John Seely Brown: "I am what I create"
I just posted this on YouTube for JSB:
December 20, 2008
November 24, 2008
Seth Godin teaches the New York Times How to Compete
In my line work (consulting) I run into all kinds of executive mindsets. In the publishing world, however, these mindsets tend to be rather stodgy at best, reptilian at worst.
Publishers don't understand the web. And Seth Godin takes the New York Times to task, pointing out so many obvious misses and near-misses, that you have to ask why. Why don't publishers get it? Why do they insist on playing it safe, even as their ship sinks below them?
Godin's answer is right on target: "organizations are run by people who want to protect the old business, not develop the new one."
This is what VG talks about as well.
In just about any large company, the people running the show are great at yesterday's business, not tomorrow's.
Please read Godin's post >>
November 15, 2008
Shoshana Zuboff: Obama's Victory is Capitalism 2.0
Writes Zuboff in BusinessWeek:
"This column is dedicated to the top managers of American business whose policies and practices helped ensure Barack Obama's victory. The mandate for change that sounded across this country is not limited to our new President and Congress. That bell also tolls for you. Obama's triumph was ignited in part by your failure to understand and respect your own consumers, customers, employees, and end users. The despair that fueled America's yearning for change and hope grew to maturity in your garden."
Years ago I remember reading Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine and thinking that no one in corporate management really wants real transparency... and that the information value-chain she described was doomed to failure.
Luckily, I was wrong. Now Obama will bring process transparency to government and business.
Asks Zuboff:
"...can we invent a business model in which advocacy, support, authenticity, trust, relationship, and profit are linked?"
"Yes, we must," she concludes.
Read the article >>
And read her book: The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism
>>
October 31, 2008
Michael Porter: Why America Needs an Economic Strategy
"The stark truth is that the U.S. has no long-term economic strategy—no coherent set of policies to ensure competitiveness over the long haul. Strategy embodies clear priorities, based on understanding the strengths we need to preserve and the weaknesses that threaten our prosperity the most. Strategy addresses what to do, but also what not to do. In dealing with a crisis, experience teaches us that steps to address the immediate problem must support a long-term strategy. Yet it is far from clear that we are taking the steps most important to America's long-term economic prosperity."
That's the Portermeister in BusinessWeek.
What he's saying is Vote Obama :-)
October 21, 2008
Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption: How to Manage Your Business Ecosystem
In this month's Harvard Business Review, authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison provide a road map for the daunting task of shaping strategy as technology-driven infrastructures constantly change.
The article is called: “Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption” and you can download it here (thanks Deloitte Consulting!) >>
In my view this is a very timely piece of thinking from my heroes JH3 and JSB (and Lang Davison). I'll dig into it later this month on ecosystemwatch.com...
Wait, there's more. Check out the podcast >>
October 18, 2008
What Would Peter Drucker Do?
Looks like Rupert Murdoch's WSJ is thinking along the same lines we are (for a few seconds at least).
They've gone an dug up an old article Peter Drucker wrote for them: Planning for Uncertainty.
Here are some of the key questions:
- ...traditional planning asks, "What is most likely to happen?" Planning for uncertainty asks, instead, "What has already happened that will create the future?"
- "What do these accomplished facts mean for our business? What opportunities do they create? What threats? What changes do they demand -- in the way the business is organized and run, in our goals, in our products, in our services, in our policies? And what changes do they make possible and likely to be advantageous?"
- "What changes in industry and market structure, in basic values (e.g., the emphasis on the environment), and in science and technology have already occurred but have yet to have full impact?"
- "What are the trends in economic and societal structure? And how do they affect our business?"
- "What is this company good at? What does it do well? What strengths, in other words, give it a competitive edge? Applied to what?"
He ends with a serious warning for the bean-counters:
There is, however, one condition: that the business create the resources of knowledge and of people to respond when opportunity knocks. This means developing a separate futures budget.
The 10% or 12% of annual expenditures needed to create and maintain the resources for the future -- in research and technology, in market standing and service, in people and their development -- must be put into a constant budget maintained in good years and bad. These are investments, even though accountants and tax collectors consider them operating expenses. They enable a business to make its future -- and that, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.
And don't forget his advice for retail strategy >>
October 17, 2008
God is in the Process: The Legacy of Michael Hammer
I have to say I was shocked when I saw the news about Michael Hammer. He was just sixty. Goes to show you how precious every second is. It may be that they need to do some process re-engineering up in heaven. Maybe make it more customer friendly or something...
Down here on Earth, process re-engineering isn't as fashionable as it used to be. And I wonder how many people got laid off because of Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (Collins Business Essentials)
But Hammer was misunderstood. His ideas were abused by company executives and the management consulting industry. Today his ideas live on in the heads of IT nerds and companies like Zara.
Where do you (and your company) stand? Check out the maturity models he created:
1) for process maturity, and 2) for enterprise maturity.
Too bad we didn't see the one on leadership maturity.
Here are some fun links:
- Put Processes First: Make High Performance Possible Michael Hammer
- Michael Hammer: A Tribute to the Guru of Operations Anand Raman
- Remembering Michael Hammer Tom Davenport
In the end, process matters. Even our buddy Drucker acknowledged that.
BTW, the other process guru who is still (very) alive and kicking isTom Davenport.
August 20, 2008
Peter Drucker on Knowledge Productivity
I love stumbling upon old Peter Drucker interviews. The insights he throws out with just about every breath are astonishing.
Here he is on knowledge productivity:
"There has been no increase in the productivity of knowledge work. I began to teach on my twentieth birthday. November 19, 1929, I gave my first university lecture. There has been no improvement in the productivity of college faculty since. If anything, it has gone down, because of committee meetings.
My distinguished colleagues spend God only knows how much time in committee meetings, and there has never been a committee meeting that produced any results. President Roosevelt said, If I want to make absolutely sure that nothing gets done, I appoint a committee."
Good to know that committees still rule the world of both corporate and government decision-making.
August 10, 2008
How to Innovate while You Sleep
Your mind is active when you sleep. Mine, I'm not so sure...
Seriously though:
1. State your problem
2. Go to sleep
3. Problem solved!
Details >>
Losing the Talent War: Immigration Policy and The Reverse Brain Drain
As a kid in India, the phrase "brain drain" meant someone smart just left India to work in the US.
Now it looks like the tables have turned:
"...more than 1 million highly skilled professionals such as engineers, scientists, doctors, researchers, and their families are in line for a yearly allotment of only around 120,000 permanent-resident visas for employment-based principals and their families in the three main employment visa categories (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3). These individuals entered the country legally to study or to work. They contributed to U.S. economic growth and global competitiveness. Now we've set the stage for them to return to countries such as India and China, where the economies are booming and their skills are in great demand. U.S. businesses large and small stand to lose critical talent, and workers who have gained valuable experience and knowledge of American industry may become potential competitors."
Ouch.
Skilled immigrants create jobs:
"...more than half of the engineering and technology companies started in Silicon Valley and a quarter of those started nationwide from 1995 to 2006 had immigrant founders. These companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006."
We need a new policy on skilled immigration, Obama.
More info: an editorial by Alan Webber on the same topic>>
August 5, 2008
Nurturing Your Business Ecosystem: Lessons Learned from SAP
JH3 and JSB have written an insightful piece for BusinessWeek titled: How SAP Seeds Innovation: SAP's collaborative Web sites and discussion forums give its customers ways to learn from SAP business partners as well as from each other.
So why does SAP succeed where others fail?
According to Hagel:
1) SAP generated its ecosystem, which consists of customers, business partners, experts and independent parties by addressing the needs of the participants
and
2) it focused on the needs of individuals, not just companies.
There you have it: people first.
Read the entire article >>
February 11, 2008
JSB on Creativity: Building the DNA of Innovation (Listen up Yahsoft/Microhoo!)
Microsoft and Yahoo need to listen to this carefully...
January 31, 2008
Everybody's Going Surfin' - Catching the Innovation Wave
The latest in a series of Innovation on the Edge articles to appear in BusinessWeek, Catching the Innovation Wave is a clever lesson in how innovation occurs at the relevant edge.
John Hagel and JSB ask executives to:
1. "find relevant edges that will test and push their current performance."
2. "attract motivated groups of people to these edges to work together around challenging performance issues."
3. "recognize that the people who are likely to be attracted to the edge are big risk-takers."
4. "recognize that the edge fosters not just risk-taking, but very different cultures that are also 'edgy.' "
5. "find ways to appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines and even more remote areas of activity."
6. "bring users and developers of technology close together."
7. understand "the loose practice network that evolved around big wave surfing." Performance breakthroughs occur "when seasoned practitioners engage with the technology, especially in close-knit communities, and evolve their practices to better use it..."
Watch the surfing slideshow here, and read a longer version of the article on John's blog >>
April 22, 2007
John Hagel's FAST Strategy Webinar - May 9, 2007
Over the last sixty years, the average lifetime of companies on the S&P 500 list has declined by 80%, from 75 years to 15 years.
John Hagel asks: "What if everything you learned about business strategy is WRONG?"
According to JH3, the basic principles of traditional strategy - the principles still taught at most business schools and company executive education programs - are wrong:
· WRONG: Develop a detailed strategy before moving to operational implementation
· WRONG: Focus on a one to five year time horizon to develop robust strategies.
· WRONG: Pursue a portfolio approach to business initiatives to cope with growing uncertainty.
· WRONG: Strategy is a specialized discipline that needs to be pursued by experts.
So what's the alternative? Hagel has developed a powerful approach he calls FAST STRATEGY and it's being used by some of the world's most successful (and innovative) companies.
On May 9, Hagel's doing a webinar with StrategyWorld.org titled appropriately - FAST Strategy: How to Get Results in Disruptive Markets
The webinar will provide you with a basic understanding of how to use FAST Strategy in both your business and as a personal tool to improve your career.
Check it out >>
Note: the way I see it is that Hagel normally charges $25,000 for an hour long presentation on strategy. And now you can join the conversation (live) for $1497.00 on May 9. That's chump change, especially if your company pays for it! See you there>>
October 2, 2006
USA Today: IDEO, The Deans of Design
IDEO is all about experiential approaches. Its designers try to see and sense the world by getting inside the heads of their fellow human consumers. The firm-a dream come true for the concerned parents of liberal arts majors everywhere-employs anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, and sociologists, among other right-brain thinkers, to create, improve, or reimagine all manner of products, services, work spaces, and business systems. "It's a very human-centered process," says Tom Kelley, the firm's general manager and brother of founder David Kelley. "Others approach a problem from the point of view that says, 'We have the smartest people in the world; therefore, we can think this through.' We approach it from the point of view that the answer is out there, hidden in plain sight, so let's go observe human behavior and see where the opportunities are." - from this article in USA Today
What a novel idea.
How come no one in the auto industry gets this?
September 9, 2006
Manasco on "The Wisdom of Communities"
My friend Britton Manasco blogs about the "Wisdom of Communities" here.
His point is "the future is increasingly about the wisdom of crowds -- or, at least, communities."
So people, says Britton, especially in the B2B world, tend to trust their peers and not the experts.
Britton's right to some extent. But what he forgets is that a community is a group of individuals, some more passionate than others, focused around a practice or interest. The leaders of the community are viewed as experts (perhaps not in the academic sense), but certainly in the role of the teacher helping the novices get up to speed.
These "experts" rise to the top naturally. And unlike senior management in most American companies, they rise to the top by virtue of merit - the knowledge they share with their fellow community members. The wisdom of communities is thus not the wisdom of crowds, but the wisdom of the expert-practitioner. Often they're amateurs. Which makes them even more believable, because they're in it for the love of the game, not necessarily for the money like the "professionals."
To me, that's the real power of communities, aside from double loop marketing.
February 19, 2006
Chris Trimble: Building Innovation Ecosystems
The rate at which new ideas are generated is directly related to the effort invested in enriching social networks.
Says Chris Trimble in his Fast Company column:
"Entrepreneurs believe in the power of networking. Many are very good at it. They become good because they recognize that most people with interesting notions usually have only one piece of a puzzle. Often unexpected combinations of ideas, or chance meetings of people with complimentary perspectives, ignite genuine breakthroughs.
"Aspiring innovators from large companies are handicapped in the networking game — not because they lack skill, but because of the nature of their jobs. Once a business is proven and profitable, the name of the game is to make operations as efficient as possible. Employees at all levels are pulled into ever more specialized roles. Repeated tasks are joined together by rigorously documented processes. As a result, each manager’s web of connections increasingly mirrors the way today’s work is organized. Most connections are with managers with closely related specialties, who share similar perspectives, shaped by the demands of the same customers."
There is one other point Chris - I call it the "closing of the corporate mind". It's not just about people being comforatble with the status quo. It's about people hiring and surrounding themselves with their own kind. A tribal thing, perhaps? So the desis hang out with the desis, the Chinese with the Chinese, the Hicks with the Hicks, the golf-playing execs with other golf-playing execs, repugs with repugs, etc.
And as your colleague VG says, travel!
Trimble also mentions the "vast differences between communication networks and trust networks. Communication networks are the kind that are useful at the front-end of the innovation process because they enable the sharing of ideas. The back-end of the innovation process depends on trust networks, which require much heavier investments in time, energy, and goodwill.
Still boils down to people and trust, people! Put a value on that Mr. CFO Bean-Counter!
February 18, 2006
Open Source Collaboration: The Flu Wiki
The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Our goal is to be:
- a reliable source of information, as neutral as possible, about important facts useful for a public health approach to pandemic influenza
- a venue for anticipating the vast range of problems that may arise if a pandemic does occur
- a venue for thinking about implementable solutions to foreseeable problems
This is how the Internet is democratizing society... collaborative problem-solving in public health. Public health is too important to leave to the bureaucrats... Remember Katrina?
See their avian influenza outbreak maps.
This level of detailed information is what we want from our public institutions, but you can bet we won't get it- for several reasons- political, economic, and sadly, policy.
January 25, 2006
Bill Gates on Knowledge Work
In his latest column in Newsweek, Bill Gates talks about knowledge as an adjective- as in knowledge economy, knowledge worker, knowledge networks etc.
He mentions Tom Davenport's definition of knowledge: "Knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection." .
And here's where he says something interesting: "We've gone a long way toward optimizing how we use information, we haven't yet done the same for knowledge."
Says Gates: "Researchers at Microsoft and elsewhere are developing technology that can unobtrusively "watch" you working, then make suggestions about related subjects or ideas. Interestingly, even if the software makes a bad guess, it can still be valuable in helping spark new ideas. Computer scientists are also making progress against a long-held dream of "intelligent agents" that anticipate your needs and provide just-in-time information that's relevant to the work you're doing. Experimental programs known as reasoning engines can test your ideas against common-sense logic, spotting flaws in hypotheses and acting as "virtual subject experts" to help guide your thinking."
I have an idea for Gates in this regard, but I don't know how to get it to him (maybe I'll ask my buddy Tom Davenport). But the knowledge in a knowledge network resides in the heads of people. Why not connect people to other people? Or better yet, to virtual communities on that topic? I've said too much already.
January 24, 2006
World Economic Forum, Davos 2006: Connecting Globalization & Innovation
John Hagel and John Seely Brown have prepared this paper for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland January 25 – 30, 2006.
It's called: Connecting Globalization & Innovation: Some Contrarian Perspectives. [registration is required].
In the introduction, they say:
"We are only now beginning to grapple with the full implications of a globalizing economy. Tom Friedman captured our imagination with the powerful metaphor communicated in the title of his new best-selling book - The World Is Flat – but he tells only part of the story. In the process, he may leave many with a misleading impression. The world is not just flattening; it is also creating significant new opportunities to innovate and build strategic advantage. Much has been written about globalization and innovation as distinct topics, but few analysts have focused on exploring the connection between the two. Those who understand this connection – whether they are well established Western enterprises or entrepreneurial companies in emerging economies like China and India - will be able to create economic value on an unprecedented scale.
"Many companies in China and India are developing an innovative set of management techniques specifically focused on exploiting these opportunities. They are pursuing a radical, yet very pragmatic, bootstrapping approach to build capabilities while addressing near-term market opportunities. In a world of intensifying competition and increasing uncertainty, even the very largest companies need to master these bootstrapping techniques to compete successfully.
The three contrarian messages:
1) Bootstrapping is not just for small, entrepreneurial companies.
2) The United States is no longer the global center of innovation in management practices.
3) Product innovation is not the most powerful form of innovation, even though this is what most Western executives focus on when they think about innovation.
Sign up and read the whole thing. It's an eye-opener!
January 17, 2006
Britannica vs. Wikipedia vs. Digital Universe vs. Squidoo vs. ?
Who wants to be the knowledge repository for all mankind?
The race is on:
- Encyclopædia Britannica: the free stuff is weak! [rank= 2,839]
- Wikipedia: a controversy on quality [rank = 31]
- Digital Universe: slow going in building out the "portals" [rank = 150,326]
- Squidoo: too quirky? [rank = 6,290]
and of course there's Google...
I'm betting on two things: "free" and "ease-of-use" - and the winner (today) is Wikipedia.
Underwhelming: McKinsey's 2006 Predictions
The nerds at McKinsey are at it again with their sweeping generalities and "big-picture" historical perspectives.
The article - Ten trends to watch in 2006 - is rather underwhelming:
"Those who say that business success is all about execution are wrong. [what?!!] The right product markets, technology, and geography are critical components of long-term economic performance. Bad industries usually trump good management, however: in sectors such as banking, telecommunications, and technology, almost two-thirds of the organic growth of listed Western companies can be attributed to being in the right markets and geographies. Companies that ride the currents succeed; those that swim against them usually struggle. Identifying these currents and developing strategies to navigate them are vital to corporate success.
"What are the currents that will make the world of 2015 a very different place to do business from the world of today? Predicting short-term changes or shocks is often a fool's errand. But forecasting long-term directional change is possible by identifying trends through an analysis of deep history rather than of the shallow past. Even the Internet took more than 30 years to become an overnight phenomenon."
Here are the trends they've identified. Wow, I'm speechless.
Macroeconomic trends
1. Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally.
2. Public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential.
3. The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly.
Social and environmental trends
4. Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact.
5. The battlefield for talent will shift.
6. The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny.
7. Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment.
Business and industry trends
8. New global industry structures are emerging.
9. Management will go from art to science.
10. Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge.
Advice to CEOs - if this is the advice you're paying McKinsey for, save your money! Just read your Economist and the Global Province every week and you'll come out ahead!
Poor show, Mr. Davis. If you're listening, Fred Gluck - it's time to get back in and take names and kick some ...
January 6, 2006
Getting Your IT Nerds to Innovate
Few studies have studied adoption of IS innovations by IS development (ISD) organizations. I just found a study that does.
Apparently researchers observed ten factors explaining radical innovation.
Seven factors were internal or organizational factors of which four characterize a configuration of capabilities that promote radical innovation within the firm. These four are: 1) Depth of Knowledge Resources; 2) Specialists; 3) Diversity of Knowledge; 4) Related Assets. The remaining three internal factors relate to features of processes where these capabilities are mobilized in ways that promote radical innovation. These three are: 5) Intra-firm Structural Linkages; 6) Experimentation; and 7) Technological Opportunism.
In addition to the seven organizational (internal) factors, three additional environmental (external) factors predict radical innovation within ISD organizations: 8) Environmental Dynamism; 9) Unit Autonomy; and 10) Adopters’ IT Strategic Congruence.
December 30, 2005
Tom Davenport: "Was Drucker Wrong?"
If improving knowledge worker productivity is so important, why aren’t more companies doing something about it?
Tom Davenport seeks an answer in this fun post on the BabsonKnowledge blog >>
December 27, 2005
How Executives Waste Time Together
Thumbing through my "moth-eaten" (I use the phrase in jest) September 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review, I stumbled across an article which made me raise my eyebrows.
The article makes the case that companies routinely squander their most valuable resource - the time of their top executives.
What was interesting about the article was the actual breakdown of how top management spends its time together in meetings.
The data was collected across 187 countries in a joint study by The Economist Intelligence Unit and a consulting company. Here's what they found: out of the total time available for senior management meetings - 250 hours per year - managers spend on average:
62 hours on operating performance reviews
27 hours on crises of the moment
22 hours on administrative issues and policy
22 hours on workforce issues
18 hours on corporate governance
14 hours on financial policy
12 hours on investor communications and guidance
11 hours on team building
10 hours on succession planning
6 hours on litigation
6 hours on community service and social responsibility
3 hours on "other"
The total "nonstrategic" time per year is 213 (out of 250). Which means that in any given year, only 15% of meeting time is available for strategic issues. That's 3 hours a month left for critical activities like strategy development and approval - at best.
And worst of all, they didn't even mention golf!
December 23, 2005
The Amazon.com Work Process in Pictures
From BusinessWeek: See how the world's largest online retailer ensures that gifts get delivered on one of the busiest shopping -- and shipping -- days of the year.
Here >>
December 21, 2005
Eric Schmidt's 70 Percent Solution
In an interview in Business 2.0, Google's CEO explains the magic behind Google's success: 70/20/10.
What is 70/20/10? It's how they spend their time at Google:
- 70 percent on the CORE BUSINESS (AdSense, AdWords, Google Search)
- 20 percent on RELATED PROJECTS (Froogle, Google Desktop, Google Local, Google News, Google Print, Google Stocks, Google Toolbar, Google Video)
- 10 percent on NEW BUSINESSES (Blogger, Google Mini, Google Movies, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Wi-Fi, Picasa)
Here's how Schmidt describes it:
"...how it works for management: We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative -- which I haven’t kept up with myself. God knows what they’ve done in the last week. I’ve been too busy on core search and ads."
There are some more interesting things in the article. Read it here >>
For more on the Google R&D process, read my post: Google's Product Development & Management Process Revealed >>
December 19, 2005
Eric von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation
Eric von Hippel is the Professor of Management and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Here's a downloadable video of his April 2005 lecture on "Democratizing Innovation."
What's it all about? From the description:
"If you have ever come up with a work-around or improvement for a balky product only to find that it performs better than the original, you are not alone. Eric von Hippel proffers multiple examples where an ordinary user, frustrated or even desperate, solves a problem through innovation. His research found innovative users playing with all manner of product: mountain bikes, library IT systems, agricultural irrigation, and scientific instruments. Often, manufacturers keep at arm’s length from these inventions. He describes the Lego company “standing like a deer in headlights” when technologically adept adults discovered they could design their own sophisticated Lego robots. User communities arise, freely communicate with each other, advance ideas and sometimes even “drive the manufacturer out of product design,” according to von Hippel. This widely distributed inventing bug is a good trend, believes von Hippel, because users “tend to make things that are functionally novel.” Not only is it “freeing for individuals” but it also creates a “free commons” of product ideas, parallel to the more restrictive world of intellectual property governed by less creative manufacturers."
And here's his downloadable book: Democratizing Innovation >>
December 16, 2005
Innocentive: Open Source Innovation?
The answer to your problem lies outside your company. Why? Because there are more smart people outside your company than in it.
That's the premise behind InnoCentive, a web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe.
Here's how it works:
- Companies contract with InnoCentive as "Seekers" to post R&D challenges to the Innocentive web site
- Each Challenge includes a detailed description and requirements, a deadline, and an award amount for the best solution.
- Award amounts are determined by the Seeker and range from $10,000 to $100,000. You can view the list of previous award recipients here.
- The name of the Seeker company posting the Challenge remains confidential and secure.
- Scientists worldwide are eligible to register on the web site as "Solvers."
- Anyone may view summaries of Challenges at InnoCentive.com. But to view detailed descriptions and actually work on challenges, registration is required.
- To register as a Solver, scientists fill out a short online form, select a username and password, and log in.
- InnoCentive has registered scientists from over 170 countries around the world.
How about that for open source innovation? Vist the site >>
December 13, 2005
8 Big Ideas for the 21st Century
Coming soon in Ben Hammersley's new book: "Octet: The Eight Big Ideas You Need to Understand in the 21st Century"
1. Information wants to be free (vs. copyright).
2. Zero distance (vs. borders).
3. Mass amateurisation (vs.censorship).
4. More is much more. (vs. network blocking).
5. True names (vs. identity cards & databases).
6. Viral behaviour (vs. more network blocking).
7. Everything is personal (vs. everything is trackable).
8. Ubiquitous computing (no privacy).
Hat-tip to Hugh at Gapingvoid.com
December 7, 2005
McKinsey's Peter Drucker Collection
The great and growing collection of outside work that Drucker’s thinking has generated testifies to the seminal place of his ideas on the role of knowledge in companies. These articles from the McKinsey Quarterly archive look at how companies might maximize the benefits from their in-house knowledge.
- Best practice and beyond: Knowledge strategies (premium)
- Managing the knowledge manager
- Do you know who your experts are?
- Making a market in knowledge
- The 21st-century organization (premium)
I particularly liked this diagram in "Managing the knowledge manager":
Check out the collection here >>
Did I mention I hate McKinsey's "premium" content policy? Those McK-partners are just penny-pinching millionaires. The Mercer people get it: their content is open. Open-up, McKinsey!
McKinsey: Knowledge Worker Productivity- The Key to Competitive Advantage?
McKinsey spits out an interesting article today- "The next revolution in interactions."
"In today's developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services. Since 1997, extensive McKinsey research on jobs in many industries has revealed that globalization, specialization, and new technologies are making interactions far more pervasive in developed economies. Currently, jobs that involve participating in interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods account for more than 80 percent of all employment in the United States. And jobs involving the most complex type of interactions—those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity, and solve problems—make up the fastest-growing segment."
What they're saying is that knowledge work is up, manual work is down- and they do a good job of breaking this down by industry.
"Over this past year, we looked closely at different kinds of interactions. Companies in many sectors are hiring additional employees for more complex interactions and fewer employees for less complex ones. For instance, frontline managers and nurses—who must exercise high levels of judgment and often draw on what economists call tacit knowledge, or experience- are in great demand. Workers who perform more routine interactions, such as clerical tasks, are less sought after. In fact, companies have been automating and outsourcing jobs that involve many of these transactional interactions.
"The shift from transactional to tacit interactions requires companies to think differently about how to improve performance—and about their technology investments. Moreover, the rise of tacit occupations opens up the possibility that companies can again create capabilities and advantages that rivals can't easily duplicate."
Worth reading.
The McKinsey folk need to spend some time chatting with Tom Davenport. His latest book - Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers
November 28, 2005
Tom Davenport on Personal Knowledge Management
Says TD: "Most interventions to improve performance in business are at the organizational or process level, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can also improve individual capabilities. Ultimately, knowledge worker performance comes down to the behaviors of individual knowledge workers. If we improve their individual abilities to create, acquire, process and use knowledge, we are likely to improve the performance of the processes they work on, and the organizations they work for."
Right on! Read this insightful post on Tom Davenport's blog- BabsonKnowledge.org.
November 23, 2005
"Competing on Analytics" - Tom Davenport and friends
Competing on Analytics is a Babson Executive Education report by Tom Davenport, Don Cohen and Al Jacobson.
The report describes the emergence of a new form of competition based on the extensive use of analytics, data, and fact-based decision making. The analytics— quantitative or statistical models to analyze business problems—may be applied to a variety of business problems, including customer management, supply chains, and financial performance. The research assessed 32 firms with regard to their orientation to analytics; about one-third were classified as fully engaged in analytically oriented strategies. Both demand and supply factors for analytical competition are described. Of the two, demand factors are the more difficult to create. The presence of one or more committed senior executives is a primary driver of analytical competition.
Registration is required for download, but it's worth it.
November 17, 2005
Google Base: Googlespace & Open Knowledge Management
Another giant step in Googlespace?
"Help the world find your content. Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we'll host and make searchable online."
And so Google takes another step with another micro-service. Try it here.
And it's not just about classifieds. It's about Open Knowledge Management.
Wonder what Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak have to say about this... I'll let you know when I find out.
November 13, 2005
Best Drucker Obituary: FT
And the award for the best Peter Drucker obituary goes to- Simon London of the Financial Times:
Peter Drucker, who has died at the age of 95, hated being labelled as a “guru”. But that is what he was for thousands, probably millions, of managers. Never mind that the dictionary definitions of the word range from “venerable” and “weighty” to “mediator of divine truth.” To Drucker, guru was synonymous with “charlatan”. He preferred to be known, he often said, as “just an old journalist”.
As so often in his life, he was indulging not so much in false modesty as in good-humoured self-mockery. For he was manifestly very much more than that.
To his many admirers, in Asia almost as much as his native Europe (he was born in Vienna) and his adoptive United States, he was the grand old man of provocative theory and thoughtful practice. He could always be relied upon to provide a helping hand through the latest trends in politics, society, economics, and especially business.
For people whose only exposure to his work was a single article or speech, his constant use of the quick insight, the aphorism, the analogy and the metaphor sometimes created an impression of glibness. But Drucker saw this as an occupational hazard of communicating clearly about complex issues.
From his early writing days as a journalist in the 1930s to the very last years of his life, with several professorships and three dozen respected books behind him, he continued to believe that the best ideas have to be simplified, often to the limit, in order to be effective. When criticised in the 1980s for writing a cursory newspaper article about “the five rules of successful acquisitions”, he grinned ruefully and pronounced in typically gnomic Drucker-ese: “My best ideas have only one moving part.”
That hardly did justice to the erudition and sense of perspective which underpinned his commentary. His cool, deliberate analysis whether of “pork-barrel” politics, post-communist economics, or a range of management topics from leadership to productivity, motivation to marketing was peppered with a constant flow of vivid references and parallels drawn from history, and from fields as diverse as medicine, music, even the nursery.
Talking about the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation which occupied him powerfully in his later years, along with the growth of what he called “knowledge work” and management's wider role in society he revelled in such observations as “for the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four”.
Such bon mots were often more scurrilous, as in his remark that Friedrich Engels might never have made his seminal observations of the British working class if his sexual behaviour had not so scandalised his parents that they sent him out of his native Germany. Told in Drucker's strongly accented English, such stories produced a mixture of hilarity and wonder in his audiences.
He was certainly “one of the last encyclopaedics”, as he was introduced at a conference a few years ago. His knowledge reached far beyond the world of affairs, deeply into literature, biology and even Oriental art in which he was recognised as an authority even by the Japanese.
One of the most thoughtful analysts of Drucker's contribution to management, Alan Kantrow, says that “many of his ideas have become part and parcel of today's commonsense understanding of business. He had a pervasive influence.” Though by no means all his ideas were original, Drucker's real value, says Kantrow, lay in the rigour with which they were formulated. “One could learn more and more deeply from watching him think than from studying the content of his thought.”
For decades, many managers did just that. Whether they worked for Shell, Gillette, a British bank, a German engineering company, a large hospital complex, or a medium-sized shipping company, they paid repeat visits to sit at his feet, or buy his latest book. One such executive talked of needing his “Drucker fix” every two or three years.
Drucker's reputation, among many practitioners and theorists alike, as the father of post-war management went back to two of his early works, “Concept of the Corporation” in 1946, and “The Practice of Management” in 1954.
The former, a study of the workings of General Motors, was the first detailed account of the way a large company operated. The latter contained pathfinding work on such varied topics as the key role of marketing; the importance of clear objectives, both for the corporation and for the manager; and the need to balance long-term strategy and innovation against short-term performance.
This early work laid the foundation for such basic principles of modern business as asking: “What business are we in, and who are our customers?” It dealt with the recruitment and development of executives, the proper role of boards of directors, the defence of profits as an essential foundation of future survival, and the development of the responsible and productive worker.
Only on the last of these counts did Drucker's principles fail to be translated into practice. In a mid-1980s interview he called this “my most conspicuous failure”, grumbling that “only now that Japan has shown the way is it being taken seriously” in Europe and the US.
It was Drucker's ability to examine complex issues in depth, while also relating them to each other, that had such a strong influence on the study of management. Yet this landed him in bad odour with most business academics. “He is vastly undervalued by most academics”, Tom Peters, the management writer and Drucker disciple, said a few years ago. In several years at Stanford University, first as a masters student and then as a doctoral candidate, Peters found that “Drucker wasn't mentioned once. None of his work was on our reading lists”.
Things were little better at Harvard. Even though it offered him a professorship four times, Drucker chose instead to take up appointments at lesser institutions. Nor does Drucker rate much of a mention in most histories of management thought. All that is in spite of the fact that, as Peters puts it, “Drucker was the first to provide an intellectual framework to analyse the corporation”.
Drucker's own explanation of his relations with academia was revealing, not only of his own character and that of the university system, but of the nature of high-class gurudom. “Earlier theorists wrote only for a small circle their jargon was often impenetrable,' he said.
“I put together the bits and pieces of the jigsaw, including what was missing, such as the role of top management, strategy, management-by-objectives, entrepreneurship and innovation. I went to work on it and built a discipline. But I have a deep horror of obscurity and arrogance, so I presented it in a form that people could apply. I don't believe in specialisation, and academia has always resented that.”
In the words of Tom Peters: “Drucker effectively by-passed the intellectual establishment. So it's not surprising that they hated his guts.”
With the passing of the years, however, relations became a little less strained. Unlike most of the previous generation, several of the top business academics who came to prominance in the 1980s and 90s paid tribute to Drucker's impact on their own work. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, of Yale and then Harvard, admitted to having been influenced heavily by Drucker's early writings and praised his “remarkable” sense of being able to foretell the future.
Yet not everyone agreed. Despite Drucker's protestations about the importance of small business, he remained identifed with the notion that the large corporation was the centre-piece of society. And, right to the end of his life, he was typecast as having an excessively rational view of the management process.
Moreover, despite his praise ever since 1954 for Douglas McGregor's “Theory Y”, Drucker did not seem to fit comfortably into the school of enlightened motivation, which blossomed into management theories of worker 'empowerment'. He tended to use tell-tale phrases such as “the basic task of management is to make (our italics) people productive”. Peters, Moss Kanter et al would prefer the verb “encourage”. In the words of one long-standing student of Drucker's writing, “he was always a bit too top-down”.
In one sense, Drucker could be accused of having lost something of his intellectual vitality in his earlier years. Today's business community is searching for more advice on how to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation, and how to manage joint ventures and strategic alliances. Drucker was writing about such issues extensively right up to his death, yet his basic view, expressed several years ago, was “we already know how to do all that just organise yourself properly”.
Right across the management spectrum, he claimed, “the academic work that's being done is on perfecting things it's variations on themes we all discovered some time ago”. Business studies had therefore entered a long and rather sterile period, he argued. The main exception to this view of the rather arid future of management studies concerned management as a social function. “We have become a society of organisations,” he used to say, in what became a familiar Druckerism. “Yet who takes care of the public good?”
The need for much better management extended not only to private enterprise, he argued, but also to the public sector and, much more broadly, to the body politic itself. In a memorable phrase, he said “politics has become the theatre of the absurd, with politicians declaiming in front of an empty audience, just like the Comédie Française. There's a new pluralism in society that we don't understand but that we have to make work”.
In his last few years, Drucker felt increasingly in common, to some extent, with Britain's Charles Handy that the major new challenges for management lie well beyond its commonly accepted field of operations. In the process of developing into “the distinct organ of our society” over the past 50 years, management had become intricately bound up with pol