Month: May 2011

In 2009, Anthony Poncier wrote a good post (in French) that covered the eight challenges of management in the virtual era; loosely translated as:

1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative.
2. Renewing the workplace social contract.
3. Creating new modes of leadership.
4. Creating value, not just revenue.
5. The production of collective knowledge.
6. Managing with both IQ and EQ (emotional quotient).
7. A diverse community rather than a disciplined unity.
8. Learning about the reality of the virtual.

1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative is becoming the norm in both large corporations and in small start-ups. The Internet Time Alliance is spread across eight time zones and we understand these challenges. One key to ensuring collaboration is through the narration of work. This fosters transparency and is something to be modelled by management.

2. Transparency becomes a catalyst in renewing the workplace social contract. Empowered workers have more responsibilities and power must be shared. This of course is a major challenge but many companies are already dealing with it, as the WorldBlu list of most democratic workplaces shows.

3. New and radical leadership models are coming forward as alternatives to more traditional, military-style command and control frameworks.

4. Creating long-term value is becoming more obvious in the business world. Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot offers a simple guide to responsible, sustainable, joyful work:

1. Find the sweet spot: Identify your Gift, passion, and purpose
2. Find the right partners
3. Research unmet needs
4. Imagine and innovate solutions
5. Continuously improvise
6. Act responsibly on principle

5. I’ve said before that personal knowledge management (PKM) is our part of the social learning contract. Collective knowledge only becomes a reality when individuals engage in meaningful conversations to share their tacit knowledge. Collective knowledge is much more than databases of information.

6. The social, human side of business relationships is finally getting the attention it deserves. Once again, look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

• Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
• Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
• Workers manage their own schedules
• Each worker has a unique “competency model”
• Customers participate in projects

7. The challenge of balancing diversity & unity is complex and requires new perspectives. Monika Hardy made this comment on my post, Emergent Value:

all levels are needed in any large organization…
isn’t that what we can do now.. seamlessly. gyrating from the vertical to the horizontal at whim, sophisticated zooming in and out, we’re in the system, we’re out of the system, we’re large, we’re small.
and without us even thinking it’s work, or that we’re doing it, or forcing it.
it’s like our reward for listening to what tech wants is that we can just be. and the freedom from just being, the extra time/money/energy from letting tech work the chaos, is allowing us to notice things we’ve been blinded to – for all the order we thought we craved. we were missing mindfulness.
emergent value and life in perpetual beta.. how lucky are we?

8. Virtual relationships are real and have significant impact on organizations. A song on the Net can drop stock values and a dispersed group of individual activists with networked computers can embarrass nation states and corporations. Virtual relationships can create significant business value (to which I can attest on many occasions). Separating relationships by medium is rather fruitless, so managers need to understand the virtual very well.

Thanks again to Anthony for eight good points, still pertinent today.

What is the future of the corporate model in a knowledge society?

Networked workplaces are on the rise and are challenging the large corporation model. For instance, many big web companies have comparatively few staff. They leverage their networks.

But the corporation is not going to become suddenly extinct, as most of our laws and business practises favour the corporation over the individual. Witness who legally owns the intellectual property (IP) produced by the employee [answer: the corporation]. It’s only in some universities that the knowledge worker maintains these rights.

While salaried workers may not own their IP, they own more and more of the “know-how”. This intangible know-how is the real value of knowledge – being able to do something with it. We are seeing the rise of  knowledge artisans who bring their tools; and leave with them. This is change from the bottom of the organizational pyramid.

Intellectual Property itself has minimal value and much IP isn’t worth the effort to protect it. Consider that companies like Facebook and Twitter have not built their businesses on patent applications. They’re too busy refining their business models, which are in perpetual Beta. Much business value is not in the idea or even the artifact that represents it, but in the speed and vigour of implementation.

The command and control corporate model may be forced to change when shareholders really understand that the valuation of their average corporation is getting to be more than 85% intangible assets. These intangibles are worthless without the know-how of knowledge workers. Therefore the actual value of the average corporation, without its people, is getting close to zero. So where would you put your money? In the corporation or in the people? For now, you have limited options, but who knows if this may change.

Look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

• Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
• Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
• Workers manage their own schedules
• Each worker has a unique “competency model” [farewell HR]
• Customers participate in projects

This sounds like a wirearchy or what I would describe as a structure that fosters multi-way flows of power based on trusted relationships facilitated by networked transparency. It reflects what chaordic structures have tried to do – balance chaos and order. Between chaos and order lies complexity, and that’s what simpler, but more nimble, organizational structures can better address.

In a networked world, the future of the corporation will be different, just as the future of many countries today looks suddenly different.

Thanks to Timbuk3 for the title inspiration.

Virtual work can significantly reduce useless meetings, eliminate commuting time and free up time for knowledge workers to focus on what is important: being creative and dealing with complex problems.

Virtual work also changes the organizational dynamic. Because you can’t watch each person and micro-manage the work, the organization must come up with real performance measurements (instead of obsolete measures such as pay for time), and that in itself might increase productivity.

Virtual learning has similar effects. As much as I enjoy face-to-face group learning sessions, they can be limiting. For instance, there is often no back-channel of text-based IM conversation going on simultaneously, nor can I quickly pop a link or file to everyone while the conversation continues. Face-to-face can also be a bit too  linear (highly dependent on time allotted for the session) and not as productive as some virtual sessions.

A key to learning and working collaboratively is trust. Trust is the glue that holds knowledge organizations together, not rules and regulations.  It’s something to consider when developing a recruitment and retention strategy for knowledge-intensive workplaces.

A few years ago, Charles Green responded to my post about the knowledge economy being a trust economy:

Your title captures an important insight; the knowledge economy allows significant distribution of nodes of knowledge, means of production, etc. To get the value of that, resources have to be distributed. If people can’t figure out how to trust other people, all that value goes unachieved. Or, more likely, it accrues to other organizations or networks who HAVE figured out how to trust each other.

I’ve referred several times to articles at the Trusted Advisor because trust is such an important factor in knowledge work as knowledge and innovation cannot be effectively coerced from workers.

Here’s Charles on Measuring and Managing:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why …

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

In the learning & development business there is much focus on compliance training, especially since regulatory compliance accounts for a significant amount of learning content development and learning management technology sales. However, there are few sales pitches that say, go ahead, let your employees decide what’s best for them.

Trust, it seems, doesn’t sell stuff:

• If you trust workers to manage their learning, you don’t need an LMS.
• If you trust workers to get things done, you don’t need a tracking system.
• If you trust workers to learn, you don’t have as much pre-programmed training because they will find what’s best.
• If you trust workers to be self-directed learners they would have a say in the training budget and I doubt they would vote to buy an LMS.

The large amount of compliance training in the workplace is just one more indicator of the amount of trust that organizations and regulatory agencies have in workers. The default position is don’t trust; regulate. However, this won’t work in virtual, distributed organizations, which are fast becoming the norm.

With increasing virtualization of work, there is little doubt that organizational structures will need to change and that management models will  need to adapt to increasing complexity. The virtual workplace requires a foundation of shared information, knowledge, power and trust.