.

Thus the traditional organization, where a few top managers coordinate the pyramid below them, is being upended.

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So sayeth a Senior Managing Consultant, IBM .... presenting on social networks at WebCom Montreal 2008.  She says that the quote above is from McKinsey's research and is one of McKinsey's major conclusions.

She is just saying that "Mckinsey says ... the stakes are incredibly high".

Boy o boy ... I am learning A LOT !!

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The morning started early ... up at 6h00 am, first conference session at 7h30 am.

I'm speaking later today at WebCom 2008 in Montreal, holding forth on wirearchy and the cultural indicators and change issues that may be part of the whole transition to using Enterprise 2.0 principles and tools.

A team from Secor (the Quebec strategy consulting firm, a francophone equivalent to McKinsey), opened the conference with an extremely boring presentation on their Internet Index research.

At the moment Andrew McAfee of Harvard and of "he-coined-the-term-Enterprise-2.0" fame is offering the opening keynote:  What Is Enterprise 2.0, What Are the Benefits, and What Are the Potential Pitfalls".

I'll post my slides using SlideShare later today or tomorrow, and will try to honour what my shadow preparation coach in new Zealand (Earl Mardle) suggested last night:

...  say something outrageous !

I'm going to ask my audience (if there is one) to go and drop a comment on Earl's blog and let him know how I did.

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The morning started early ... up at 6h00 am, first conference session at 7h30 am.

I'm speaking later today at WebCom 2008 in Montreal, holding forth on wirearchy and the cultural indicators and change issues that may be part of the whole transition to using Enterprise 2.0 principles and tools.

A team from Secor (the Quebec strategy consulting firm, a francophone equivalent to McKinsey), opened the conference with an extremely boring presentation on their Internet Index research.

At the moment Andrew McAfee of Harvard and of "he-coined-the-term-Enterprise-2.0" fame is offering the opening keynote:  What Is Enterprise 2.0, What Are the Benefits, and What Are the Potential Pitfalls".

I'll post my slides using SlideShare later today or tomorrow, and will try to honour what my shadow preparation coach in new Zealand (Earl Mardle) suggested last night:

...  say something outrageous !

I'm going to ask my audience (if there is one) to go and drop a comment on Earl's blog and let him know how I did.

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The morning started early ... up at 6h00 am, first conference session at 7h30 am.

I'm speaking later today at WebCom 2008 in Montreal, holding forth on wirearchy and the cultural indicators and change issues that may be part of the whole transition to using Enterprise 2.0 principles and tools.

A team from Secor (the Quebec strategy consulting firm, a francophone equivalent to McKinsey), opened the conference with an extremely boring presentation on the Internet Index research

At the moment Andrew McAfee of Harvard and of "he-coined-the-term-Enterprise-2.0" fame is offering the opening keynote:  What Is Enterprise 2.0, What Are the Benefits, and What Are the Potential Pitfalls".

I'll post my slides using SlideShare later today or tomorrow, and will try to honour what my shadow preparation coach in new Zealand (Earl Mardle) suggested last night:

...  say something outrageous !

I'm going to ask my audience (if there is one) to go and drop a comment on Earl's blog and let him know how I did.

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... but I'm here in Canada, so it WAS a sloow glance.

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From first to worst

It doesn’t take long to go from being a leader to a laggard. That’s what has happened with Canada’s forays into high-speed broadband – the communications network that drives the Internet.

At the start of this decade, Canada was a leader in the Internet Age. Maintaining this momentum, in 2001 the National Broadband Task Force issued a challenging report, setting as a national goal the linking of all communities across Canada by 2004 through high-speed broadband of 1.5 million bits of information every second.

But too little was done to achieve this goal, and today Canada has the dubious distinction of having one of the slowest and most expensive broadband networks among advanced economies. Not only that, there is little political interest in raising Canada’s status as a high-speed information society and little understanding of why this is so damaging to Canada’s future prospects.

Canada’s broadband prices are higher than 20 other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In fact, Canadian prices are nearly 30 times as high as those in Japan, 12 times as high as in France, 11 times as high as in Sweden and just over 10 times as high as in Korea. Canada also has one of the slowest average advertised broadband speeds, ranking 15th in the OECD. Compared with Canada, Japan’s downloading speeds are nearly 12 times as fast, France’s and Korea’s nearly six times as fast and Sweden’s three times as fast.

Why does this matter?

As Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington points out, the universal provision of high-speed broadband will deliver a wide range of benefits that is, in many ways, similar to those delivered by the universal provision of electricity and the telephone in earlier generations.

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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 from 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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Well, not really .. but he does lend his profile to the reading of an alternative perspective on the development of America's position in the world.

Via Listics and GiftHub:

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Viggo Reads Howard Zinn on American Empire

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I've long appreciated that aphorism, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.

Today I went from Euan's Twitter archive to Jackie Danicki's (Updates protected), curious to see what she might have said to prompt an Euan tweet, and so to Jackie's blog .. where I found this snippet from Clay Shirky's now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, services and people in equal measure) joining to create on the Web more usefulness and more inanity, also in equal measures.  It 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 being 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).

At any rate, this quote of Shirky's 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.

UPDATE:  apropos to long time and quick changes, I added a bit more of Shirky's address below after the [ 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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Random findage on a Saturday morning.

I'm not particularly adept technical-wise, but I read a lot ... and one of my areas of interest and speculation for the last two or three years has been my relatively uninformed belief that one day we will see television screens made out of somewhat thick clear plastic that you can roll up like a yoga mat and carry with you (probably with a wireless connection in its inner works).

So, here's a piece from the NY Times today swooning and drooling about the Sony X-11 OLED television screen.

I recently saw one of these in the Sony Store showroom near where I live, and the article is correct.  Yes, it is astonishing, astounding, amazing, incredible

Anyway ... what caught my attention in this article is the fact that roll-up versions are in the Sony labs.

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TV Images To Dazzle The Jaded

 you’re a TV-technology geek and you’re getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu, congratulations. All of this does sound exactly like the descriptions of S.E.D. television prototypes demonstrated years ago by Toshiba and Canon. Unfortunately, that equally impressive picture technology never made it out of the lab.)

To make this thing even more drool-worthy, the XEL-1’s screen is only three millimeters thick — shirt-cardboard thick. If they could build a laptop with a screen this thin, it would make the MacBook Air look like a suitcase.

The reason: in an O.L.E.D. screen, each pixel generates its own light; there’s no need for bulky backlights, as there are in, for example, L.C.D. sets.

(In the labs, they have O.L.E.D. screens so thin you can roll them up.)

Finally, O.L.E.D. uses less electricity than either plasma or L.C.D.

So, if this thing is so amazing, why isn’t everyone stampeding to get one?

Because even though the XEL-1 is the biggest O.L.E.D. television you can buy today, it’s only an 11-inch screen. That’s not a typo; it’s smaller than your laptop screen.

Oh, and it costs $2,500.

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... and, I've heard it said, makes hair grow on the palms of your hands.

Seriously ...  I've stated in numerous conversations that I believe today's social networking platforms are a transitional technology, and really more than anything a playground for the early stages of learning what hyperlinked sociology can help us accomplish and what hyperlinked marketing can do to annoy and irritate us. 

In short, an incomplete glimpse of the future.

I strongly believe that online social networking is here to stay ... but I believe that we will come to be members of a handful of private or semi-private social networks that will have anywhere from 5 members to say a maximum not in the millions but in the low thousands (say like a compulsive networker on LinkedIn).

But as this uncomfortably accurate video clip from Current TV shows, most of us need some sort of reasonably compelling and ongoing purpose to want to use the key socializing features of a social networking platform for more than a few weeks or months.

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"Power To The People" or "Power To The Handful of Telcos" ?

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Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

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Either way, I think the future holds for us an "archy" with respect to being "wired".

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