Management

Management

principles of networked management

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At Red Hat, the enterprise IT company,  “managers focus on opportunities, not score-keeping”.

‘We also rely on associates’ peers and communities to informally assess how people perform. We pay attention to their reputations and how they are regarded by others. We look at the scope and quality of their influence. The result is that rather than “managing up” to their boss to get a good review, Red Hatters are accountable to the community as a whole.’ – Jim Whitehurst, CEO Red Hat

This is a good example of networked management, as opposed to scientific management (1911), which informed the past century of practice.

Principles of Networked Management: It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more creative work can be fostered. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, especially management.

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a simpler approach to km

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A recent posting for a six-week knowledge management contract was posted by the UNDP. When it comes to requests for proposals, if you ask for something, you will definitely get offers to produce it. But is this what they need?

“Conduct initial research on industry standards for KM measurement to inform the design of UNDP’s KM performance measurement, and develop tailored metrics for monitoring and measuring UNDP performance;
Identify and recommend suitable tools and mechanisms to collect the data necessary for KM monitoring;
Formulate standard operating procedures for data collection and monitoring and analysis of KM metrics.” —UNDP

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management in perpetual beta

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We are arriving at a break-point with the existing economy, one dominated by markets, as we enter the network era. A creative economy is emerging and our existing institutions and markets cannot deal with it. Tim O’Reilly calls this The WTF Economy, and is bringing people together to understand and deal with it.

What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional universities in keeping skills up to date?

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networked unmanagement

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What are the fundamental changes necessary to shift the dominant organizational model toward stronger networks and temporary, mutually negotiated hierarchies?

Yesterday I spoke with the founders of a small start-up that has seen good growth and is looking at how best to structure for the future. They realized that most existing management models did not make sense for their case, as they have both for-profit and non-profit divisions, and while small, have operations on two continents. They have been provided with a lot of advice around business models from local government and industry, but they have not seen any models that reflect the reality of the network era: post-job, global, digital, mobile, complex, creative, agile, self-managing, etc.

I said that in my experience, nobody has really figured this out. Frédéric Laloux has found some commonalities for what he calls Teal organizations, and Niels Pflaeging has established some solid principles to organize for complexity. Neither of these approaches is widespread or tested at scale. My advice was that they need to build their own model, based on some general principles, within their specific complex context, which only they can understand.

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digital transformation skills

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Oscar Berg has further developed his digital collaboration canvas that describes nine capabilities required for collaborative knowledge work. He includes a handy CC-licensed worksheet to go with it. Oscar’s original work on this subject was part of my inspiration while working on a way to describe the required facets on an enterprise social network (ESN). I described how I developed the framework, based on the work of Oscar and others, in a presentation at the Learning Technologies conference in 2014. A recording of my presentation is available as well.

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L&D outside the box

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ILTS0115This article appeared in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills Magazine, January 2015

Harold Jarche issues a challenge to L&D professionals in an environment where getting the work done is more important than learning anything new.

In the mid 1990s I became involved with my most expensive learning project. I was then serving as a Training Development Officer with the Canadian Armed Forces, working in tactical aviation (helicopters that support the Army). We had just purchased 100 helicopters. A $25M full-motion combat simulator had been thrown in with the $1B budget.

I was able to watch as the new simulator was installed at our training unit, as my office was next to it. As it was tested, discussions began on how best it could be used. As the ‘training guy’ I started researching best practices in flight simulation, and was able to see what our NATO allies were doing.

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a simpler approach to content management

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I was recently asked what I thought about content management systems (CMS); how content should be developed; whether generational differences should be considered; and how to keep content relevant. The best example of a CMS is the Web. There is relevant and irrelevant content. The relevant content is often found through referrals. This may be in terms of ratings, curation by a trusted party, or from a known source. Referrals can be pushed, through something like a subscription service, or pulled from knowledge networks when there is an immediate need for information. People with more diverse and deep knowledge networks get better information.

So what does a CMS have to do with it? Not much.

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We are the media, now what?

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One of the potential downsides of a network society is that deception, especially by those with power over the communications platforms, will become all-too-common. John Pilger takes a look at this, focusing much of the blame on professional journalists in War by media and the triumph of propaganda.

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

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