Posts Tagged ‘work in the future’
We are right. Oh, hold on. We were wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.
Have you been in a situation, say, of supporting the invasion of Iraq to destroy WMD and then finding out you were duped. Well, let’s face it ~ finding out you were wrong. Wrong about the evidence. And more importantly, wrong about your certainty.
I’ll argue you that we are not grown up, not quite grown up, until we’ve experienced being utterly wrong, about the facts, their interpretion, our certainty and our right to dismiss the other side.
Yes, we were wrong to dismiss the other side.
We need to seek an apology and forgiveness but I am not going there today.
Converging ideas about new work, organization and management
Today I am getting my thoughts together about the amazing convergence of ideas in business and the current tensions between the old guard and newcomers in management.
Management theory was laid out before World War I and has been a matter of frills and extensions for 100 years.
By the turn of this, the 21st century, we had begun talking about positive organizational scholarship, distributed networked models, and yes, mytho-poetical approaches.
Believe me, these ideas are an 180 degree about turn. Our first impulse is to say they are wrong. And they will be wrong in parts. There is no doubt about that. Nothing is every completely right.
Equally, just because ideas converge, does not mean they are right. Not at all.
But we have to challenge our impulse to dismiss ideas because they are unfamiliar. If we have a scrap of intellectual honesty, we must recognize that they are inconvenient to those of us who have invested heavily in understanding old ways.
It is our job to go forward with them and turn them into working ideas, to find out their limits, and to find out their worth.
Self-esteem and Nathaniel Branden
As one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle, I looked up the work of Nathaniel Branden.
Branden has worked on self-esteem for 50 years. Here is one of the touchy-feely ideas that gets rejected out-of-hand.
What struck me is that Branden has asked a question that I haven’t seen asked before and I hadn’t thought to ask.
Can modern businesses survive without people who have high self-esteem?
In times of rapid change and technological development, how can we work, except with people who believe they can cope and who believe they have a right to happiness? Anyone who expects less is unlikely to rise to the challenge of modern day living, simply because they will accept 2nd best.
And the corollary, of course, is what happens to a company when it is staffed by people who have low self-esteem?
The empirical test for an HR Director, I think, is what happens to people when they join the organization. Does a person with low self-esteem gradually change to become a calm, composed, assured person who is neither whiny nor dictatorial. Or does the opposite happen?
Self-esteem may be the critical competitive competence of our 21st century world
In the meantime, the world moves on. We can be sure youngsters with high self-esteem are self-selecting environments that are healthy.
Indeed, I’ll predict that the western country that concentrates on developing wide spread self-esteem will come out best placed as we work through the financial crisis and shift of power to the East.
Enjoy. We need to relearn our trade. There is plenty for us to do.
That’s what I said. Government’s cannot promote innovation
Yesterday, I was playing with John Hagel’s list of three features that distinguish fringe/flaky activities from edge, innovative activities and I suddenly realized: governnments cannot promote innovation.
This is why.
3 differences between fringe/flakey and edge/innovative enterprises
John Hagel, famed for his work on the motor cycle industry in China, points out:
#1 Edge activities are scalable
There is a way to bring the critical stakeholders and a critical mass of people together to make a difference.
#2 Edge activities are ‘life works’
The change brought by edge activities are so compelling that we are willing to back them with everything we have.
#3 Edge activities change the status quo
Edge activities don’t exist as a complement, extension or protest to mainstream activities. They intend to take over the mainstream.
When we develop a new industry, we curtail, or even displace, other industries. People are put out of work. How can a government sponsor that?
QED. Governments cannot sponsor innovation.
How can governments support innovation?
It seems to me that govenments’ job is to promote social conditions that promote innovation.
#1 Look at employee rights in failing or contracting industries. I don’t mean employee privileges, I mean rights. How do their rights stack up with the rights of other stakeholders (who are also losing out). Bring those into balance in a fair, transparent, agree and comprehensible matrix.
#2 Make it easier for employees to move from one industry to another. How easy is it to retrain mid-career? How often does this happen? How do individuals go about it? With what success? What structural changes would make it easier?
#3 What other structural issues make it hard on employees exiting collapsing industries? How do we treat people who are not in employment? How does the tax law and the banking law make life difficulty for people who are reinvesting in new industries?
What I learned from Hagel’s points on edge industries
That’s what I learned from thinking through Hagel’s three points about edge industries. Government has got to make it easier for more edge industries to succeed.
And that means Governments must make it less painful for old industries to shrink and eventually fade away.
It also follows that a good governments, in this day and age, should be boasting that this is an economy, and society, in which old industries are given and neat, tidy, respectful burial. And that we are proud of our ability to move on. Because moving on just got profitable . . . for everyone.
And after Toyota we have ?
The time has come when management is making one its momentus periodic shifts in thought. The textbooks might take a little time to catch up. Most university textbooks don’t do Toyota yet. And after all, as we all know, Toyota is passed its zenith. But as ever, the world moves on, and we learn from engine-makers and manufacturers.
This time it is Chinese motorcycles. How do they make them quite so cheap?
Chinese process networks & local modularization
I have been looking for good references to understand the phenonmenon of “local modularization”. At last, I have found a good paper the motor cycle industry in Chongqing where this practice emerged. It is a pdf document presented at Davos 2006 by Hagel & Brown who are now part of Deloittes.
Working tips for finding work that will still be here in 10 years’ time
As ever, I’ve made a working checklist for my own good. I imagine it might have been superceded by know, though. 3 years is a long time in today’s management practice.
Think supply chain not assembly line
The key to this thinking is ‘supply chain’ not the assembly line. Now there are specialized master’s degrees in supply chain & logistics. It is a serious business. I have a very amateur take of what we can learn generally about where business is going but this is what I make of it.
#1 Pull vs push
Look for networks where people are asking you to do things. Avoid networks and people are trying to ‘push’ services and products (spam you in other words). You are looking for networks that are based on people putting up their hands and calling “I need . .” You can go back to them saying “I can do X at this price.” Then neither you nor them have to say “Please buy . . .” and waste time and money on marketing. I haven’t seen any writing, other than a reference that I’ve listed below, on how networks make the change from push to pull. Please tell me if you have!
#2 Change the game to give you and your partner permanent competitive advantage
Outsource strategically rather than tactically. That is, form an alliance that changes the game. Don’t just buy in finished goods. A strategic alliance
- Shares the goal setting with the outsourcing partner.
- Expands the pie.
- Deepens capability (and know how)
- Is a long term relationship.
When you are calling for assistance, begin with the long term relationship. Have a discussion about your long term goal. The British aerospace industry have a cracking questionnaire on the questions to ask. It’s worth a look.
#3 Talk long term but go with whomever delivers
At the same time, be loosely coupled. Don’t try to specify the entire process or lock people in. It’s a scary thought at first but every person and every supplier is redundant. That is the natue of pull systems. Utterly redundant.
This feature may seem sem to contradict the second point and this is how the contradiction is resolved. A long term relationship comes from discussing the long term goal. In the past, one person specified the goal and others had to fall in in lockstep. Now long term goals are jointly agreed but if a partner doesn’t deliver, the network simply closes over, just like the internet, and moves on. The ‘self-healing’ of networks, ruthless as it is, is the biggest guarantee of quality (and also a worry for people who study exploitation).
#4 Go for good company rather than total dominance
Choose networks where you are one specialist link in a network rather than a dominant player. You don’t need to dominate the network; you need a good network. And good networks are full of people at the top of their game where the network, not just the members, gets better every day.
The British aerospace industy even have a programme to switch the whole industry over to strategically thought out relationships which though not quite pull, go in that direction. I can imagine this point worrying people. Certainly I would like to see work on how we protect ourselves from people who do try to dominate the network.
Moving from old styles of business to new
Hagel and Brown also gave me this checklist for managing our futures strategically. It might be sufficient to answer my two unanswered questions. How do we make the shift and how do we protect ourselves from ‘powerful pirates’?
- Where can we see the future? Where shall we post lookouts?
- Where can we do things differently with other people? Where can we work on innovative solutions?
- Where can we push the limits of organizational practice?
- Where is the “edge” or “boundary” that meets the outside world and informs the core?
- What sustains relationships?
- Where are we getting better and getting better faster?
- Which industries are unbundling and what is the patten? In 2006, Hagel & Brown forsaw businesses unbundling into infrastructure management, product innovation & commercialization, and customer relations.
I need to explore Hagel and Brown’s work more, on their own site and Deloitte’s. These lists are pretty rough but hopefully you’ll find these two lists useful in some way. Comments?
flowing motion 
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