Harold Jarche

Make Work More Human

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2013: The Incredibly Shrinking American Middle Class — Bill Moyers

2013: Five Myths about Canada’s Middle Class — Globe & Mail

2013: RIP: The Middle Class — Salon

2013: The Next Middle Class — Harold Jarche

2014: The Middle Class is Steadily Eroding — New York Times

The titles above indicate a shift in the economy and many of our assumptions about the nature of work, at least in my part of the world. There are many definitions of what middle class means, but for me it is the class of people who are experienced, trained or educated yet still have to work to earn a living. Where I grew up, many of our parents were immigrants who all had jobs. We were lucky. School did not require fees and most extracurricular activities were free. Many things have changed since then.

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Learning and Emergent Leadership at Google

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Two themes I have discussed here for a number of years are: 1) work is learning and learning is the work; and 2) leadership is an emergent property of networks. Helping people work on complex problems in networks is one of our management challenges for this decade. Learning has to be part of the workflow. In addition, leadership in networks does not come from above, as usually there is no top. This challenges the practice of management by hierarchical position. Leadership is an emergent property, not something bestowed from on high. Some companies understand this, but most do not. Google seems to get it. Gideon Rosenblatt highlights a conversation in the New York Times that Thomas Friedman had with Google’s VP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock.

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Personal Knowledge Mastery

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PKM for me was initially a way to keep my professional development costs as low as possible. I wanted to use the open web in the best way to stay current in my field. In 2004 this was by following early bloggers and also by blogging myself. I must say that my posts in the early years were not very good. These past few weeks I have been compiling, updating, and editing my best articles. The earliest post in that selection is from 2007. It took me three years to write a blog post that would stand the test of time.

The road to mastery needs practice and perhaps some guidance. My PKM workshop is a more structured approach to start your practice.

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some useful models

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Unless we test new work models now, we will not be ready for the demands of the future. Trying out new management structures while we have time is better than trying to make a quick shift during a crisis. Change management today means practicing change, not waiting for it to hit you on the side of the head. Smart companies don’t wait for change, they constantly experiment in anticipation of change. Whether it’s climate change or a new market demand, chance favours the prepared company.

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A roadmap for transition

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There is general consensus in this part of the world that the modern enterprise is a broken structure. Dissatisfaction with employment runs high, even at a time when it is difficult for many to find a full-time job. Just one, of many, examples is a 2013 Gallup Report that shows that 70 percent of workers are disengaged from their work.

The network era scares or confuses many people in positions of influence in large organizations. Having conversations about transparent processes and networked people actually working together to produce business value is like speaking a foreign language in most cases. Grant McCracken says that from the perspective of most corporations, the future looks like the enemy.

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A job is just a role that cannot change

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Social networks disrupt hierarchical structures. Web-based social networks accelerate the spread of new ideas and lay bare organizational flaws. Anyone in a position of power and authority is losing some of that due to the growing power of social networks – doctors, teachers, managers, politicians. Social networks speed access to knowledge and accelerate learning. They allow people to quickly make and change connections. Seb Paquet calls this “ridiculously easy group-forming”.

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Site Redesign

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If this site is popular, it is because of the content, not the design. I have not put much effort into the design and visual art is definitely not one of my skills. For the most part I have just used templates or very simple layouts. Here are some of the iterations through time.

jarche.com March 2004
jarche.com March 2004

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A simple approach to KM

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Knowledge management (KM) does not have to be a major enterprise effort. But the lack of a KM strategy can be a drag on innovation or hamper decision-making in a knowledge intensive organization. While not perfect, a simple approach to KM may be better than none at all, and preferable to a flawed and expensive enterprise-wide approach. At least this model can be implemented with relative ease and no costly software platforms.

A simple approach to KM in the organization is to look at it as three connected but independent levels. The simplest is organizational KM, which ensures that important decisions are recorded, codified, and easily available for retrieval. This is mostly explicit knowledge that ensures the organizational memory remains clear on what key decisions were taken and why others were not. Over time, this becomes more valuable. Focusing only on decision memories ensures that enterprise KM does not require significant resources but does yield useful results.

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What is your PKM routine?

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The most important aspect of PKM is that it is personal. In order to stick with a routine over time, people have to find what works for them. Blogging has been a core part of my sense-making routine over the past decade. When I conduct workshops, my primary aim is help others discover what works for them. I do not have a secret formula, only some general guidelines developed through experience, plus a lot of ideas and suggested areas to explore.

My colleague Jane Hart shared her daily PKM routine recently and it’s different from mine, which of course it should be.

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