Assembly line thinking has no role to play in 21st century services. Or education. Or healthcare.]

When we can capture a person’s interactions patterns on an objective and unemotional basis, we are also able to form the basis for something else, something that I will cover in my next post. Let me leave you with a taster, a teaser:

Human interactions have a cost and a value, both within the enterprise as well as beyond the enterprise. If we are able to price and value interactions on an individual basis, even crudely, we are able to create far better feedback loops than we’ve ever had. As the population covered grows, we are able to bring in collaborative filtering processes, ratings and recommendations, really get engaged on a Wisdom Of Crowds and democratised innovation model.

But first we have to be able to capture the population and their interactions. Objectively. Unemotionally.

I’m not a particularly jingoistic person. I’ve heard and seen too much damage done in the name of “national pride”. I’m not a particular lover of passports either, believing that they’ve become bureaucratic barriers over the years, rather than the leave-to-wander-unfettered that they originally represented.

Notwithstanding all that, I’ve held on to my passport and nationality of birth; I’d prefer to think of my stance as dignity rather than jingoism.

When I was growing up, I’d hear the national anthem regularly; every film I watched ended, for some reason, with the national anthem. I loved the tune and the words, probably even more so in knowing that it had been written by Tagore. I felt we’d lost something when the tradition died.

There are still some places where I hear national anthems, usually at sporting events. Too often, many in the audience don’t appear to know the words for their own national anthem, and tend to trivialise the occasions, especially when it’s the opponents’ anthem.

With all this in mind, I was strangely touched by this video, probably released to coincide with India turning 60 last week.

More than anything else, what the video did for me is to remind me that we can be dignified without being overly jingoistic. And for that I am grateful to the makers of the video, and to my sister for pointing it out to me.

…this video by Simon Willison is a good place to start.

Incidentally, the way I got to the video is probably the way I’m going to get to many things in the future. I was in Facebook, used Blog Friends to get to Chris Messina’s Ma.gnolia, read a very interesting article on Identitu.de by Dan York, and while reading that saw the reference to the Simon Willison screencast (something I missed because I was recuperating in hospital when it came out).

While doing all this, I also found Aswath Rao’s blog, somewhere I intend to spend a little time. Soon.

We need to get used to this process. Some place in cyberspace you go to regularly, a place that supports your reading the blogs of people you trust and like, your friends. A way of following the recommendations that your friends make, particularly about things you’re interested in. A way of selecting from those recommendations those which you intend to do something about.

Lower search and discovery costs. Persistent and shareable processes. Patterns I can study and learn from. I like what I see.

There was a time when I was happy with enterprise budgeting processes and their underlying technology support. That time was thirty years ago, before I ever worked for an enterprise. [And that’s probably why I have so much time for Sig and Thingamy. Disclosure: I have no stock in Thingamy. Or any other company for that matter, save the ones I have worked for or am working for.]

So many places have nothing that approximates to project accounting yet they try and account for projects. So many places have nothing that approximates to multi-year planning, yet they try and account for multiple years and across year boundaries. So many places operate in multiple timezones and jurisdictions with multiple accounting standards and conventions, even if they claim to be using the same one. So many places have a habit of nesting cost centre charges, creating this monstrous concept called allocation cycles. So many places have people arguing till the cows come home about the allocation process, allocation keys, the amount allocated….. while all the time being completely unable to isolate the costs being allocated.

Sometimes I think that many people avoid getting into any form of management in order to avoid becoming spreadsheet jockeys; spreadsheet jockeys riding blindfolded through treacle while mounted on imaginary horses. I can’t blame them.

I’m no accountant, I want to keep things simple. Tell me how much money I can spend, as if it’s a credit limit on a card. Let me spend it on the people, things and processes I need, in order that I can keep the promises I make. At the end of each month, send me a statement of expenditure for that “card”. If I run more than one cost centre, then give me more than one “card”. If I run a P/L, then let me receive money into that “card” account as well. If I have the right to an overdraft, then let me know how much, and by when I need to pay it off. What’s frontloaded, what’s not. What the early termination penalties are.

And don’t let me charge one card account with another. No smoke. No mirrors. No nesting of allocations.

And all cash. No mumbo jumbo. No enterprise kiting.

That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what I’ve never had.

So, when I saw justgiving as an application on Facebook, it made me think. Shouldn’t that be how budgets work in an enterprise? Let the P/L holder “justgive” money to the “causes” he or she wants to support. Constrained by their available balance. Let the “causeholder” run the cause, equivalent to a project at a time. When multiple P/Ls want to support a particular enterprise “cause”, they can.

Sure we have to solve for other problems, like how to deal with overheads. In fact we need to go further, we need to understand far more about how we fund shared infrastructure, shared within an enterprise and shared beyond the enterprise as well.

But we need to start somewhere, and one place that needs attention is the way projects get funded and accounted for.