Management in the Network Era: It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation, that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, including management.
ConnectedEnterprise
Connected enterprise
Three elements of digital transformation
Altimeter released a new report yesterday, called Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences.
For those of us in this field or related ones, much is not new, but confirmatory.
- Benefits:
- Leadership and employees feel empowered through education.
- Decision-making and processes become more efficient across departments.
- We found that businesses often remodel or bolt on mobile, social, and digital functionality to an aging offline/online infrastructure that is counterintuitive to customer behavior.
- Team members want to feel empowered to do the work that’s necessary while feeling a sense of ownership in the process.
- In its own way, digital transformation is making businesses more human.
Enterprise knowledge sharing requires trusted relationships
As the economy gets more networked, open organizations are becoming a necessity. Businesses are increasingly dependent on complex social interactions. Products are becoming services, as we can see with web apps, software, and even books. Trading intangible goods and services today requires trusted relationships, and often across distances. Internally, work teams that need to share complex knowledge require tighter social bonds. These are developed through time, with experience, and most often informally. Trust is a human quality. But the major barrier to encouraging informal social relationships at work often comes down to a question of control.
Move the hierarchy to the rear
In an environment where everyone is a leader, some other mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure that everyone can maintain and optimize the tenets of fairness, trust and transparency so the entire organization can move forward. —Harrison Monarth: HBR
The foundation for this ‘other mechanism’ is the wirearchy framework: a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” But what is the mechanism and why is it important to have an environment where everyone can be a leader? After all, most leaders are quite comfortable where they are. They worked hard to get there, didn’t they?
From SSM to SLE
I mentioned on Twitter that talking to people inside large corporate bodies only confirms that most are soul-sucking machines (SSM). John Bordeaux replied that skunkworks may be one way to alleviate this organizational tendency. He also said there was a need to clarify the steps necessary for community to be the central organizing principle in order to create a soul-liberating enterprise (SLE).
What matters in knowledge work
This Venn diagram by Oscar Berg says a lot about the nature of work and management today.
What I see on the right are all the attributes of being a free agent and working in trusted networks like the Internet Time Alliance. The only thing missing from these networks is a salary. Almost everything on the left is a control measure in return for a salary. It reinforces the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator to do work.
If we want knowledge workers to be truly productive we have two major options. We can create new organizational models. These could be new or based on one of the well-known 18 bossless companies. Or we can try a hybrid model, as Rod Collins advocates to Steve Denning [Collins’ other two models are a sub-set of the 18].
The third option is the hybrid option. This is more likely what a big old firm is going to use. Hybrid options are transition options. You are blending network features with a hierarchical structure. It can happen in a couple of ways.
That’s about it, because the status quo is not really an option. Not for leadership and not for dealing with complexity.
Scaling knowledge
Most organizations grow from simple to complicated structures and in so doing keep adding layers of control. These complicated organizations usually wind up getting industrial disease. On the other hand, networked organizations can scale because they do not need to control every connection. People who participate in structures like open source software projects can join and connect to others at will. Designers of these open organizational structures understand that in complex un-order, loose hierarchies and strong networks are best.
Learning and Emergent Leadership at Google
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.
A roadmap for transition
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.
A job is just a role that cannot change
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”.