I am traveling for the next two weeks .. visiting friends, having a few meetings and attending at least one conference (LeWeb 3 in Paris).
I’m currently in my favourite North American city, Montreal and will be here for the weekend.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2007.
The whole Joe-Klein-reporting-on-the-pending-FISA-bill fiasco is getting hilarious, troubling or absurd (your pick).
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Collectively, Klein’s postings paint a deceiving caricature of people who are concerned about letting the government turn the nation’s telecommunication systems into giant microphones — something that was explicitly rejected in the wiretapping compromises that followed the excesses of Nixon, the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover.
Perhaps Time’s correction writer is out with an extended tryptophan Thanksgiving coma, but when she gets back, she’s got some serious work to do.
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It has all the elements that the ongoing hyperlink-driven power shift enable … status and position taken for granted, stubborn and resistant senior editors, and informed and knowledgeable commenters who care about the issues about which the journalist Joe Klein states "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right" (his words .. AMAZING !).
AFR stands for Australian Financial Review, evidently Australia’s answer to the Financial Times, and BOSS (how quaint !) is the title of their magazine about leadership.
This interview (below) took place by email, and is a bit "cheerful", if you will.
Via A Tiny Revolution
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Vengeance Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning
It’s always struck me as odd that a country so passionate about freedom be so quick to deny it to so many of its own citizens.
When you read the numbers below, keep two facts in mind: (1) only 15 percent of arrests involve serious property theft or violence; (2) we keep 10 times more people in prison than we did in 1970 when the crime rate was actually higher.
- The US has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of all prison inmates.
- The US incarceration rate is the world’s highest, five to eight times higher than those of other industrialized nations.
- Liberty-obsessed America has a million more prisoners than China, a police state with four times our population.
- One third of all black males and 60 percent of black high school dropouts will go to prison at some point in their lives.
- African-Americans serve as much time in federal prison for a typical drug offense as whites do for a violent crime.
- African-Americans constitute 14% of the nation’s drug users (roughly their fraction of the general population) but 56% of people imprisoned for a drug offense.
- Over 5 million people are denied the right to vote because of a prior conviction.
Which brings us again to the Iron Law of Institutions: If the Democrats passed a law restoring to former convicts the right to vote, they might well secure for themselves a permanent majority. But whoever pushed for such a measure would likely pay a price. And, remember, a politician shall never willingly endanger his/her position.One silver lining is the growing recognition from our top leaders that excessive prison sentencing is unbearably cruel and must be stopped at all costs!
I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the [30-month] prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.
George W. Bush, 07/02/07Jessica Hall, on the other hand, was not deemed worthy of a presidential pardon. A mother of three with a husband on his third tour in Iraq, she was sentenced to two years in prison for throwing a McDonald’s ice cup at another car that cut her off while driving. She had no prior record and the tragic consequence of her "road rage" was the unfortunate spilling of McDonald’s water on another car. She spent nearly two months in jail before the uproar created by the decision caused her sentence to be commuted to probation.
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I respect and enjoy these guys, no doubt more than they do me.
.. and, as Ryan Singel notes in yesterday’s Wired Magazine Blog article titled "Time’s Columnist Joe Klein Butchers Wiretapping Debate"
1) it is quite hard to understand how Joe Klein was not relieved of his duties based on his dishonest representations re: Primary Colors
2) beyond that, his lack of knowledge now is "beyond stupid.
.. with this statement lifted from the recent Globe and Mail review of Gary Hamel’s book The Future of Management.
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The End of Management As We Know It ?
[ Snip ... ]
We also must learn from the Internet’s example of widespread, leaderless collaborative effort. "The Web has evolved faster than anything human beings have created - largely because it is not a hierarchy. The Web is all periphery, and no centre," he observes.
We can use those examples to build a democracy of ideas in organizations, amplifying rather than dampening human imagination, dynamically reallocating resources, aggregating the collective wisdom in our workplaces, minimizing the drag of mental models, and turning employees from an army of conscripts into a community of volunteers.
That’s a tall order. But it’s a tall book. He builds his ideas carefully and with discipline, in stages taking us through the challenges facing management, examples of maverick management to draw upon, ideas from elsewhere to consider, and then shows how to bring that together into a new formula for management that resembles Web 2.0 rather than 19th century thinking.
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Specifically … when it comes to applying to organizations the networked structures the Web affords, and the principles of the behaviours it engenders, I don’t quite fully agree with the observation that "The Web is all periphery, and no centre".
Technically speaking, I think that is correct.
I stumbled across an interesting piece from a veteran journalist by the name of Gene Lyons (National Nagazine Award winner in 1980 and author of the book "The Hunting of the President").
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Blogosphere not as radical as pundits think
Gene Lyons
November 21, 2007It’s no exaggeration to say that the establishment media’s initial response to the blogosphere was panic. The idea of mere citizens talking back to the press was unsettling to Washington media celebrities. Pundits who’d exhibited no qualms about the sordid imaginings of, say, American Spectator or The Wall Street Journal editorial page recoiled in horror at online mockery. It was laugh-out-loud funny to see a Washington Post reporter infamous for treating Kenneth Starr’s backstairs leaks like holy writ make a show of pretending that the now-defunct Web site mediawhoresonline. com had accused her of prostitution.
How the system had always worked was this: They dished it out, everybody else had to take it. Now that many print and broadcast outlets feature Web logs—blogs—of their own, it’s no longer common to hear the word “blogger” pronounced with utter disdain. Even so, competition from the groundlings still provokes unease. The latest high-minded worrier is a University of Chicago law professor and sometime politico, Cass R. Sunstein.
A Justice Department official during the Carter and Reagan administrations, Sunstein has written a book called “Republic. com 2. 0,” essentially arguing that the Internet’s “echo chamber effect” is responsible for increased political polarization and declining civility. In an interview with salon. com, he said that social scientists find that when people talk only to those who agree with them, their views become more extreme.
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Among the blogs I read, there’s no equivalent of the authoritarian impulses, intellectual dishonesty and rote chanting of the GOP party line that characterizes Limbaugh and his imitators on the right. Partly, that’s because most are written by educated individuals who take pride in winning arguments without cheating, and to whom party orthodoxy is anathema. In a saner climate, many wouldn’t be called left-wing at all.
How liberal do you have to be to defend habeas corpus, Fourth Amendment privacy rights and the rule of law, as Glenn Greenwald does on his “Unclaimed Territory” blog at salon. com ? A former constitutional litigator, Greenwald brings rare clarity and passion to political issues with legal overtones.
Here are the political blogs I read every day.
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This (below) on the heels of tasering resulting in the death of a bewildered innocent man in the Vancouver airport.
My oh my …
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… and I agree.
Here outlined below is a piece I wrote in March 2005 that arguably could be a an early draft of a primer for addressing that call to action.
Comments welcome.
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1. Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has
This fact has large implications for any organization. It means that you can’t hide – anywhere.
Michael Schrage of MIT puts it very succinctly:
"Networks make organizational culture and politics explicit"
It’s essential, in this interconnected age of instant accessibility to information and knowledge, that as a leader and manager you are aware of the potent force that is contained in networks of connected information and people.
The implications are clear.
People have to understand and believe in what an organization is doing, why the organization is doing what it does, and how it’s doing it.
The messages have to be clear and believable, and the culture that carries out the organization’s mandate and mission has to be flexible, responsive and open.
Fear and cynicism, being driven to perform – as opposed to being invited to contribute your best – can’t carry the day.
2. The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight.
Most organization charts reflect an organizational design that is intended to deliver a strategy developed by a small group of people sitting on the top of an organization.
Evaluating and ordering jobs in terms of their size and importance is often used to implement the organizational design.
Most methods of job evaluation use factors, logic and language that was developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s – perfect for the Industrial Age, less than perfect for the interconnected Information Age.
Often, reporting relationships and chains-of-command get in the way.
Why do you think the Dilbert comic strip has been so successful for so long ?
Probably because people know that lots of time, energy and effort is expended keeping bosses happy – usually at the expense of customers.
Many managers aspired to, and have spent the last twenty years, learning how to become “bosses”. Do you know what prison guards are called by the inmates ? You guessed it –
BOSS
3. People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other and working with each other – and so they do that – all day long
People communicate. That’s what people do.
They share jokes, they send around interesting e-mails and web sites, they help each other get things done.
The nature of work in the Information Age has changed – dramatically. And it’s likely that the nature of work will keep changing.
If you want to see what work might look like – watch developments in the usability and usefulness of blogs and wikis. Watch younger people as they bring the gaming mentality into the workplace and watch how they communicate using cell phones, e-mail, and IM and the (eventual) derivatives of podcasting.
Watch, too, for developments in telepresence.
Employees are people, too. They communicate just like all the other real people, in Social Networks. They’re the ones communicating with your customers and shareholders.
It’s essential for an organization’s success, and the personal success of each and every one of those employees, that they feel proud of what they communicate. They want to be engaged in positive ways in making a meaningful contribution – to the customers, to themselves and to their fellow employees.
4. Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control
Thousands of articles have talked about how command-and-control dynamics are less than effective in the new set of interconnected conditions found in the workplaces of the Information Age.
Remember how you felt (or feel today) when commanded by a parent or other authority figure?
All too often, going to work in today’s organizations feels like re-living the adult version of that experience.
Not all organizations are like this – but fewer and fewer of tomorrow’s organizations will be able to function effectively if command-and-control remains the dominant dynamic.
Coaching has become an important response to changing this dynamic. Coaches help leaders and managers listen better, respect other people more authentically, and become more effective at striking a balance between:
Clarity and Decisiveness AND Flexibility and Openness
As change swirls and complexity keeps on growing, champion-and-channel helps good ideas and effective responses come to the surface and get implemented.
Effective leaders and managers know how to, or learn how to, champion and channel.
Bosses are different than leaders and managers - as both a conceptual construct and in the lived experience found in our relationship with them.
5. Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done
Human beings have been having conversations since time began. That’s how we’ve figured out all of the things we’ve invented and how we govern ourselves. It’s how we’ve gotten to how we are now.
In the Industrial Age, reporting relationships, and the assumption that the dog on the top of the heap knew more than all the other dogs, were the formalized structure for conversation . It doesn’t work very well this way, anymore.
The only way to deal with ongoing change is to create and sustain effective conversations – with your customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone else.
Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will work from here on out.
The structure, tools and culture of organizations will have to honor this fact.
There’s no other way it’s going to work.
6. Trust, transparency and telling the truth are the glue that holds it all together
People want to trust, they want to believe – even in the face of large amounts of evidence that the system is being manipulated in the favor of a select few.
In North America, we’re still trying to shake off the disbelief about the blatant dishonesty and fraud demonstrated by some corporate (and governmental) leaders. We actively do not want to believe things may be as corrupt as they seem … institutionalized dishonesty and deceit.
We don’t want to believe that these attitudes and behavior might be more widespread than is apparent, yet somehow we have a feeling that the common corporate culture rewards and supports this possibility.
Many people – checking their 401K’s or stock portfolios, or looking back at the job(s) they’ve lost – feel at best disrespected and at worst enraged that they have been taken advantage of.
The interconnectedness of the Web has created a means for people to challenge blind authority, and to push back. If their trust is abused, many will use this to establih their own authority or fight back
Let’s understand one thing … when people who have been abused decide to get organized and push back, they become a potent force.
Interconnectedness is a potent force for creating transparency and demanding trust, and many are just now learning how to use it more effectively.
7. The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language
In the midst of all the interconnectedness and sharing of information, the composition and shape of the workplace will keep changing.
North America and Western Europe are landscapes of a changing population – different waves of immigration keep coming, and each new generation brings fresh change to the workplace. The workplace of the near future will be a sea of people from a wide range of countries, cultures and languages – and they will all be interconnected.
The range of diversity brings with an equally wide range of beliefs, values and reasons for working.
This emerging mix will bring new dynamics of relationship into the workplace – both online and offline
Learning to listen, respect and champion-and-channel will be an essential competency for success.
8. New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever
According to the experts, Web 2.0 is on its way to the workplace soon – it’s an infrastructure that’s decentralized and more open than that which exists today.
Remember Napster ? The workplace versions exist and may be coming soon to a workplace near you. Indeed, the wider conversation about blogs and the workplace is only growing, and acquiring useful examples.
Many forms of “smartware” are also on the runway, getting ready to take off. New tools are absolutely essential to deal with the overload of information that already exists – and grows more daunting with each passing week. This “smartware” will find its way into the workplace.
Smartware will either “dumb things down” (entering information, and the system does the rest), or “smarten things up” (helping people collaborate and create new knowledge).
Many of these tools will add capability and functionality to the continuing need for effective collaboration – and so will make collaboration more and more possible.
More technology-supported collaboration will in turn increase the need for effective leadership and coaching – champion-and-channel will become more necessary than ever. The game will get sharper again.
Adapting to the new tools will require new forms of social interaction in the workplace. As change keeps coming, and work activities become more interdependent, the required adaptation will become more social and cultural - and biological, in terms of the dynamics - in nature.
9. We’re all in this together
The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.
This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.
New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.
Awareness is the key. Maintain an "open focus".
Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.
10. There’s no going back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal
It’s almost trite to say this – the only constant is change.
However…over the past 15 years or so, there have been enormous amounts of energy spent resisting change – waiting and hoping for things to go back to “normal”.
It won’t happen. It’s useful to acknowledge and accept this, and get started … at learning how to learn, and equipping yourself for constant adaptability.
It’s a good - but not the only - way forward.
At the same time, you won’t survive by trying to make yourself into a chameleon. You can’t be all things to all people.
Connecting to your self – your values, your ways to build and acquire knowledge, and understand and use your intuition – is in my opinion the only way to go.
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Tags: Gary Hamel, The Future of Management, wired workplace, hierarchy, wirearchy
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… I’m a nobody.
I’m sitting here in a wee cafe in Vancouver, pecking away at a keyboard (spent a couple of hours sending a presentation I did yesterday o about a third of the attendees, who all said they found it interesting and wanted copies), when ..
I pick up the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, opened to a page where a guy named Harvey Schachter has had a column like forever, reviewing management, leadership and organizational effectiveness books.
The title of today’s column piqued my interest.
Exploding bladders on the rise amongst Britain’s binge drinkers !
What’s next ?
Thanks to Stuart Henshall’s (prolific and comprehensive) return to blogging, I found and read the post "How Will Enterprise 2.0 Transform the Workplace", by Idris Mootee of the Innovation Playground blog.
Given that I’ve just finished a revision of the 2004 Ark Group publication "Making Knowledge Work" in light of the recent arrival of Web 2.0 capabilities and their gradual migration into the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0), I think the paragraph in bold in the excerpt below is right on.
The questions he asks in the first paragraph are often hard to answer, and I think it’s increasingly apparent that they highlight one of the major differences between work design assumptions from the Industrial Age (static, linear task sets, replicated and reproducible skills applied to sequential parts of a value chain, the application of knowledge vertically in upward chains of decision making, etc.) and what we will all need to understand in an age of information-carrying and knowledge-building networks (wirearchies, if you will).
Work inputs and outputs, roles and responsibilities and deliverables will increasingly be negotiated between participants in networks held together by purpose and common information and values who are seeking to create or build the value (response, capability, fulfillment) that a customer (also in a network of opinion and experience) is looking for.
I’ll of course offer my usual kvetching and note that I have been writing about this for a while, for example in this May 2002 article titled "From Hierarchy To Wirearchy - the future of workplace dynamics" in the World Future Society magazine The Futurist.
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So why (do) Enterprise 2.0 initiates gets stuck? Because they fail to answer many of the following questions: How does it help the organization to improve business performance? What does it mean for the knowledge workers? How does it contribute it support human capital development? What are the incentives to share? What are the core issues and does the business and IT teams see the same issues? Who owns the issues and is that a plan to resolve them? Are there agreements on the key risks and is there a plan to mitigate them?
There are also cultural, compliances and legal issues. And if free comment is allowed in a corporate blog or wiki, the company has to be alert to the dangers of libel or infringement of employee rights laws. There must be reasonable measure to ensure the content adheres to certain standard to balance the rights of individual opinion and respect for others. And from a technology standpoint, there’s realistic concern about how 2.0 technologies interact with legacy systems and what it will cost to ensure that the IT project is appropriately staffed and resourced.
But the biggest idea is the “transformation of the workplace”. This new generation of social networking and collaborative software is transforming the workplace and starting to take on the very human characteristics of interaction and collaboration that will fuel a burst of productivity to rival the advent of e-mail. It will take 2-5 years and that’s what a typical corporation usage adoption curve will look like.
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Tags: Enterprise 2.0, workplace, wirearchy
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.. as supporting the screen writers’ strike in Hollywood.
I have no trouble believing this story, below.
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It’s clear that video games are now an established part of our lives.
Watch for aspects of gaming strategy and gaming rules creeping into the design and the operations of social networks, and the eventual movement of gaming principles into workplace-oriented platforms that support knowledge sharing and social networking.
Work design in terms of performance measurement and compensation will be (or perhaps more accurately, should be) drastically affected by how the reward and feedback mechanisms in games currently operate.
Game theory as work design in 2015 ?
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October video game sales up 73%
SCOTT HILLIS
Reuters
November 16, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. sales of video game hardware and software jumped 73 per cent in October, with Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii console regaining its spot as the top-selling console, industry data showed on Thursday.
Total sales were $1.1-billion, compared with $643-million a year earlier, according to market research firm NPD.
Nintendo sold 519,000 Wiis while Microsoft Corp. sold 366,000 Xbox 360 consoles and Sony Corp. sold 121,000 of its PlayStation 3 machines.
In September, the Xbox 360 knocked the Wii from the top spot it had held all year, thanks to a boost from the release of Microsoft’s blockbuster ‘Halo 3′ game.
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Tags: video gaming, work design, rewards, recognition, social networks, knowledge management, wirearchy
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Dion Hinchclife wrote an excellent article in ZDNet in May 2007 that I read back then and have been re-reading as I am struggling with the last bits of a revision to an ARK Group publication titled "Making Knowledge Work". He notes that the real challenges will be cultural, and that those challenges will grow more important as the tools for work get easier to use, less expensive, etc. (which is what has been happening).
I’ll also offer a short version of my usual whine … I have often noted on this blog that the use of wikis and blogs would do as much to change corporate cultures towards openness, flexibility and enhanced / accelerated learning as most (all ?) more expensive, more formal and more cumbersome corporate culture change and development programmes. Just do it.
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Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst
[ Snip ... ]
Viewpoints like Tom are entirely right on however if we were looking at tools that are hard to use, highly complex and overspecialized, and required significant resources and special skills to acquire, deploy, and maintain. But this is entirely not the case in this wave of software applications that seem to systematically address virtually all the barriers we’ve seen in the past to getting new tools adopted, rapidly providing immediate value, and broadly used.
One of the most important reasons for this is simply that the constantly evolving Web has continually refined and guided through competitive pressure — and other feedback loops — the design of sites until we have hit upon very effective models for collaboration and communication. These include the now-ubiquitous blog and wiki but many others as well including mashups, roaming Web desktops, and highly-customizable SaaS apps.
Applying these to the enterprise is now extremely easy for anyone to do, highly applicable in many if not most business situations, and certainly last but not least, very inexpensive.
How can the framework (referring to the use of social computing tools in an enterprise) outlined in this diagram of Dion’s not change the dynamics (and structures) of traditional hierarchies ?
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What do you think ?
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Tags: Hinchcliffe, Enterprise 2.0. Making knowledge work, hierarchy, wirearchy
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I don’t make much money, and I don’t get asked to consult or advise very often (I suppose that is because of my reluctance about and lack of expertise in marketing), but I have always wanted some acceptance and recognition for remaining dogged about the concept of wirearchy.
I imagine also that the fellow travellers mentioned in this blog post from Rebecca Jones at the Dysart & Jones Info Buzz blog will probably dismiss my thinking and writing as non-academic, but I feel honoured to be mentioned in the same sentence as these other three thinkers.
Dysart & Jones are event planners and managers who specialize in conferences focusing on information technology, knowledge management and digital workplaces, and strategic planning
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When are we going to pay attention to our organizations?
Way back in 1999 the Cluetrain Manifesto started many of us thinking about the impact technologies were having on our interactions with our customers, and within our organizations. But really, there have only been a handful of people looking at how organizations will change - and how they’ll work from a practical standpoint. Andrew McAfee at Harvard, Tom Davenport at Babson, David Snowden at Cognitive Edge and Jon Husband at Wirearchy are looking at how organizational structures will evolve.
Wirearchy is a term coined by Husband meaning "a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology". What a great concept — really the transformation of hierarchies in the wired world. We spend an incredible amount of time, money and expertise integrating technologies into our work processes and organizations, and yet minimal time on how the organization’s structure, culture, performance measures and rewards need to adjust to this integration.
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I would be remiss if I did not mention that there are a fair number of other really smart and aware people who are also thinking, learning and writing about how our interconnected environment is affecting the structures in which we live and work, namely:
Enterprise 2.0 is emerging quickly as a large and important field, and people seem to tumbling to the notion that the application of Web 2.0 tools, services and practices in the workplace will lead to significant re-design of work processes and dynamics.
I’ve been thinking about workplaces as social systems for a long time (started roughly in September 1972) and about work design since the early 80’s.
I started thinking about blogs and blogging as useful workplace tools almost as soon as I started blogging.
My friend Don Hill, a long-time radio personality who hosted CBC Radio’s Tapestry program for a few years, is running an interesting series of radio interviews for CKUA radio in Alberta titled "Inspiring Leadership".
I believe there’s an old Beach Boys song with those lyrics (replace Spain with USA).
Here’s a report on the rapidly-growing popularity of one of the world’s oldest bloggers - a grandmother in Spain.
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Blogging granny a hit with surfers
RAQUEL CASTILLOSANXENXO, Pontevedra — "Today it’s my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog."
So reads the first entry by one of the world’s oldest Webloggers, Maria Amelia Lopez, who, at the age of 95, has surprised herself by a sudden conversion from Web-illiterate to cybercelebrity.
"At first I thought a blog was just a type of paper notebook," said Lopez, a great grandmother.
"When I saw my grandson using the Internet, it caught my attention. I said to myself ‘What’s this? You can find out about anything. I want an Internet!’"
With 60,000 regular readers so far, Lopez’s homely mix of memory and chat, available at http://amis95.blogspot.com, attracts regular readers from around the world and has put her back in touch with the younger generation in a way she had never imagined.
"No one pays any attention to old women any more. Not many people love us. But I was surprised by the Internet, because young people who were 18 years of age, or 14 or 15, tell me about their lives and what they think and ask my advice," said Lopez.
Only one in 10 people over the age of 65 uses the Internet in Spain, slightly below the European average. Although that proportion has nearly doubled over the past two years, it still suggests older citizens are missing the digital revolution even though they make up a growing portion of the population.
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What a lovely way to bridge the generations … the wisdom and warmth of an old grandmother in touch with the enthusiasm, joie de vivre and questions of youth.
My father is in his 90th year, still very vibrant, curious and engaged with the world. The Internet has been a key factor in making the last chapter of his life immeasurably richer, deeper and more engaged.
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As I mentioned previously, Stuart Henshall has done a robust post offering questions to deepen the understanding of what wirearchy means.
We all have our own ways of using and enjoying the exchanges in the blogosphere. Speaking for myself, sometime about a year and a half ago I began to realize that often I get as much or more out of comments threads that follow blog posts as I do from the posts themselves. It of course gives me insight into what other people think, and I begin to try to understand why and with what or for what reason someone says what they have said in response to a post.
Today I went back to Stuart’s post to see if anyone might have said something in response to Stuart’s questions and push-backs, and I discovered Harold Jarche’s comment (below in block quotes). Of course, in this case it is self-serving of me to highlight this and perhaps doubly so because Harold is a friend with whom I converse and I know that he shares a very similar perspective and brings much light to bear on the ways we are all moving into and through the new conditions our webby world offers.
Nevertheless, his comment is affirming to me. It seems clear to me that the workplaces and our communities, and our ways of interacting with each othe, will become very different over the next decade or so. The forces in operation are too large, and the pent-up realization that the ways we structure and operate the institutions in our society are not serving ALL of the members of society well, but only a small and privileged group at the top (a vast generalization on my part, but tangible evidence to back up that statement is easily discoverable).
Thanks, Harold, for continuing to walk into our new world shoulder-to-shoulder with me (and many others). And thanks, Stuart, for helping me get motivated to go deeper.
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These ideas are permeating the mainstream business culture, as a recent McKinsey Report shows:
“[W]e’re on the verge of a post-managerial society. The idea that you mobilize human labor through a hierarchy of overseers and bureaucrats and administrators are going to look extraordinarily antiquated a decade or two from now.”
http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2007/11/the-creative-co.html
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He’s a man with a plan, and he’s very effective at helping me NOT plan.
With no further to-do …
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Tags: Being, repurpussed, on porpoise
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It’s been a busy month, and the notion of wirearchy seems to be acquiring a bit of currency.
I was interviewed about a month ago by Beverley Head for the possibility of an article in BOSS magazine, the Australian Financial Review’s magazine on leadership issues. That interview was published and is now online.
UPDATE: I’ve switched the main link to the article, in the article title directly below, to CIO Magazine of New zealand (must be a sister publication of BOSS) because it’s easier on the eyes than the AFR BOSS site. I care about my readers, of course 
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The wired world is challenging the principles that have underpinned management for more than a century. Welcome to the web that is the wirearchy.
If knowledge is power then in today’s wired world it’s on the march, filtering down from the top and out across networks. Welcome to the world of wirearchy, where the power is the network.
Jon Husband, a techno-anthropologist and strategy and organisational change consultant based in Vancouver, coined the term wirearchy in 1999 It’s hitting its straps now thanks to the internet’s speed and pervasiveness, the rise of the digital native who is already wiki, blog and social network savvy, and a growing corporate enthusiasm for seeking out the the wisdom of crowds and leveraging collaboration.
Husband believes that the internet and web services are fundamentally changing the nature of work, and that the transition to a full blown knowledge age is well under way. What will drive it further is the emergence of wirearchies through which information is circulated, refined and exploited more widely than traditional hierarchies permit.
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Read the rest of the AFR BOSS article here.
A couple of notes - I have always chuckled at the continuing use of the term "boss" for managers and leaders in hierarchical organizations. I typically associate the term "Boss" with the supervisor of chain gangs, and I know from real-world experience that the inmates of prisons have one word for prison guards … Boss. No, I wasn’t in prison per se, but I spent nine months as a prison guard 31 years ago
Re: organizations and the wisdom of crowds … here’s a blog post titled The Wisdom of the Organizational Crowd that I developed about a year ago.
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Tags: Beverley Head, Wisdom of Crowds, flow, wirearchy
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The presentation I offered at KM World 2007 has been well interpreted and improved upon by Stuart Henshall’s blog post titled "Jon Husband - Wirearchy @ KMWorld".
Stuart has run the high-level presentation (I only had 45 minutes) through interpretative filters and asked many good questions about issues in the presentation that need further exploration and development.
I do have responses though not necessarily answers to much of what he is outlined, and his report and analysis will give me much good material with which to structure improved and clearer presentations for future opportunities.
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Jon Husband - Wirearchy @ KMWorld
The world is wired. We are a networked society. We are going from hierarchy to wirearchy. This seems obvious to many of us, yet apparently it is not. It’s a topic that hasn’t yet hit the mainstream and Jon continues with his message and how organizations must change.
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Tags: Stuart Henshall, KMWorld 2007, complex adaptive systems, wirearchy
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The title of the post is taken from a three-day master class I attended in 1992, in the Park Lane Hotel in London.
The leader of the master class was Charles Handy, a systems thinker and organizational guru who has long been one of my main inspirations. Charles suggested back then that the world may come to see Canada as a model for the effective integration of the world’s diversity because of our progressive policies on education, health care, decentralization of federal powers (the notion of subsidiarity), and a basic culture of tolerance, multiculturalism and respect for others.
One of the elements of this orientation that is becoming noticeable is our attractiveness to well-educated talent from all over the world. Microsoft recently announced that it would be developing a significant presence in Vancouver, one of the reasons being that Vancouver was a very attractive place for high-end talent to live and work.
Today’s Globe and Mail has a piece on the growing attractiveness of Canada as a destination for that kind of talent. I understand what they are saying in the article, as I see it and live in it every day.
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Canada: A UN of tech talent
PATRICK BRETHOURVANCOUVER — Parminder Singh thought he was a Canadian when he applied for a technology-worker visa to the United States in the late 1990s - and with good reason.
He’d lived in Canada since he was six years old, built his career here, and had long since renounced his Indian citizenship in favour of Canadian credentials. But when it came time to line up to get into the U.S. job market for tech workers, immigration officials took one look at his birthplace, New Delhi, and lumped him in with applicants from India. With a low ceiling set for H1-B visas, Mr. Singh didn’t make the cut.
"I felt kind of cheated," he recalled in an interview this week. To make matters worse, his kid sister Amrit applied and breezed through, since she had been born after the Singh family immigrated to Halifax in the 1960s. "As a result, she got preferential treatment!" he exclaims.
Eventually, Mr. Singh made his way into the United States using a NAFTA visa, and landed at Microsoft Corp. The sting of that unhappy visa experience might linger, but it will come in handy at Mr. Singh’s new job: Running the new software development centre that Microsoft is opening in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond - and recruiting workers from around the world.
Parminder Singh, managing director of Microsoft Canada Development Centre, looks over a map marking the diversity of the company at the Richmond office in Vancouver. (Laura Leyshon/The Globe and Mail)
Mr. Singh, whose appointment is being officially announced today, is careful not to directly criticize the U.S. government, but the plain fact is that protectionist sentiment south of the border has meant a hard cap on technology-worker immigrants at a level far lower than what the industry needs. In just one day, U.S. immigration services received 150,000 applications - more than double the total annual quota of 65,000.
So, Mr. Singh has lots of company in the I-didn’t-get-an-H1-B club. Microsoft gets the third-biggest slice of H1-B visas, but the software giant didn’t even come close to meeting its needs.
While Mr. Singh is diplomatic, the company’s government affairs director, Jack Krumholtz, was much more blunt in comments late last month, saying the Richmond software centre was motivated in part by the H1-B cap, and that it could be the start of a bigger move.
"We currently do 85 per cent of our development work in the U.S., and we’d like to continue doing that," he told Associated Press. "But if we can’t hire the developers we need, we’re going to have to look to other options to get the work done."
Faced with the hard cap, Microsoft has come up with a way to cut through the knot of anti-immigration sentiment by setting up a satellite campus in Richmond. Up to 300 employees, software programmers for the most part, will work at the development centre. They will start off with relatively low-grade testing work, but Mr. Singh says he has no doubt that his new hires will be working on major software projects before long.
Canada’s more lenient immigration policy has just become a major competitive advantage in attracting high-paying, brainy jobs. The proof is on the office wall of the development centre, still under construction in the south of Richmond. Tacked on the wall is a world map, with dozens of coloured stickers, each pointing to the home town of one of the newly hired software programmers. There are a smattering from South America and Africa, a generous dusting through Europe and clusters in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and China. There are none in Canada or the United States.
"It’s a United Nations of talent," says Mr. Singh, whose own sticker, of course, points to New Delhi.
But there is something else that the Lower Mainland has going for it in the battle to attract international talent. Any immigrant from China would feel right at home in Richmond, where Chinese-language signs are common and fabulous Asian cuisine is easy to come by. Similarly, nearby Surrey would ease the transition for any recent arrivals from South Asia.
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I just got back from offering a presentation at KM World 2007 (at midnight, after the ubiquitous US airlines’ two hour delay).
One of the key points in my presentation is that we are beginning to live in an era of the "mass customization of work", notably amongst the younger generations .. in my opinion this stems from Peter Drucker’s notion that "knowledge workers own the means of production" (from his seminal article Beyond The Information Revolution).
The younger generations increasingly know and understand this. Combined with a decade long message that there is no job security, that you are your brand, and that you will bring your cognitive and digital tools and your networks and networking skills to work with you, they understand that employers will increasingly need to accommodate those styles and ways of working with information and knowledge.
After a cup of coffee and whilst wiping the sleep from my eyes, I noticed on the news a short piece previewing an upcoming 60 Minutes Plus piece on "Here Come The Millenials" with Morley Safer as host.
The basic message ?
After a very early morning (there are no direct flights from Vancouver to San Jose, so it’s up (very) early for an initial flight to Seatlle for the connection to San Jose), I arrived in San Jose yesterday about noon.
The plane ride from Seattle amused me .. I guess I expected a 9h25 am flight from Seattle to San Jose to look like it was full of Microsoft, Google and other tech company employees, and I wasn’t disappointed.
This quick comparison found on the New TeeVee blog … the whole blog post has more detail than the edited excerpt below.
Miro is a free, open source internet television and video clip player. Anything free and open source I am interested in looking at, and I support the mission and work of the Participatory Culture Foundation.
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What Joost And Miro Could Learn From Each Other
The folks over at the Participatory Culture Foundation are gearing up for the 1.0 release of their Miro video player, formerly known as Democracy, and you can practically hear them sharpening their knives. The Getmiro.com web site is now featuringa comparison of Miro and Joost, and Joost doesn’t get much love: “Miro is open like the Internet. Joost works like a cable company with DRM.” Snap!
The aggressive tone of the site is understandable. Miro is an excellent product, but ever since they launched late last year, Joost has been getting all the attention. But is it really true that Joost is “a pretty dull product,” as the Miro blog laments? We’re not so certain about that. Sure, Joost has its shortcomings, but it also has some pretty innovative features. So why not learn from the competition? You can always start your knife fight later.
Here are a few things that Miro could learn from Joost:
Be more social.
Get widgets/plug-ins.
Be more open.[ Snip ... ]
Of course, Joost has some lessons to learn as well:
Open up your catalog.
Play local video.
Tear down these walls.And finally, a lesson for both of them: One size doesn’t fit all. We’ve had this one box in our living room, serving all of our TV needs for decades, and now it’s supposed to be replaced by one software solution? No way. The competition both Joost and Miro need to be positioning themselves against is the web and its flash video platforms, not one another.
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… makes no sense to me.
I get an email feed once every two weeks of BC Business Magazine’s headlines.
Here below is what I got this week. The first article notes that sales is no longer something to be suspicious about, as in "Long gone are the days … you had to grow a forked tongue and a pair of horns. Today’s world of sales is all about relationships and trust".
The last article headlined features Dennis Parsonson at Commercial Electronics lying, so as to create a sense of scarcity.
Where’s BC Business Magazine’s editor when you need her or him ?
Someone please call Andrew Keen .. this damned Internet is killing off the world of sales as welll as all of our culture.
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How to Close
by Jessica WerbLong gone are the days when being a salesperson automatically meant you had to grow a forked tongue and a pair of horns. Today’s world of sales is all about relationships and trust. Which is all well and good, but how do you go about sealing the deal in this age of niceties?
See the signs
It may be subtle, but people will give off signals when they’re ready to close, says Shane Gibson, president of Knowledge Brokers North America and author of Closing Bigger: The Field Guide to Closing Bigger Deals. “Non-verbal buying signals would be the fact that their posture has changed from closed to open or they’ve got continual positive body language, like open arms, nodding their heads, good eye contact,” explains Gibson. Questions about financing options, discounts and warranties also indicate the buyer is ready to commit.Create scarcity
Dennis Parsonson, a veteran of high-end electronics sales at Commercial Electronics Ltd., says one of his favourite tactics is to create a sense of scarcity. Once a consumer has voiced interest in a particular model, he’ll say, “This isn’t something we necessarily have. Let me check if we have it” – that’s even if Parsonson knows it’s in stock. “When you come back and say, ‘Yeah, we do,’ then they’re pleased. That sense of scarcity means it’s special and unique.”
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There is an interview at ZDNet this morning with JP Rangaswami, formerly Global CIO at BT (British Telecom) titled CIO Sessions: BT’s JP Rangaswami which underscores and reinforces rather nicely Dave Snowden’s assertion in the recent podcast on Web 2.0 and knowledge work that the CIO role may be an endangered species.
I think the content of this interview also underscore the point that much of the Web 2.0 functionality and capabilities that will be used in Enterprise 2.0 work design rests, in laypersons’ terms, in layers on top of existing IT architecture and infrastructure.
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Rangaswami, who was formerly global CIO at BT, has been an early adopter of the Web, blogs, wikis and social networking tools. He even eliminated the CIO title as a way to better reflect the roles individuals play at BT. I asked him if that means CIOs are dinosaurs, headed for extinction.
"Perhaps not today, although believe it or not, at BT we’ve done away with the CIO title at our levels. We call ourselves MDs [Managing Directors] because we’re fundamentally managing directors of certain businesses and the head of BT design overall is actually called a CEO which reflects what the person does. Part of the reason to get rid of the CIO title was effectively to say that we represent disciplines far beyond just was in IT in the past or in IS, that we represent networks, we represent products, we represent processes. What we represent is design so it made sense for us to come together and converge on that title."
Rangaswami is also a strong advocate of Web 2.0 technologies, with significant internal use of blogs, wikis and instant messaging. He is also an advocate for using Facebook, in contrast to many of his peers who have taken a different approach to the social network upstart, banning it as non-productive use of company time and too far outside the compliance boundaries of corporate information systems.
Rangaswami views Facebook as a way to break the “assembly line mindset”:
"In fact if you look at what I’m doing with Facebook, what I’m really achieving, what any of us who wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable. That’s a huge win because we’ve spent years talking about the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of the more amorphous softer discussions.
Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work".
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Tags: JP Rangaswami, Dave Snowden, CIO, social computing, wirearchy
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