by frankh
It’s Time to Invert the Management Pyramid
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

As time passes by, people and things change. Now, what if time passes by and people change, but things that should change, don’t?

It is not a stationary relic I’m talking about. I’m talking about the brand new dinosaur on the block – the classical management pyramid. Time has come to dismantle it and adapt to a new evolutionary and unstructured model that leverages the team effect to ensure that companies can lead change rather play catch up or be left behind.

A little rewind might be in order here to make my point. The management pyramid, as we know it, began to take shape around the early 1900s. There were two important factors that influenced the classical (traditional) management school of thought: The Industrial Revolution and the World Wars.

The Industrial Revolution brought along with it the problem of management and the Wars brought with them the solution. In every war there was the General, the man who controlled and commanded. He had ‘managers’ who reported to him; these managers in turn had several ‘assistant managers’ who reported to them, and the whole configuration went on to make the traditional organizational structure, or the Management Pyramid.

[More]

This is a very interesting article. It identifies the need to make organization less centralized. More bottom-up, less top-down. The organizations that can accomplish this with be more innovative. Those that fail will not be competitive.

This will not be easy. But, as with any selective system such as capitalism, the organizations that can more quickly harness innovation and creativity will more rapidly solve complex problems and become more successful.

The last part of the post is particularly important, regarding the task ahead.

Simple as it may sound, the truth is that this is a very tough task. The question we must ask ourselves is whether we have within ourselves the fortitude to deconstruct the traditional power centres so that more emphasis is placed on the troops instead of the General.

Business models have to change. In a football game, there are 22 players but only one has the ball at any particular time. The other 21 are forming a configuration. The open-ended structure we are in is not about the man with the ball, but about the configuration of the other 21 people.

Every forward-thinking organization has to carry out a reality check about its willingness and capacity to unstructure so that it can adapt to the new 22nd century business ecosystem.

So, do we have the vision to look upon our organizations as collaborative and evolutionary life forms that must keep changing along with the marketplace? Do we have the humility to step out of our egos and hand over the mike to our subordinates? Do we possess the courage to unstructure an existing, rigid regime that we have known to work in the past?

We often accept the verdict of the past and slumber into the cushioned inertia of best practices, until the need for change cries out loudly enough to stir us out of our comfort zones. It is time.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by jared
Wanted: Too much news:
[Via Buzzworthy]

Information overload is something people generally try to avoid. But when there’s actual earth-shaking news like the current financial crisis, many people actively seek it out. The New York Times looks at the latest iteration of this phenomenon:
[More]

The key change in today’s world from one even 5 years ago is that finding information is easy today. It used to be that trained professionals, with years of experience were needed to track down important information. They needed to examine lots of journals, catalog the information in arcane ways and generally learn where things were. Now almost anyone can do it.

They provide context, if properly used.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Jay Cross on Twitter:
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
By David Gurteen

Do you still not understand all the fuss over Twitter. Took me a while also but the penny has recently dropped for Jay Cross. See what he has to say.

Twitter provides an instant, real-time connection to the people you want to be connected to.

Credit:: Jay Cross

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by Mr. Kris
Connected – Why is it so hard to get smart people to share?:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

I came across Why is it so hard to get smart people to share? from Gia Lyons via a mention on the actKM mailing list. She covers some of the common downsides to attempting brain dumps from experts. Her notes reflect many of the conversations on this topic.

“There is a brigade charge underway to capture the wisdom (knowledge + experience) of the retiring corporate crowd. The urgency is perhaps driven by the fact that these “wisdom holders” will retire, then turn around and charge their former employers a hefty consulting fee for continuing their services. Not a bad gig if you can get it. But, those who have tried the knowledge management (KM) thing in the past will tell you that this harnessing, leveraging, capturing, harvesting – pick your favorite over-used word – is a hard row to hoe. And for the record, please do not try to harness or harvest my knowledge. I am not a horse, nor a corn crop.”

Back before knowledge management was a business term, expert systems work included the Knowledge Engineer role (and still does). This person was responsible for developing appropriate representations of the body of knowledge in the expert system. And quite often this included interviewing the experts to try to elucidate their rules and expertise: knowledge harvesting. While it works okay, there were always elements that either could not be discovered or could not be articulated by these means. As a result, expert systems never quite got to the point of perfection predicted by early proponents. And there was always some unsettling aspect of using expert systems alone that made people shy away.

Part of the problem is that the individual really sees no advantage to helping create such a system for the vague ‘group.’ People help other people but it takes a special kind of process to do a lot of work purely for the group without any recognition for performing the task.

Too many of these KM programs do not really take into account human needs and nature. The best way to move the tacit information of the expert into the explicit world of the community is to demonstrate to the expert why it will help save them time and give them more time to spend on what they want to do. This tacit-explicit transformation of information works best when it is an emergent property of a person’s workflow and not the primary reason.

The trap, I think, is in thinking that KM (or any other knowledge discipline) is only about writing things down. This trap is easy to fall into when the focus of the discussion is on the technology, rather than on people and process.

Back to basics then. There are experts within your business, and that expertise is all over the map from arcane technical topics to customer experts to company lore experts. They are employed because their expertise supports the business at some level.

Experts do a lot of things in the context of their work. They apply their expertise to solving business problems, whether in the lab or in the board room. They spend time honing their expertise: talking with people, attending conferences, reading, doing blue-sky experiments, etc. They also respond to questions and requests related to this expertise. (Experts do a lot of non-expert things in the company too — including learning from other experts.)

Most corporate experts hate repeating the same things over and over again. By putting an FAQ about their area of expertise up on a wiki, they can easily remove those sorts of interruptions and concentrate on problems that require their focus. Thus, there is a tacit-explictit transformation but it obviously helps the expert and will provide more time for them to use their expertise where it can really help.

And, as an added bonus, there are now metrics to demonstrate how important the expert is. Simply observing how often the FAQ is accessed and by whom will be valuable. It will be possible to compare the importance of different experts in the community and thus making it easier to reward them as well as making it easier for the experts to demonstrate their usefulness.

So, when it comes to the experts, what do we want them to do? All of these things – in the right balance at the right times. Do we really want them to spend time being interviewed by knowledge engineers or writing down what they know outside of any context? Why not facilitate their current work? I don’t think these projects should get in the way of their work by forcing them into artificial “harvesting” situations.

There are many directions to go from here. For example, maybe the mentees should be writing down what they learn, instead of asking the expert to take on the entire burden. If the knowledge transfer job is necessary, then it has to be in the context of work happening now or in recollection of how a particular project ran. At least then there is some context around which to hang expertise.

There is a balance of sorts between being the expert, becoming a better expert, and growing others’ expertise. Adding to the workload only upsets this balance – and upsets the very people we are asking to “share.”

People generally help other people, not a faceless organization. But people often like recognition for their help. A simple use of Web 2.0 tools helps accomplish both of these, while permitting the organization to capture the expertise of its people in a useful fashion. A real win-win.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by kevindooley
Getting Web 2.0 right: The hard stuff vs. the harder stuff:
[Via O’Reilly Radar]
Here begins a typical success story:

I had a powerful conversation recently in Europe with one of the top executives of a major industrial company. They have 100K+ employees in over 50 countries. When he joined five years ago their business was struggling and in need of major transformation; their stock was at two dollars a share, they had ethics issues and product quality problems – you name the malady, they were suffering from it…

Fast forward to 2008 and now they are one of the most extraordinary success stories in Europe – stock is over $28 a share, great profits, growing operations, well regarded in the business community etc. When you fly through a European airport they are everywhere.

I asked him how they were able to turn such a large, multinational ship around.

He told me most executives talk about “the hard stuff” vs. “the soft stuff”. Their focus for success in the organization is on the hard stuff – finance, technology, manufacturing, R&D, Sales – where the money is to be found, where costs savings are to be made. The soft stuff – leadership, culture, change and implementation – is there in rhetoric but not in reality (e.g., “people are our most important resource”). But the truth is that it is not the “hard stuff” vs. the “soft stuff”, but the hard stuff vs. the harder stuff. And it is this “harder stuff” that drives both revenues and profits by making or breaking a decision, leading a project to a successful conclusion – or not, and allowing for effective collaboration within a business unit or an organization – or not. He told me it was a consistent focus on the harder stuff that allowed them to turn their company around.

The harder stuff is that way because there are few ways to measure it by many current approaches. How can one demonstrate that collaboration was critical? How much collaboration was needed for success? Who needed to be involved that was not?

One of the magic aspects of Web 2.0 technologies is that they often provide just these sorts of data. When used well, they explicitly illustrate what was involved in a collaboration, who is important to make sure is involved and who is holding things up.

This is an apt description of the problems we face in bringing Web 2.0 into the enterprise. Web 2.0 is a game changer – it holds the potential to turbo-charge back office functions, foster collaboration and transform every business unit in the enterprise. Yet the resistance occurs when it comes down to implementing Web 2.0 because it represents a series of shifts that challenge traditional business culture and models of leadership. How often have I heard the knee-jerk reaction, “we can’t let our customers talk to each other” or “we don’t share our data” or “we are going to upgrade to a new platform – we are on a three year plan to get it done” (I keep a list of these reactions so please help me add to it). If developing a web 2.0 strategy is the hard stuff – moving that strategy forward is the harder stuff – and the bigger the company I work with – the harder the harder stuff is.

They need to understand that companies using these technologies will be ahead in 2 major ways: their employees will be more productive and innovative; and, they will have better metrics to enhance the process and make it work even better.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0