Robert Paterson: The Work Place

Blogging and Society

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 14:14:24 GMT

500 years ago the communications system in the west was owned by one organization - the church. If you wanted something in writing a monk transcribed it. Few knew how to read as a result of books being so expensive. Your network news was delivered from the pulpit. The system supported the status quo of the power of God's elect, the King and his henchmen the aristocracy and above supported the most powerful multinational enterprise the world had yet seen the church itself. The church was the largest landowner in the west at a time when land was the basis of all wealth. The barriers to competition were impossibly high.

I am sure that when Gutenberg built his first press that there was a lot of chatter about font types, about gearing and pressure and inks and about the best type of paper - the kind of geek talk that is central to all new things. This is where so much of the discourse is today about blogging - RSS etc. But the true power of the printing press was something else that went way beyond how it worked. It was how it was used that was to be important.

Within a hundred years huge numbers of people could read. It was possible to run off broadsheets - personal publishing very cheaply. So what happened as a result of this use of the new technology?

The reformation in Europe, the dissolution of the monasteries in the England the the redistribution of all that wealth to secular hands, the civil war and the end of the idea of monarchy being God's anointed. The modern world was created where new ideas based on observation - such as a new vision of the universe - could not be held back by the establishment in spite of persecution.

So this is what will happen with blogging. What blogging is, is an end run on the strangle hold of our conversation and on our mindset that the corporate and institutional world has established. Until now the costs of having a human voice were set impossibly high. Only Rupert Murdoch or a government could play. But now communication costs are ridiculously low compared to the mainstream media and communications in corporations and government. Not only are the costs low but the interactive element of blogging is so much more powerful than the broadcast technique owned by the institutions. Any one of us can have a voice and groups can have power.Institutions are frightened of this voice and will fight it because it means that they will die as a result.

As at the time of the reformation - the general adoption of blogging tools will lead to the overthrow of the corporate and the institutional mind. In so doing it will release the vast treasure that it locked up in the costs of corporate and institutional life. It will free men and women from being peons in a feudal state where they had to live as liege men and offer fealty to their overlords.

We are not only oppressed by those in power in institutional life, we, like medieval peasant, are complicit. We know of no other life. Knowing no other life, like those in Plato's cave, we cannot imagine what freedom from institutional life might be like. We fear freedom because we see no alternative to bondage.

Even simple blogging can help here. It offers for the first time to each of us the potential to find our voice. At first maybe to tell the world what we had for breakfast or to recall some work idea. But I have found in myself a huge change in the last year in my inner voice and in the confidence as I discover that I am not alone in how I think.

Until now people who think as I do have struggled alone. We are by nature are not joiners. Fewer of us every day work in institutional life and cannot use that voice. What "organ" do we have to speak with a human voice? Blogging By finding so many of us out there, we grow in confidence and our voice becomes less hesitant. I feel wonder as I read new blogs every week and see how close our thinking is. This is how power is created

Technical talk is helpful. It leads to better tools. But let's talk more about how we will use blogging to change our world. It is not about making the corporation better - this type of discussion would be the same as a group of monks talking about how printing was going to help the church. It is about how to we take the institution out of our lives.

(Thanks to Dave Pollard for getting me going this week)

Blogging and Education - eBay???

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:42:35 GMT

Enrollment for the media courses at our community college is way down this year. Is this part of the dot-com fallout or is something more going on?

What is on offer is a one year full time class based course that costs $10,000 and teaches you to create web pages. I asked my blogging friends on PEI, none of whom are older than 24 and most younger and all of whom are experts in web based communication, - note I did not say experts in web creation.- to tell me how they learned to be so good.

They were all highly motivated and started to "play around" on the web when they were very young
They learned from each other and still do
None of them see learning about a tool or a technique as being central - one said that when they see a resume that states that the person has mastered a set of named software, they bin it immediately - wrong approach. They do not take a product approach but a holistic approach

So who takes these courses? Maybe folks who have no talent but who think that the web is hot. What happens when they enter the workforce - they meet the web version of Miles Davis or Dave Brubeck with a high school band talent - result they are peons not masters.

So what do you do if you are our community college? Maybe you have to link those who want to learn to those that can teach rather than try and teach the sheep. This is a huge shift. Does it only fit with IT?

What about automotive trades. Until now you could go to a college and learn how to fix a car. But what about Hybrids and soon fuel cells - who will stop the train for long enough to create a conventional curriculum? It can't be done. We will have to learn on the job as the job will be changing too fast. So what does the Community College have to do to create the learning environment. The same process is true for many areas - think even of construction - post Kyoto we will change radically how we build and the material will change very fast. You can't teach stuff that is 3 years out of date.

Who can we learn from? eBay I think. They have made a business through creating a safe community where people can do business with each other.

For me the big challenge is how can we create a safe community where we can learn from each other?

eBay have revolutionized retailing as a result. No inventory! You think that education has no inventory - think again - it is all about inventory - they are called courses and departments - they build and sell. Changes in inventory are exceptionally slow. But the pace of change is accelerating. Formal learning cannot keep up and will only fall behind.

It is also all so expensive. Canadian university fees were up 7% this year while inflation is about 3%. School costs are rising much faster than inflation and the degree is falling in value as more kids enroll. Student debt will be cancer on the next generation. But if you get out of build and sell you get out of your main costs - inventory.

So here is the challenge. What small place that knows it cannot compete with the large traditional centres will have the balls to set up the eBay of learning?

Blogging - St Paul - The Real Needs of Business

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:57:54 GMT

New movements tend to stall when the "in group" want to keep the movement within the
"in group"

The same may be true for blogging. The number of people that know about what a blog is among my clients is very small. Intuitively I would say less than 2%. What would put them off? Anything technical. Blogging has to be made really easy.

Why do I mention St Paul? At the outset of Christianity there was a huge debate. The "In Group" as lead by the surviving disciples of Jesus insisted that to be a Christian you had to be a Jew. This meant adult circumcision for the men and backseat behind a screen for the women. Quite a "technical" hurdle!!!. Paul argued that all men and women should be able to become Christians - guess who won? Pride in coping with the technical sides of blogging is a block for take-up.

The real opportunity is when a group of "Ingroup folks" maybe like "socialtext" really engage with organizational life and find the fit. Step 1 has to be"Easy does it" Easy does it demands that anyone who can type can set up a good blog and that there are a number of great templates. We are exploring Typepad to see if we can make it even easier.

Step two has to be finding the immediate felt benefit. This is more challenging and I think demands that we find parts of an organization where building a community will help - maybe in the entire support area. This is where the whole KM issue rears its head. The idea of content management is an exceptionally stupid idea that flies in the face of how we understand knowledge. Only a small fraction of knowledge is explicit - the vast bulk is implicit - ie it is ten times better to talk to someone about an issue than to try and find what he has written about it. Who wants a manual when you can be walked through? BP has been a leader here in seeing that their key system issues is to find a way of connecting people with questions to people with answers. Each employee has a personal website that amongst other things has a lot of info about what they know. The deal at BP is that if you have question you search for the person.

Why should we care anyway? Blogging is our path back to being human at work. Blogging reveals who we are to not only others but more importantly to ourselves. For the first time mankind - the great tool maker - who has used tool making ingenuity to make the world and himself into a tool, or a thing, has created a tool that renews and brings back what it is to be human.

So like Paul - we are faced with an historic choice. We can relegate blogging to geekiness and tool making or we can work to change our relationships back from machine to human.

What do I mean by this bold statement? We can change democracy by making it essential for politicians to be real and to listen to us. We can get the issues that make sense on the table other than spin. We can make management of organizations transparent and give organizations a human "Cluetrain" voice. We can change how we learn - from each other rather than from institutions. We can change healthcare by empowering fellow sufferers to help each other rather than to rely on the priests of medicine. We so change the world as Paul did.

Blogs for What Business?. Jimmy Guterman's new piece on business blogging (sub. required) is sure to cause a stir. He charges the blogging community as being "self-absorbed and elitist" and says its not essential for business. He cites a Forrester study to back up his claims:

You don't have to believe me on this. Finally, some data asserts that blogs are hardly a popular pursuit. If anything, blogging is more marginal than its critics contend. Forrester Research (FORR) conducted an online survey of 3,673 people and found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one. Blogs can be wonderful things, but if a mere 2 percent of Internet users read blogs, the pastime is far from mainstream. The Forrester survey notes that the typical blog reader has been using the Web for an average of six years. For the most part, blogs feature the Net elite writing to the Net elite. This continues to be the case only as long as the elite are underemployed.

I believe what Jimmy is saying is that there isn't a consumer market for blogging and that it isn't essential for businesses to address it. The problem is we are at the very beginning of a technology adoption lifecycle. Some serious companies have forecasted this market to grow and made their bets accordingly. Every time a journalist tries to wrap themselves around the existing market, what's visible are early adopters. What stands out are the leaders in using blogs for publishing, who benefit from preferential attachment as the earliest entrants. And if you take the innovator dialogue to seriously it looks like a one ring circus.

The other story folks pick up on is unclueful attempts by businesses and PR firms to market to bloggers as an emerging and influential segment. Any attempt to treat bloggers as a segment will fail. Today the influence of participants who act more as producers than consumers is the attraction. The number of participants is growing at 400% per year, and that's before AOL's entry.

But the real story in the consumer market is how increasing numbers of real people are using blogs , but as a way to communicate an form their own communities. Its that skinny tail of the power-law distribution that's going to wag the market. A way to share with friends, communicate post-by-post and remain open to new people joining your community. Conversational Networks provide the most value to your average Jane.

Rick Bruner does make the case that there are lots of businesses using blogs in the consumer market and points out this is like the web in 1995 and where the weblog as publishing market is headed. And many of them are making money. I agree that more evidence in this area would help, always does, but give it time for these new ventures to tell their story.

There is another story of weblogs and business that is less visible because the real action is behind the firewall. At Socialtext we are adapting weblogs for use within enterprises. Weblogs are one Enterprise Social Software tool, because they are necessary but not sufficient for communication and collaboration.

The enterprise market is entirely different than the consumer market. What is in common is an efficient, and dare I say fun, way of having conversations that contribute to productivity. Maybe its time we start telling more of our customer stories, but the distinction between consumer and enterprise needs to be made. [Corante: Social Software]

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 10:09:20 GMT

More Great KM Stuff.

Collaboration is in the KM toolbox.
Collaboration is the new KM

Why collaboration? I think it appeals because its less fluffy than 'KM' - people intuitively think its good (few CEO's are crying out for their people to collaborate less) - and it taps a current need: in trying to cut costs by e.g. reducing travel, people are feeling the pain of projects failing and mis-communication. 'Virtual teams' as a term has been around long enough, but few companies are getting it right.

[from Intellectual Capital Punishment]

This snippet from the middle of Sam Marshall's comments hints at why collaboration has gained new attention: collaboration = faster throughput with the same resources. He also reminds us that for this to be done well, we have to prepare for it.

As part of his discussion on expert databases last week, John Chu shared a report on the topic from Outsell, Trend Alert: Connecting People to People - Expert Databases (abstract only). Outsell surveyed a number of companies with expert databases and said some things about knowledge management and setting up expert databases. It was the conclusion that was most telling:

In our opinion, the pain won't be worth the gain if collaborative work practices aren't already inherent within the organization.

It is relatively easy to set up the technology to run video conferences and webinars. But to create a culture that takes advantage of these technologies is much more difficult, and much more interesting in the long term. Beyond saving money on travel, what does the organization expect to gain from having NetMeeting or WebEx or iSight?
[Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Not only is collaboration important and allows more productivity with the same number of people, but the final aspect, culture, is critical. Companies that do not already have collaborative cultures will not be able to utilize these technologies efficiently and will thus be at a tremendous disadvantage to companies that already are collaborative. Simply providing collaboration tools to a company that believes that knowledge is power, where restricting the flow of information is the way to advance, will result in unused tools. In companies that already value transparency and open communication, that want as many eyes on the problem as possible in order to find solutions, these tools will only enhance productivity. So, in my mind, it is worthless to try and provide the tools to a company whose culture will not allow them to be utilized. You might make a buck but your customer will not be satisfied. If their industry requires novelty, creativity and innovation to succeed, then they will eventually fail. In such an industry, not having a culture that fosters collaboration is a business model of failure. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Richard is hot! I am 100% with you Richard - the new competitve frontier is culture. Those who have a collaborative culture will learn and adapat more quickly and will overwhelm those that do not.

You can't buy this type of culture - so the leadership issue becomes critical

No safety in the familiar in a storm

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 14:56:03 GMT

Several years ago, a friend of mine came close to breaking free from the institutional life. He had a foot in each place. But frightened by the unknown, he pulled back into the world he knew - confident that he was safer there where his mastery lay. Last week he was fired.

In my own life and family too we have a recurring story, a Greek tragedy, where the pull of duty and obligation to the familiar overwhelms the preservation of self. The outcome - an early death for both my father and grandfather. It seemed to be their only exit. I thought that I was exempt from this story but find that I am well into it.

I too like my friend have a choice. The paradox is that in a turbulent time, the greatest risk is in hanging onto what seems safe. The greatest safety - to reach into the unknown. This is surely not only true for each of us as individuals but also for organizations.

Here is how Herman Melville describes this in Moby Dick

"The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! " Moby Dick - The Lee Shore Chapter.

Universities - Where next?

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:32:51 GMT

We live today in one of those periodic times, when shifts in beliefs and in communication technology drive a fundamental change in how power is defined and exercised. What are these trends and how do they manifest themselves in the lives of universities? How can universities, with their unique cultures and management processes, cope and even prosper in this type of environment?

What is going on? What are these trends and what do they mean for managing a University? In particular, what do they mean for the social and human aspects that HR will have to plan for?

A revolution in demography - By 2020, most people in the developed world will be over 50. This is a unique demographic event in the history of nature. This aging of society will affect all aspects of the social and work world. It will be especially challenging for organizations that rely on a stream of young customers or those who rely on the young to replace the old as participants. Universities are vulnerable in both ends of the age spectrum. Who will teach? Who will be the students? How will we attract and retain staff and students? Our previous assumptions about the answers to these questions will have to be revisited.
A revolution in values. There is a pronounced shift in organizational values in the developed world. The shift is from an acceptance in organizations of a top down and process driven approach toward a new set of values that built on self-expression and dialogue. This values' shift is proving a challenge to all organizations In particular, all "customer" interfaces in every field of service delivery are being challenged by this new values set. There is no reason why institutions of learning should be exempt from this shift. where the managerial culture is authoritarian. For academia, the shift is especially challenging as it demands also a shift in pedagogy from where the teacher and content is the centre piece to where the student and dialogue is the centre piece. What is meant by this shift? What is the right course to take? How will we get there? Our current approach to delivery and to teaching itself has to re-evaluated.
A revolution in technology - It is not an illusion, the pace of technological change is accelerating in a non-linear manner. The web revolution has however only just begun. The impact on society will be similar to the advent of the railway which radically changed how and where people lived and worked in the 19th century. We can expect no less of a revolution today. While the new design for society is not yet clear, the new design for service delivery is emerging with some clarity. New technology enables the customer to access the service provider on his terms and at times that suit the customer. The new manufacturing process, as developed by Dell, has turned the Ford model of make and sell on its head. The adversarial customer relationship of the transaction economy, is being replaced by a community and relationship based model as exemplified by eBay and Amazon. How will this affect education? Many say that education is different. This may be a dangerous assumption. These technological and cultural forces are located already on the edge of the Academic world and are becoming ubiquitous. They fit the new values and they fit the new service/cost criteria as we are seeing in the airline industry. They will bear down on how universities operate. What will happen to high cost, place and content based universities when an educational equivalent of Southwest Airlines or EBay emerges? Other organizations in other sectors that have not thought about this threat now face extinction.
A revolution in educational costs and service expectations - A generation ago, post secondary education was an elite process. Now it is expected to be accessible to most young people. This has lead to a massive expansion in the scale of universities and to a new and challenging relationship with government. Governments, in many parts of the developed world, see universities as engines of economic and social development. As Governments pay many of the bills, their social and economic expectations are becoming important parts of the university agenda. In response, Universities have had little choice but to adopt many of the features of the industrial workplace. Mass production of content and mass processing of students has enabled student participation to rise but at the cost of a significant increase in infrastructure costs and a corresponding reduction in organizational flexibility. Development and fund raising have become critical skills of the President. Coping with Unions and labour relations has become an important Presidential skill. As a result, the culture of business is seeping though the academic world. Paradoxically, as more students participate and as the direct and indirect costs of education rise for the student, the value of a BA is devalued in the work place. The average student can no longer afford a 4 year term at university away from home. Something in the cost mix will have to break. The current system cannot deliver the price and the quality that the student can afford and that the staff can tolerate. The result is a growing conflict between the internal stakeholders. All the stakeholders intuitively sense that something has to give but have circled their own wagons to defend themselves. How can Universities break the deadlock between their constituent parts? Is it likely that the conventional process of fighting this out at the bargaining table will work? What new process would give us the chance of reconciling the fears of the competing groups?

What operational issues will be exposed by these trends? -

Bearing in mind, a very small pool and a huge demand, how will we attract and retain the key academic and specialist staff that we need? Rank this issue in importance? Is this a survival issue or just a tough one to deal with? What are the financial implications of getting this wrong? What are the reputational issues of getting this wrong?
How important will dealing with the subset issues such as pay and work place culture be to the attraction and retention issues? Is money the only issue? What can you afford bearing mind the pressure on the cost front?
Is transforming our costs merely about finding new cuts or will they come from a redesign of how we do things? How will conventional cuts affect the ability of the university to deliver? What will happen to morale and to students? What will increasing risk of more internal conflict mean?
Will finding more effective and ways of teaching more for less be about the application of new technology or is it about finding a way to change our mindsets about how to do this differently?
Is affecting change itself an issue of power or is it an issue of understanding how we change from a psycho-social perspective. How important is being able to change?
How important is it to reduce the centrifugal forces that are affecting our university? Can this be done as a matter of power or are there social and organizational design issues involved?
How can we reduce the inertial and complexity drag of our union environment? How important is this in a rapidly changing world? Can we use power to do this?
Our health and benefits costs are growing at a non linear rate. How substantive is the threat to our financial health? Is solving this issue a matter of power or design?

More here

What is going on at Universities? Growing cultural complexity!

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:26:21 GMT

I have been talking to a number of universities about what their world feels like today. Here are some of my early views.

The bottom line - Universities have become too complex for conventional management processes and conventional HR approaches which have a tendency to seek conformity and are based on both a mechanical mindset and the belief in cause and effect. Many enterprises have complexity such as different divisions, but at a modern university the complexity is overwhelming.

What is it about a modern university that is so complex? It is because there are a number of distinct cultures that are on a trajectory of conflict. This conflict is based on scarcity, the need to change the nature of universities completely, which will mean that the conflict will become very bitter.

The dominant culture of the university is the academic culture. In the past the academics also ran the university so there was an alignment between the dominant culture and management. That was a time when universities were like large clubs and were not part of the mainstream of life and high on the government agenda. This is no longer the case. The president is tasked with running the university and the largest group, the academics now play a blocking role. The main culture conflict is between the guild of academics and the President who represents a new culture that is an anathema to the guild - a business culture. The complexity is amplified by what I see as a "slave revolt". At a lower level are 2 grieving groups. A new class of teachers: the TA and the Sessional Lecturers who are treated like helots by the Guild and who will fight for status. A rising group of administrators who in the past were cleaning staff but now are IT professionals and Lab technicians who also want status.

These groups are all unionized and their issues are being built into a deteriorating negotiating environment and into difficult meetings in the Presidents office where one side tries to win over another.

The President is the only person who can see the big picture. All the groups are hunkering down to win their own battles. This is what the President sees.

Fees for undergraduates are already too high as are the total costs of attending 4 years. Now $60,000 for a 4 year term they are expected to be $100,000 in 20 years time. The average debt on leaving is over $25,000. The theory was that with a degree, high paying jobs were a certainty. As the pool of graduates has got larger this is no longer a valid assumption and many are crushed by this debt. They are seeking a better way and will jump at a credited course that does not demand 3-4 years residency. Presidents know that their model of product push on campus will be disintermediated by an electronic alternative. Presidents want to find ways of structurally reducing these costs.
The new demography will cut the number of undergraduates severely in Canada in the next 10 years. Between numbers and money something will have to give. Presidents want to look at other groups such as seniors but this does not fit the system.
Over 50% of faculty in North America will retire in the next 10 years. Already there is a race to hire. Academic wages are going up to both attract and to retain good staff. Just as Presidents will have to cut costs, the core costs are under pressure to go up. The tendency is to ask government for more - but government will be coping with rising healthcare costs and will back off universities. Or to raise fees! Presidents would like to broaden the type of candidate but the faculty demand that the PHD is the benchmark.
Another way to reduce costs will be to change the delivery system of courses from face to face to electronic. The heavily unionized faculty will defend this to the death. Defending IP is their by word. In fact this is a smokescreen. The point is that within the universities, faculty do not understand the new medium and don't want too. They don't pay a great deal of attention to undergrads any way. Their status and pay is determined by where they are on the publishing research track and not by teaching. So they are creating a new underclass the TA and the Sessional lecturer. Presidents need to get into the faculty and help them see that holding on too tight is not in their interests
One of the things that faculty hate the most is the idea of a university becoming like a business. They see the President taking the university to that place. They want it to be a club again. Their club. So they still do all their hiring within the confines of their own discipline. The need to replicate themselves and the tenure system. In so doing they will by design add to the costs and the complexity of the enterprise.
There are 2 new groups at universities that will increase the complexity and tension in the next 10 years. In the delivery system are the TA and the Sessional lecturer which have become essential in the undergrad world. They both teach and mark. They are the face to face undergrad world. At the moment these are helots - poorly paid and low status. But tensions are rising - after all they do the work. The other group is the ever expanding Administrative world. In my day these were literally servants. Now they are a heavily unionized group of bitter people who feel put upon and without status. Many of them are in the IT area and are lab technicians. We can see the same trend in medicine.

The bottom line? The modern university has at least 4 cultures on a collision course. This type of cultural tension cannot be solved at the negotiating table. Some type of visioning process will be needed and a new managment process that can include these forces.

More later

Marriage - Another Ptolemaic Construct?

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 11:46:38 GMT

As the debate about Gay Marriage builds, I wonder what is the "natural state of marriage". Much of what I read in our local paper righteously informs me that Jesus, God and the church determine what marriage is all about. In short in this view, marriage is a union of one man and one woman whose role is to have children.

Just for fun, let's explore the history of the union of adults a bit further than the few thousand year perspective that the CW allows for.

For most of the 4 million years that humans and our predecessors have been around, our primary social unit has not been a union of two adults of opposite sex but a small tribe of between 15 and 25. 25 appears to be the optimal size with the right threshold of complexity for survival. These tribes were in turn linked into their surrounding tribes into "nations" of about 150. These in turn were linked into federations of around 500-600. Why these numbers?

The Math of Genetics - There is also a genetic link to group size and Magic Numbers.

A person living alone has a "half life " of about one year. Set ups of one lose half their number in one year, half in the next and so on. Living alone is a very weak strategy in a natural environment where there are many risks and challenges. Today the power of the state is encouraging us to live this way - the state is the dependency creating family and its not a healthy relationship.

The half life of a group of 5 is a generation or about 20-40 years

The half life of 25 people is 250-500 years. 25 seems to be an ideal blend of comfort and complexity. A company that lasted 250 years would be a remarkable organizations. In a tribe about half a group of 25 would be adults - say about 8 men and women - now we see the core underlying magic number revealed. It is the ideal single sex work group derived from the ideal familial work group, the tribe.

The 500 person group is the ideal "marriage gene pool" Incest taboos prevent breeding in the 25 person tribe. Wives and husbands have to be found outside this group. But not too far outside. After all we don't want our daughter to mary a stranger or worse someone who cannot add wealth by his connections. We also want them to speak the same language and worship the same Gods. So being close means that we can enter your wife's family hunting ground and that it creates the potential to have large scale group hunts on occasion. 475 people = the ideal gene pool of 19 x 25 member bands.

Dave Pollard writes eloquently about how great it would be to live/work in a group whose sole aim would be mutual support - this is what this tribal set up was all about.

The reality is then that for most of human time, we lived not in units of two adults but in social units of 25 that include about 8 adults. The purpose of this tribal unit was obviously to raise the next generation but to do so in the context of doing all of the related work as a large team. This was above all a social and economic unit.

There was no clear line between work, play and society. No Work/Life balance issues here. Belonging to the tribe and having a tribe that functioned well was in every member's survival interests. No individual was safe on their own. No child could depend solely on her natural parents. They needed the power of the larger group. If we are honest with ourselves, this issue of safety and the need for a support group has not changed. The game can disappear - we are fired. Partners and children die. Our kids need a job. We get injured or sick. In our diminished social world, we now look mainly to the state or to insurance companies for the benefits of the protection of the group. The most important unit in our history was not the "family", it did not exist, but the tribe.

Ah but you have left out the best bits you say. So what about men and women and sex? Any study of primal people tells us that there are many arrangements for how sex was accommodated. There are tribes where the big man has most access to most women. There are matriarchal tribes where the power and the choice is in the hands of the women. There are tribes where most of the sex is homosexual and where mating for children is a by product. In most tribes your own gender is where your primary social and affection relationships reside.

My point? The tribe is sacrosanct - sex and sex partner rules are diverse. The point of the tribe is to raise children not simply to produce them. No two parents in a tribe focus on only their own offspring. They look after all the children as do all the other adults. With all property belonging to all members, there is no need to make a strong link of who was the father.

So where does this leave us now?

The reality is that most so called families are now one adult organizations lead by a woman. This is as small and as vulnerable a unit as is possible. Even with two parents, most are so stressed out at work that they have little energy for their children. We see the results in grade 1 when 30% of the kids have behaviour problems that are so overwhelming that they are unlikely to make it through school. Many families are blended but are so hooked into the CW that they blame the other for the breakdown and have little or no contact. So the children can be cut off from Grandparents and are shuttled between warring parents. Many blended families have the potential to be tribes if only the warring parents could see through their anger and see the potential.

Our view of jobs has meant that work and social life have been split apart and we vainly try and find a balance. Our social structures have been destroyed. In desperation we turn to the state or to the company benefits plan or help for those times when we as individuals cannot help ourselves. .

What marriage really means now is a legal construct by which the benefits of the state and from insurance companies, pensions etc, can pass from one party to a related party. This is what most Gay couples want - legal recognition and access to the state and company tribal benefits.

The church is fixated on sex. No surprise that this is its own weakness. The church assumes that we organize around sex which makes the conventional marriage the central organizational unit. BUT the observed fact is that humans do not naturally organize around sex - we organize around work and survival. Human social organizations are not built for procreation but to raise children so that they can take over the leadership of the tribe. Sex is not why my Gay friends want the recognition of their union. They want the protection of the state tribe. Most importantly, they want to be able to raise children so that they too have the ultimate benefit of dying in the knowledge that they have raised good people who will remember them as their ancestors.

Social Capital - Are we at the edge of a Copernican revolution in OD?

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 10:41:14 GMT

A theme of my posting is to examine why so many people today are so deeply unhappy about their work life. Recently I have been looking at our need to have a higher purpose and at our need to have a more collegial relationship in the hierarchy.

I have posted two great articles by Ross Mayfield below because it seems clear to me that we have another basic flaw in how we organize - except for the military who have never forgotten - we are mainly are ignorant of the inherent numbers and structures that facilitate the optimal human relationships.

I bet also a dinner that there is not a text book on HR that talks about natural networks as opposed to formal departments and which then includes the theory of magic numbers for optimal relationships. My bet is that organizational theory today is an artificial construct just like the Ptolemaic view of the Universe. What is really on the table here is another Copernican revolution for organization based, now as then, on observation of reality that we are humans rather than acceptance of a doctrine based on the hope that we are machines. .

Kane on Education

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 11:29:36 GMT

"The last obvious policy is in education. There is already a gathering counter-consensus in the UK around educational reform, led by voices like Tom Bentley of Demos, CreativeNet and the Scottish Council Foundation: they want to stop "factory schools turning out factory minds". The creative child can imagine new problems (rather than have them handed down to them); mingles ideas easily from one realm to another; makes mistakes, as long as they lead to more interesting solutions, and focuses on goals with all their powers of attention. That's a text-book list of the psychological attributes of play.

Yet creative education should be about more than producing fodder for the "creative industries", or a better class of info-worker. The democratisation of creativity could save lives - or at a minimum, turn those lives away from self-destruction. If the play ethic means anything tangible, it is about occupying the gap that drug culture occupies in our poorest communities. And that gap is created by the distance between "work" as it stands - job-seekers allowances, McEmployment of all kinds, the spiritual tedium of "workfare" Britain - and the individuals who cannot (or will not) conform to its dictates.

Drugs, you could say, are the dream-seekers' allowance: the most expedient way to boost your sense of human potential, when all the official routes heading towards that end seem rubble-strewn, or impossibly long, or depressingly unrewarding. This also explains the traditional hot-link between narcosis and pop culture. If your chemical dreams spur you to activity, then dancing, socialising and fucking - or making other people dance, socialise and fuck - is often the most gratifying way to make your mark on the world; to align your inner state with your outer reality.

What Ibiza has really "uncovered", for all its reckless, oafish hedonism, is an inarticulate but deeply-felt rejection of the false dignities of contemporary labour. "I’m largin' it" should be taken literally: it means, My precious self is bigger than this mousy, pointless social role.

An education for creativity which wanted to be truly “inclusive” would have to listen to this elemental and popular desire for playfulness. It’s an unruly vigour which has its subterranean link to an earlier, more carnivalesque Britain, evidently not entirely swept away by industrial capitalism. A time of "happy Mondays" and "the soul's play-day", when 18th century Gloucester bishops complained about "loutish mobs that are drunk with the cup of liberty".

Teachers would have to find ways to tap into these disruptive energies, and turn them into a repertoire of usable life-skills. That means, among other new approaches, that the much-abused "media and cultural studies" would at last get its proper curricular due. Bringing context and history to pop songs, computer games and tabloid tv could provide kids with an exit route from the cul-de-sac of these escapisms, into richer areas of cultural tradition and understanding. From Big Brother to George Orwell (or from Ibiza Uncovered to Epicurus) is surely a worthwhile educational gambit.

Economists who've read their Marx often talk about education as part of the "reproduction of labour" - the place where the character of the good worker is made. The play ethic wants an education which aims at the reproduction of creativity, the nurturing of the good player’s soul. Children should leave schools feeling motivated, in command of their faculties, and capable of expressing themselves in forms and behaviours which both please themselves and others. Why would such a child choose the temporary utopia of drugs, over the actual joys of skilful self-creation? Why would they not choose to play?"

If you woke up and found that you were 8 again and had to go back to school, how would you feel? Would you not want a school that was more on Kane's lines than the one you send your kids to now?

Play versus Work - Maybe the thought of a lifetime of "work" is putting boys off school?

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 11:18:47 GMT

Here is an extract from Pat Kane's body of Work on Play - Thanks to Ross Mayfield for the link

"Yet why believe in work, when work doesn't believe in you? The constant watchwords of the new capitalism are flexibility, creativity, self-improvement. Workers are urged to "get up to speed" with a runaway world: we must become mobile and tensile, enterprising and capable. We must harness our chariots to the sun of intense global competition.

Yet these injunctions come from companies which hire you for a year, six months, maybe even less; who might be taken over at any time in some City of London or Wall Street manoeuvre; who try to wriggle out of long-term entanglements like pensions, wage and holiday agreements; and who shed labour whenever their position in the global marketplace shows the slightest competitive disadvantage. Trying to excel for companies that are themselves transient, provisional and unforgiving might come to seem like the grandest folly.

When that realization comes - that is, when the work ethic crumbles before your eyes - then an intellectual vacuum opens up at the heart of contemporary capitalism, which desperately needs to be filled. Over the last decade, a procession of not-big-enough ideas have tried to fill the space - "downshifting", "work-life balance", all those slackers and idlers. None of them with much success or distinction.

They all try to speak to our deep common anxiety: that if we keep up our loyalty to the work ethic, in a world where competition, mutability and innovation rule supreme, we will destroy ourselves. The LSE's Richard Sennett calls this the "corrosion of our characters" - where the acids of the new capitalism eat away at the old industrial virtues of self-discipline, sacrifice and duty.

We need a new, similarly powerful social ethic for these hyper-demanding times. Some other world-view that can give a coherence to the frenzy of activities and interests that we scatter across our busy lives. Something - anything - that could make all these demands for "creativity" and "achievement" even worth the effort.

I PLAY, THEREFORE I AM

Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don’t take “play” to mean anything idle, wasteful, frivolous or even necessarily childish. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is "play" as the great philosophers, and recently mind scientists, have understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.

“Man plays only when he is in the fullest sense a human being“, said the great German Romantic Friedrich Schiller. “As man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, then his activity is to play", agreed Jean Paul-Sartre. The classic 20th century psychologists - like Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson - all understood play as our most effective way of mastering the complexities of our world, rather than submitting to its routines.

And now that we can watch the very synapses of our minds perform, through medical neuro-imaging, the powers of play are even more confirmed. Those who clear space in their lives for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is, for play - have better memory, sharper reasoning, and more optimism about their future. As the dean of play studies, the University of Pennsylvania's Brian Sutton-Smith says, "the opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects".

So to call yourself a "player", rather than a "worker", is to immediately widen your conception of who you are, and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realizing your full human potential; to take an essentially active, rather than passive stance towards your environment; and to be constantly guided in this by your sense of fulfillment, meaning and satisfaction.

The play ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole way of life. It turns us into more militant producers, and more discriminating consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties.

So, like the work ethic, the play ethic is a set of feelings and principles about how we should be active in the modern world. But the difference between the two is huge. Work is always (to coin a phrase) the involuntary sector - the realm of compulsion and necessity, where men and women have to do what they have to do. But as Sartre says, play is what you do when you feel at your most free, your most voluntary. When every positive decision you make about your life carries both a risk, and a promise, of something new and challenging taking place. This is why the play ethic isn’t “the leisure ethic”: the last thing it involves is slumped relaxation."

This is an extract from a 4,00 word piece and a wideranging site with tons of material

Worried about cholesterol? Worried that you cannot afford the drugs that you think that you need? - Don't worry be happy!

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 19:38:19 GMT

Here is another view from the Whitehall study. What is shows are the rate of death from Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) your rank in the hierarchy and the risk factors. Look to the right at the longest bar chart. This shows that you are 4 times more likely to die form CHD if you are at the bottom of the pile than at the top. See that thin black line at the foot of the chart - that is your risk factor to scale if you have high cholesterol. yet what is the main topic of your conversation with your doctor? What are the best selling set of drugs, after anti deprressants? Pills to lower your cholesterol. The blank in the file (actually white so it doesn't show) is high blood pressure. Taking pills for hypertension? Even smoking is not too bad.

It's easier for us to take a pill I suppose than to face reality about our lives. Are we mainly slaves or free - that is the health question I think.

There is no doubt that many drugs are very useful but are the the only way to see health improvments?

I love this slide. It shows the relative decline of TB. Most of the battle was won in the public health sector way before the introduction of antibiotics in the 1950's.

How we feel about ourselves is another important factor.

Here we see the amazing rise in the crude death rate in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What is the main factor. A loss of identity. We see the same prcess in our native population in North America.

So what's my point? One of the factors that is causing our healthcare costs to exceed the rate of groweth of our economy is the rising cost of drugs. We seem to belive that it is only drugs that keep us from death's door. This is especially true for seniors. How do we change this perception?

Identity - Our most important need? Does blogging make you well?

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 12:49:52 GMT

I was struck this week by seeing "Augustine's wall". In the work I am doing on health, I have come to understand that one off the most powerful negative forces on our immune system is when we lose our sense of control and identity. The modern bureaucracy strips us of both. Hence now 17% of payroll is the direct costs of absence and health in the modern workplace. Just before you scan on past this -17% OF PAYROLL!!!!.

Most disease in the developed world is chronic. Diabetes, back problems, depression. They cannot be "cured" by using the germ theory.

This type of disease is the largest cost in the modern work force and is also driving the revenues of the drug companies who have found a gold mine in problems that cannot be "cured". Drug cost are rising at a compound rate in excess of 9% and will move soon to the top of the list of costs in the health system.

But actually it is Augustine that has a sense of where we could more profitably look for help. The emerging key to chronic disease is culture. Our immune system is compromised when we live in a culture where only a few have voice and control - the modern bureaucracy. We are also learning that the same conditions apply when we look at societies. Those that are very top down such as Sicily have much worse health and economic outcomes that say the north of Italy that has a tradition of strong horizontal links of self help. We are also learning that the same is true in families as well. Egalitarian family cultures drive the best development for their children. All this is coming together in a grand theory of culture/the immune system/development and coping.

Here is Sir Michael Marmot, the world's leading workplace researcher on the topic:

The question is what is it about position in the hierarchy that determines different rates of disease?

And given that, the hierarchy in disease does change. All societies may have hierarchies but we know that the social gradient in disease is not fixed. It?s bigger in some places than others and it can change over time. This could be that the magnitude of the hierarchies change, but there are always hierarchies. But more importantly, it suggests that it is about where you are in the hierarchy that's related to disease and can we do something about that?

So you ask is it money? Is it prestige, self esteem? And in fact what I think it is has much more to do with how much control you have over life circumstances and the degree to which you?re able to participate fully in society..?

Here is what this means in real life.

Here is a graph showing the Gradient in mortality in the Whitehall Study that looked at the UK Civil Service over 20 years. In the UK, Administrative would be the top of the heap. People at the bottom have 4 times worse outcomes. These forces are much more powerful that the factors that we currently focus on such as smoking, obesity etc.

Putnam makes the same case for the impact of community on health as well.

The traditional "paternal cultures" such as Louisiana are at the bottom where only those at the top feel they have a voice and control, and the more egalitarian cultures such as Vermont are at the top where many feel that they are in charge of their lives and that they have a say. Again these indentity and control forces are huge.

Wilms at UNB has found the same correlation in family culture as well. Those families with very traditional authoritarian cultures shut down their children and set them up for very poor development tracks. By the way really permissive parents are almost as bad.

Augustine is so on the money! My sense is that in the next 20 years we will develop an approach to health that is largely governed by our emerging understanding of how our immune system is connected to our sense of identity and voice. Paradoxically, similar "Public Health" approach in the late 19th century hit infectious diseases on the head. Clean water, good sanitation, the end of child labour, the introduction of public schools etc all contributed to a huge reduction of infectious disease well before the introduction of anti biotics. I find it interesting that as parts of society break down that diseases such as TB are on their way back now.

My hope is that as we understand the issues of control and voice, that we can shift from medication to having a better life as the "cure".

Selfridge's - The Physical eBay? - Focus on the experience versus the transaction

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 11:39:16 GMT

Great article about the revolution at Selfridge's in London. Like eBay it now focuses on creating the optimal environment for brands and resellers to do their thing. Gone is a the bureaucracy and the sameness. Gone are in house brands. Gone are most employees - they work for themselves or for the brands. In is theatre and design and fun.

In a fast changing world, communicating what is going on becomes key

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 11:10:53 GMT

An excellent article on the need to be open - there are no secrets anymore. Good link to the Military's work in the early weeks in Iraq

How to Win the Information Battle — Lessons from a Modern War
By David Newkirk and Stuart Crainer

07/30/03
Business leaders can learn a lot from how the military manages the flow of real-time information.

The former British prime minister Harold Macmillan was once asked what made his job most difficult. “Events, dear boy, events,” he replied. In this age of information overload, events befuddle and bewilder leaders more than ever. From battles in foreign countries, to explosions in space, to CEOs’ defense of their honor in court, events are relayed to our television screens and computers in real time. Transmission and production delays in the media once allowed time for editing and perspective. Today, news is unfiltered — and rat-a-tat rapid. There are few guidelines (let alone rules) to help senior executives understand how to manage the outflow of information — or assimilate the avalanche coming in.

The best practices for managing information may lie not in business, but in the military. Long a supplier of metaphors and guidance for grappling with strategy dilemmas, the armed forces are also showing business leaders how to manage real-time information.

Is work in most organizations Slavery?

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 02:36:09 GMT

My friend Andrew Clarke sent me this about Simone Weill's views that most work was in fact slavery

"Here's the logic chain:

1. Work is of fundamental spiritual importance because it offers us an anchoring connection to the present. If we don't achieve this connection regularly, our minds become too "unchained" and roam around in the past and the future. This part is not too far from the whole Zen notion of the role of "every day living".

2. Work is always organized in the context of a hierarchy (she got a lot of flack about this from her Marxist friends who believed that this was not true). The fundamental thing that differentiates an opressive hierarchy from a non-opressive one is the notion of consent. If you give your consent to participate in the hierarchy, you're free, and work assumes its proper spiritual role. If you don't give consent, you're a slave.

3. Your ability to give consent is dependent on your ability to perceive the connection of your work to the overall work of the hierarchy, and to your belief that the hierarchy's work is "good". If you cannot perceive the connection, then by definition you cannot give your consent, and you are therefore a slave.

4. Modern methods of organizing production (and she was talking about the factory experience here) either intentionally or unintentionally remove our sense of connection to the whole, which destroys our ability to give consent, which by definition makes us slaves.

There you have it! Amazing that she wrote all this down between 1940 and 1943.?

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 02:30:57 GMT

Thoughts on the Intersections of Social Capital, Virtual Networks, Enterpreneurship and Innovation

I had mentioned a few days ago that I had to write a short essay outlining the main issues to be confronted in any attempt to understand the role of virtual networks in enhancing enterpreneurship and innovation, especially with respect to how social capital accumulates and impacts upon business dynamics.

Here goes then:

***

For the project to achieve fruition, there is a plethora of issues that need to be clarified. I will shortlist a few basic issues that pervade the work of leading researchers and practitioners and whose significance cannot be overlooked. First and most obviously, how could social capital be measured, especially within the context of virtual networks? Social Network Analysis tools are widely employed for such purposes, however, their effectiveness is limited due to the difficulty inherent in specifying which criteria should be used. Most analyses based on such tools (ie. Inflow) value the connections between disparate nodes of the social network in which they belong. When the social network consists of a relatively small number of nodes, the analysis will definitely unveil how frequently the nodes communicate and will choreograph the information flows among them. What though the analysis cannot tell is whether the relationship between the nodes in built upon strong or weak ties. Put otherwise, we can infer the existence of a relationship between two nodes, but we cannot determine the exact dynamics upon which the specific relationship is premised, and frequency of communication is not the best of criteria since it may denote hierarchy rather than intense team building or project work [1]. This difficulty aside, the Internet is bound to impact upon the process according to which social networks are formed, and hence the way social capital is accumulated, as “social capital is about networks, and the net is the network to end all networks” [2].

Secondly, the process of innovation is continuously changing in scope due to the amplifying character of all – pervasive communication networks, and this further hinders an analysis based on conventional metrics. For example, the nature of consumerism online can be radically different from the respective consumption modes observed in the physical world. Unhindered by physical matter constraints, users of file-sharing networks, such as the legendary Napster music file sharing network, redefine consumption as an essentially peer activity, which extends far beyond typical paid-for commercial experiences. In a similar vein, economists have a hard time explaining why people share information online without the requirement of quid-pro-quo relations [3][4]. Or in the case of Linux and collaborative software development on the Internet, the boundaries between producers and users are so blurred that this dichotomy between production and consumption loses its meaning. Some have argued that this is where the innovative potential of the Internet actually lies: networks of users providing help to each other without expecting anything in return, in much the same way that mutuals in the UK operate [5]. This peculiarity of the model has led many to assume the prevalence of a gift economy [6], however, it is a mistake to categorise the Internet as a mosaic of gift economies, despite that it arguably promotes the proliferation of certain kinds of gift economies. We should not neglect to bear in mind that the Internet is primarily a collaboration and communication platform rather than a marketplace aimed at co-ordinating exchanges of goods and services. Hence, it should come as no surprise that B2B e-marketplaces, which are geared toward communication and collaboration and aim at co-ordinating supply chains, are far more successful than B2C/e-tailing ventures that initially dismissed the inherently collaborative character of the Internet. And this is also reflected in the success of those early pioneers who have managed to stay afloat despite the current economic downturn.

Amazon.com and eBay are probably the most succinct examples as they have both embraced the contribution of end-users and have continuously rethought their strategy in order to morph from e-tailers to platforms where people could do a lot of things [7][8]. eBay still portrays as the most gigantic marketplace in the world, however, its real strength lies in its ability to build a massively decentralised database of member profiles, which constitutes the pragmatic leverage point of the platform. Users of eBay rank other users they have engaged in some sort of transaction through eBay, and this ranking mechanism emerges as the definitive asset of eBay because it enables users to evaluate the credibility of other users and this is the least-hassle route to reputation building in a dematerialised world [9]. Amazon, on the other hand, invites users to submit reviews of books they have read, and in so doing, a conversational effect is evident throughout the Amazon platform with users seemingly carrying out conversations and forming temporary communities of interest [10][11]. The underlying technology or process, called Collaborative Filtering, has drawn quite some attention as it is reckoned to be in the epicentre of a radical shift away from content based e-commerce models toward user and community centric models. What is more important though, particularly with respect to innovation and social capital, is that the very same process of collaborative filtering enables the formation of social networks at a scale the world has never experienced before. Witness the success of community sites such as Slashdot.org, which recycle the web in real-time, and which rely upon their members to create content and generate value. This genre of websites is also known as weblogs, although the genre is as well defined as peer-to-peer to say the least. Semantics aside, the technology that powers weblogs is not really novel, but the impact on innovation and network formation is dramatic. Nowadays, scores of companies like Macromedia, Microsoft, Apple, Demos, Groove Networks and Jupiter Research to mention but a few, have started experimenting with weblogs in an effort to connect with their market and benefit from end-user innovation.

Perhaps, the greatest challenge and promise at the same time of seamless communication networks revolves around work organisation. As knowledge workers no longer need to be physically located in a specific workplace, and they can co-ordinate their creative output regardless of geographical constraints, the role of organisational structure loses its historic role of managing power relations at a distance. In much the same way, organisational boundaries tend to become more elastic and flexible, and it is not rare to confront organisations whose strategy is defined by their structure. Put bluntly, although at first glance conventional structures seem to gradually evaporate, the overall importance of structure is as important as ever. In a sense, structure precedes strategy [12][13]. In fast-pacing industries fraught with technological uncertainty and galvanised by rapidly changing consumer expectations, the only way to compete is by elaborating on a fluid organisational structure that allows for quick adaptation to environmental disturbances. Thus, strategy becomes of secondary importance, and day-to-day management is what matters now. Under such circumstances, a rigid structure is bound to result in managerial lethargy, and to ease this tension, organisation around teams and projects becomes the norm. Nevertheless, this is not to say that the boundaries of the network can be easily defined, as many organisational actors may not be even conscious of those very swiftly adjusting boundaries.

Furthermore, when average job tenure lasts for no more than a couple of years as it is the norm in the Silicon Valley, and the emerging model of organisation is modelled on Hollywood, where individuals form ad-hoc, temporary, project-based business networks and once the film – the project – is completed, the temporary network disbands, then the corporate world is certain to undergo for a major restructuring [14]. Needless to say, this process is further accelerated by cyberspace and the new legion of e-lancers that discover new opportunities through always-on communication technologies [15]. Some speculate that the prevalent organisational entities of the future will not be mega-corporations the size of countries, but small clusters of e-lancers brought together for a single project and continuously reconfiguring their dynamics and components [15]. So far so true, people no longer need to see each other in a face-to-face context in order to work together. But, how can they trust each other if they have never physically seen, touched, and handshaken them? And this is perhaps the greatest obstacle that virtual organisations face: how to establish trust in a exclusively virtual context where relationships and processes are in flux, and the lifespan of the temporary organisation is meant to be so short that most organisational actors will never get to really know everyone involved? The importance of swift trust [16] and weak ties [18] has been proposed as the antitode, however, the Hollywood organisational model, again, offers a glimpse of the future to come: intense team building through a shared goal and trust building through webs of trust. First, there must be no ambiguity as to which purpose the organisation seeks to fulfil, and most importantly, you trust the people whom the people you trust trust. After all, centralised trust systems have always been inherently risky.

References

[1] Preece, J. Online Communities: Designing usability, designing sociability, John Wiley & Sons, NY, 2000

[2] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2000, p.171.

[3] Richard Barbrook, The high-tech gift economy, First Monday, 1998, at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/index.html

[4] Felix Stalder, Beyond portals and gifts: Towards a bottom-up Net economy, First Monday, Issue 4, No 1, 1999, accessible at

www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_1/stalder/.

[5] Charles Leadbeater, Up the Down Escalator: why the global pessimists are wrong, Penguin, 2002.

[6] Kollock P. The Economies of online cooperation: gifts and public goods in cyberspace in Smith M and Kollock P (Eds) Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge, 1997.

[7] Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Case study #1: amazon.com - a business history, in E-Commerce Management: Text and Cases, 2002.

[8] Tapscott, D. Digital Capital: Harnessing the power of business webs, McGraw – Hill, 2000.

[9] Boyd, J. In community we trust: online security communication at eBay, Journal for Computer-Mediated Communication, Issue, no 3, April, 2002, accessible at http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol7/issue3/boyd.html

[10] Locke, C. Gonzo Marketing: Winning through worst practices, Perseus, 2001

[12] Langlois N. Langlois, The Vanishing Hand: the changing dynamics of industrial capitalism, University of Connecticut Working Paper, Version 3.02b, 2001.

[13] The McKinsey Quarterly Reader, “Strategy=Structure”, May 2002.

[14] Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: how the shift from ownership to access is transforming modern life, Penguin, 2000, pp.24-29.

[15] T.W. Malone and R.J. Laubacher. "The Dawn of the e-lance economy," Harvard Business Review, volume 76, number 5 (September-October), 1998.

[16] Meyerson D., Weick K.E. and Kramer R.M. “Swift Trust and Temporary Groups” in Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research. (Eds) Kramer R.M. and Tayler T.R., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp.166-195.

[18] M. Granovetter. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1973.

[George Dafermos' Weblog]

Excellent stuff George

The retail revolution - eBay

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:09:54 GMT

Why Ebay Works.

Meg Whitman:

"We make our money one dollar at a time, literally $1.72 per listing, and a final value fee if the listed item sells."

"our users are on track to trade $21 billion worth of merchandise. "

"what eBay does is create efficient markets where there were quite inefficient markets before. We’re the major player in the two inefficient parts of the overall [product life cycle] bell curve. "

If you want more details and don't my slogging through powerpoint check out the latest corporate presentation.

[Micah's Weblog]

I think that eBay is the best example of the Support Economy yet. Anyone who cannot see the power of creating a trusted place and facilitation as the new way of doing business - look out. Check out the PPT has a gold mine of stuff - Adam Cohen's Book - see link - is great too.

Organizational complexity - A New Math Required and New Tools

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 18:54:16 GMT

I am doing some OD work for a university. One of the issues confronting all universities today is a quantum increase in organizational complexity. My ingoing sense is that the mechanism's for managing complexity are poorly understood and that as maths changed at the turn of the century to take complexity into account, so we have to look for novel ways of managing complexity at universities.

My thesis is that we manage today as if cause and effect were our universe. Our systems are too complex for this midset and if we remain in cause and effect, conflict will be the only result. Some type of systems tool is required. A start may be some type of council that brings all partiers to the table - but I get ahead of myself.

Let's look at the world of 1969 when I went up to Oxford and then at the world of 2003 for a modern urban university in Canada

When I went to Oxford 35 years ago, my college, Christchurch was mainly an undergraduate college attached to a cathedral. The Dean ran both. He and the Dons ran the college with a handful of secretaries and a lot of servants and he and the Canons ran the Chapter again with a few secretaries and a lot of servants. Christ Church was part of a Coop called the University where a few Dons sat on committees and set policy. That was the University - a few committees.

Our world was really the college. Small and compact. 90% of the teaching was in the college. We all lived in college. Each college had a its own funding. Christ Church was immensely wealthy with large endowments of land that had accrued over hundreds of years. There were few of us. All of us that went paid fees and it cost me then about L1,000 a year in fees and I spent about another L1,000 on having a good time. We were heavily subsidized by the college but it also lived well within its means. Our accommodation, though splendid, was also spartan as only an all male place of the time could have been. In my quad, the only toilet was on the ground-floor, and the building was 6 stories high. We used the sink for most things! The only baths were in the basement in one corner of the quad. When this was pointed out to the dean who built the quad, his reply was that " they are only here for 8 weeks at a time". I think I only had a handful of baths in the 3 years that I was there. I would go home on the weekends for a clean up.

Again my point - a simple set up with not much money flowing either way and almost no government involvement. The world was the college and the faculties. Being small there was little managerial complexity. All who were not faculty were in effect servants or students. There were no money problems and, apart from maintenance, little need for capital investment. The money fit inside the capital envelope of the college. The university ran a few libraries and exams. The simple college was our world where everyone knew everyone perhaps better than they wanted too.

I use Oxford as an example because it was the model for many other universities. But now what is the university world?

Money and social engineering are compelling drivers. The state has entered the game in most countries and has funded a huge increase in enrollment which has driven a huge increase in the capital requirement. Coed is the norm and modern plumbing has entered the male preserve at great cost. Equipping my college with toilets and bathrooms on every floor cost over L20 million! Imagine the plumbing issues in 16 -1 19th century buildings.

So what are the issues in many Canadian Universities today. They have a president whose job is to fund-raise and to deal with governments. His job is mainly a business role. He has to get the budget and make the money work. He has to compete for capital donors and he has to lobby government for more research and operating funds. He is supported by a staff that would not be out of place in any large commercial enterprise. But he has no power to tell the faculty what to do. The Product end of the university has not changed much since I was an undergraduate or indeed since the middle ages. The faculty is divided into separate disciplines who jealously guard their turf. Now usually unionized, my Tutor Charles Stuart must be turning in his grave, they hold back the online world as they know that this will destroy how they work. They do not want to teach because they move up the tenure track and in status by publishing. So they employ armies of servants, TA's to you and I, to teach and mark in their name. In my day all the dons in every discipline met every night over dinner in hall. Today they all go home to their SOS's and children. So the linkages between them are poor. All the fertile research ground has been tilled and new entrants scrap for weeds deep in the mud.of their field. There is little sense of collegiality.

They fear that the president will make their university into a BUSINESS - horror of horrors! They sense that undergraduates already pay too much but that is the President's problem. They sort of know that demography will send fewer young their way - but that is the president's problem. After all they don't want to teach them anyway. . They reject any idea of using technology to teach differently - they fear that their precious IP will be lost if they make what they do accessible. So reducing the cost of teaching is the-President's problem. They have their heads firmly in the sand but will not give an inch of thie power up to help.

Governments want every one to have access to university. They have set up a loan sharking business to facilitate this. The average debt for BA is about $30,000. The theory is that BA's get high paying jobs and will easily pay this off. Not so. Most are caught and flip hamburgers or some double up and go onto graduate work. Students will find new ways of getting what they want and will turn away from the traditional delivery and costs - they have no choice.

While the students are finding university too expensive. 50% of the faculty will be in the retirement zone in the next 10 years. Already a bidding war for the new talent is happening. In key areas, new hires are earning more than the old guard. resentment is building and costs are going up.A classic squeeze play is emerging. Costs are too high and rising. Each party balmes the other.

Universities have become huge. They now have armies of Administrators and Technicians who are still treated like servants by the faculty. They are unionized as well and have a deep sense of bitterness and entitlement.

So who would want to be a University President?

How can universities reduce this complexity. Maybe they can take a lead from our Provincial Politicians. They are recommending the formation of a council where the premiers meet as a matter of course with the Prime Minister. The underlying idea is that there is no process other than confrontation to meet the complex needs of a diverse set of groups who live under one hat, Canada. So maybe for universities. Currently each powerful group has to attack the others. The poor President is stuck in the middle.

Maybe this is true for all organizations? Management and the rest was OK for simpler times. The 3 body problem demands a more sophisticated process. It recognizes that once there are more than two parties, then using cause and effect as the metaphor leads to conflict and failure. Most organizations are more complex than two body systems now. Understanding complexity and chaos will become essential tools for managment. More later

Magic Numbers and Social Organization Is there a science here?

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 17:54:21 GMT

I am reading Simon Singh brilliant book on Maths "Fermat's Enigma". (See link) Fermat's problem is based on the one equation that even the most dunce maths brain such as my own understand - in a right angled triangle, the Square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the two other sides. - Fermat's problem is based on this simple equation. But that is not my point today. My point is that Pythagoras was struck by how the natural world, such as music and so on, was run by a series of numbers. Numbers can be found at the core of most natural phenomena and relationships. Did you know that you can calculate the actual length of a river by multiplying its crow's length, the point to point, by Pi (3.14)? How weird!

My aha for today is that, why should not human relationships be also governed by numbers? If so, we are underplaying the importance of magic numbers. Why are nurses so unhappy? Might it be that they go to work as groups and not as teams governed by the rules of magic numbers? Why is there bullying at school? Might it be that we do not organize them by using magic numbers? Why do many of our social and work organizations need so much bureaucracy? May it be that we do not use Magic Numbers. Why do all armies have the same core organizational structures of 8 - 15 - 35 -150 and 500-600? Might it be that they have found out intuitively that these sets work best under stress. Why are all HG groups functions of 15 and 35.? Why are larger tribal groups not more than 500? Why is 150 such a perfect number for getting complex work done?

I am beginning to feel that much of the inhumanity and stress in our work place is the machine culture that pays no attention to these hard numbers.

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 21:16:06 GMT

Project Management and Horses.

Project Management and Horses.

Spotted this gem on Anders site:

The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that 'when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount'. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Changing riders

2. Appointing a committee to study the horse ...

It just gets better from there.

[High Context]

It does.

[McGee's Musings]

And we think that we are so civilized and clever!

Blogging and becoming Human

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 21:43:05 GMT

I was being interviewed today by a PHD Student who is working on the topic of Communities of Practice. We had a bit of an aha that I wanted to share

It appears that the corporate model that most of us work in now squeezes out our humanity. We develop machine relationships - even odd corporate voices - not simply a use of lanaguage that is not human as described in Cluetrain, but a manner of speaking a "dead sound" where our real personality has been excluded as has emotion and feeling.

This machine world is causing us to become ill and depressed. I speculate that as we assume this corporate personality that it takes over our whole life and affects our marriages and our relationships with our children.

No wonder marriage is failing and our children are in such trouble. We act in this impersonal and unreal way in our whole lives. We even act like this to ourselves and no longer have a real relationships with ourselves.

How can we learn and experience being human again? What is the essence of being human? It is surely to hear our real voice. What does blogging do? It allows many of us to develop this voice. Blogging can enable us to become human again.

Not a small issue.

Are we neanderthals? How can social software help?

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 16:12:24 GMT

I wonder - have we become trapped in a type of culture that has turned us into Neanderthals? What do I mean by this weird statement?

I wrote yesterday

"Remember that we think that complex language was an adaptation to hunting on the savannah and hence was our start as homo sapiens - the tool maker. Our new ability to learn across tribes and across time, rather than only directly face to face in present time, gave us the ability to adapt to changes in the environment by using culture not biology.

Neanderthal did not innovate. In 200,000 years his tools' set did not change much. He could not cope with the invasion of Homo sapiens and was extinct within 1,000 years of first contact. With no complex language he could not communicate ideas in the abstract. He therefore could not cross tribal barriers. With no complex language he could not recall the past nor imagine the future. He could only work in the context of the present.

We are like that today.

In the modern organization there is no allowance for cross tribal discussion. Instead of looking across, we look up and down. This is also true of our learning organizations such as Universities. University departments are trapped inside their disciplines and find cross disciplinary work very challenging. Yet we know that the breakout in human potential came as a result of using complex language to look across boundaries. Innovation seems to demand a diverse perspective. As one human tribe found a new way to make a tool - the horizontal links drove not only adoption but improvement. Recursive loops between tribes accelerated the improvements.

In the modern organization, and in political life, we live in a fixed present - the life cycle of a CEO or an administration. There is a denigration of the past. We puff up our selves by dismissing the work of the predecessors. Because we do not look to enough to the past, we fail to see the patterns available there that tell us why and how we are in the present. Consequently, we cannot see the systemic causes of current problems. So, instead, we look for simple cause and effect - a view of causality that does not exist in the natural world. We not only do not look at the context of the past, but we seem incapable of imagining the future. Our days and minds are filled with the crises of the present. So we, like Neanderthal, are trapped in the present unable to move .

We have been trapped by a cultural meme that has turned us into Neanderthals.

So what is the way out? I think that social software will be like complex language. It offers us the chance to cope with our challenges by once again opening up the context of the past so that we can see the patterns. It re-attaches us to the power of the future to pull us forward. How does it do this? By opening up the horizontal channels and by opening up time again.

Is blogging an evolutionary tool?