Management Innovation for Increasingly Wired and Collaborative Workplaces

Most managers don’t want to manage; they went into management for more money, prestige, or power.

Until we have managers who truly do want to manage people (money, prestige and power being effects of the choice but not the reason), all the technology in the world and all the hope it will work will still underperform an organization that is filled with real managers.

We need to overturn the management cadre in most organizations for this change to succeed.

Yes. IMO the pernicious effects of rewarding status through compensation and perks, for which I blame the job evaluation and compensation consulting industry as much as any other party .. they being the ones who have “interpreted” management theory / “science” over the past 40 - 50 years and led the creation of the situation you describe.

You may find this post of interest
Dancing in the streets and the architecture of authority
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/07/dancing-in-the-.html

I remember reading way way back In search of excellence, which sounds like an early rev of these thoughts. One would think that organisations would have moved by now. I think the organisations have not really moved because the capital markets have not. Organisations that will succeed will have to tie themselves to new types of capital markets. The NPO scene is of interest to that extent.

Great post BTW.

Via email from Jim Bair:
“Jon,
I like it from a public persona perspective. Technology in general and the Web specifically has changed human society forever.
Where I cannot go with you is excitement at the ideas (the technology improvements are exciting). I’ve been not just immersed in them, but WAS leading them for over 25 yrs.
Just one eg — my first book, The Office of the Future: Computers and Communications,
I rigorously documented the impacts and potential of what you call Enterprise 2.0, and then dozens of publications.
It seems the ideational change has been the PUBLIC adoption of the New Way, making it broad based and de facto.
But at this idea level, I do not see positive outcomes: Web 2.0 is not stopping B u s h …. It is promoting a divisive fragmentation of society where human differences are amplified into increasingly unrelated sub groups, where even the use of language is not shared , eg, rappers + teens, for a real extreme.
In this country, we cannot even dialogue about the differences between left and right, blue and red. We have lost the ability for social compromise - the melting pot leaked to empty.
Where is Web 2.0 in this Fascist society?
I’d be honored if you would enter my comments in your blog…perhaps another isolated subgroup could resonate with my retrospective.”

“Until we have governors who truly do want to govern people (money, prestige and power being effects of the choice but not the reason), all the technology in the world and all the hope it will work will still underperform an organization that is filled with real governors.”

Imagine respectable governance.

“It is promoting a divisive fragmentation of society where human differences are amplified into increasingly unrelated sub groups, where even the use of language is not shared , eg, rappers + teens, for a real extreme.”

Listen to the “music” instead of the words? Accents inflected in one’s own language can be intoxicating. When and where they “battle,” discomfiting, but riveting?

People with enough time, energy and (social) security are more likely to hear the strange musics, even seek them out. If I wanted to prevent this I would suggest that these things have “peaked,” the trends in “rationing” to become ever more severe.

Jon,
You didn’t say whether you thought / recommended anyone read this book. You know I am somewhat cynical; I’ve read nothing new in the “because” list above and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Gary has adopted these tools personally, or his company Strategos has reframed their own approach to management as part of their learning. Is it really just anecdotal? Or are there documented facts and figures; less managers, better returns, etc.?
Re post managerial society; what examples does he provide for accelerated learning and action?
I’m surprised to see no mention of what customers and users bring into this. When the organization becomes an adaptive ecosystem primarily populated by customers / users “management” is truly redundant in a traditional context.
When an organization knows no boundaries, when it is truly wired then customers will direct how it adapts and reacts. Is there no concept in this post managerial society of how power shifts from the bureaucracy to the collective customer?
Management rests on control of “information assets”. The change from the industrial, to managerial, to post managerial relates to who controls the information assets. Outsourcing has shown one dimension already; hold onto the design and the brand and what the customer wants. What happens when the customer controls their designs?
I guess the question remains. Can companies change their management DNA? Does this book give me any methods or even places to start? I remain skeptical.
I know my comments may sound harsh. Then he’s held up as a guru. I’m interested in finding and understanding innovation in management and what we can do to more creatively apply ourselves to next generation work.

Jon, You didn’t say whether you thought / recommended anyone read this book.

You’re right, I didn’t. I was or am being lazy, by relying on Hamel’s perennial Top Thinker status and comparing some of what I have had to say about wirearchy and its elements to what he is now saying.

You know I am somewhat cynical; I’ve read nothing new in the “because” list above and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Gary has adopted these tools personally, or his company Strategos has reframed their own approach to management as part of their learning. Is it really just anecdotal? Or are there documented facts and figures; less managers, better returns, etc.?

Good point. In the book basically he uses some examples that have been around for a while.

of what customers and users bring into this. When the organization becomes an adaptive ecosystem primarily populated by customers / users “management” is truly redundant … [ Snip ... ] Outsourcing has shown one dimension already; hold onto the design and the brand and what the customer wants. What happens when the customer controls their designs?

He does address these issues, but in relatively general and vague ways. What “surprised” me was that it (the book) is a generally philosophical treatise on “things have changed, and there’s been no management innovation that really comes to terms with networks, hyperlinks, knowledge used horizontally instead of vertically, the (partial) collapse of time and space, etc.” So, in a sense it is a call to awareness for many mangers / execs who may be part of the group whose awareness of the web-and-Internet’s growing impact may be derived from the “occasional-back-pocket-of-the-airplane-magazine” or “headline-glancing”. Thus for those of us who have been observing and thinking for a while, it may be frustrating that there are no real (and referenceable) tangible solutions, prescriptions, or formulae offered.

Can companies change their management DNA? Does this book give me any methods or even places to start? I remain skeptical. I know my comments may sound harsh. Then he’s held up as a guru. I’m interested in finding and understanding innovation in management and what we can do to more creatively apply ourselves to next generation work.

Interesting questions. the more I have thought about this (and your points and questions) the more I am beginning to believe that the management “innovations” he is calling for already exist.

Gosh ! That sounds provocative. What do I mean ?

I mean that there is a large and pretty coherent body of work stretching back to the 60’s that languishes in the frame of “organizational development”, that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL and quality circles through socio-technical systems approach(es) through self-directed and self-managing teams and “workouts” then into inclusive large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to “management” (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search, Open Space, dialogue circles. The individual-actor aspects of working in and with such approaches is actually (in my opinion) pretty well embedded in much of the current management and leadership development models and in the non-pop-culture application of (for example) competency models and Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence at Work or Jim Collin’s Level 5 Leadership, which probably track closely in parallel with the kinds of leadership and manahgement that (probably) work well with the kinds of leadership enquiry, decision-making and implementation implied by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues.

I use the word “frame” above because I think there is a coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so .. much of it aimed, but by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while coping with what actually “is”. Dave Pollard has often suggetsed that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as the proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.

I think OD suffers from being seen as “soft” and a “nice-to-have-time-to-do” and can be shouted down by the hard-asses, the “I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack” crowd, but I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent models or models in what exists .. it is just not seen as the dominant “management” model.

I hope the above makes sense. It does, more or less, to me. I can probably get at it better in a spoken conversation, or if I take the time to write a structured essay instead of a shoot-from-the-lip blog comment.

Jon,

Fantastic comments! I want to make a blog post out of this. I think I will read the book too; maybe even get it for xmas! I’m going to ponder some more. You shouldn’t leave this buried in / as a comment!

Cheers

Stuart

Thanks, Stuart.

I believe I have said as much over the last several years, but of course it (like most things nowadays) comes bit by byte, blog post by blog post, and so any given reader would have to be reading regularly and thinking about this specific issue to weave the thoughts and fragments together.

But yes, I agree that i should pull it together into an essay. I have distinct memories of talking with some OD friends about how in an increasingly wired world and workplace(s), the more hi-touch processes that are dialogue-and-consensus-building-oriented would become more important.

For two reasons … first, after such processes (used regularly), much of what we know that works from self-directed / self-managed teamwork can be switcged on and used as “regular” mode, and 2) OD work fits so well with “collaboration”, and also usually enhances each individual’s capabilities re: leadership in a work group and their ability to use confidence and assertiveness in decision-making and such .. this is ideal for the wirearchical “temporary-hierarchy-when-you-need-it” kind of situation that interconnected people working in groups can and do practice.

They negotiate (amongst themselves) what, who, how, when, the appropriate accountability mechanisms … and then go do.