SXSW reflections will come soon, but first…
On the opportunity (and dying, crushing need) to revamp organizational structures:
- John Hagel, Attracting Talent in Spikes and Firms (via Ethan Bauley):
Attract and retain vs. access and motivate. Talent strategies of companies often focus too narrowly on the talent that resides within the enterprise. … Few companies make a systematic effort to map the relevant talent that exists outside the company. Even fewer companies develop effective strategies to access and motivate that talent through networks of relationships, including positioning in relevant spikes around the world.
… At the most fundamental level, the rationale for the firm is shifting. As JSB and I have written, the rationale for the firm articulated by Ronald Coase back in the 1930s – that firms exist to economize on transaction costs – is diminishing in importance as continued innovation in IT systematically drives down transaction costs. In its place, we are seeing a new rationale for the firm emerge – firms exist to accelerate talent development. This is increasingly the reason why people choose to affiliate with firms. They believe they can get better faster by working with others within the firm, as well as with others across firms, through the privileged relationships built by the firm. If firms can’t find ways to deliver on this promise, talent will exit and Tom Malone’s e-lance economy will flourish.
And a more recent refresh:
- John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, Tomorrow’s Talent Networks:
Operations, organization, and strategy must all be reconceived through the talent lens. They must be re-thought as part of pull platforms that treat all workers as capable creators who are continuously improvising in response to unanticipated situations. In this view, talent isn’t just the highly trained and deeply skilled knowledge workers one typically thinks of as talent: they’re just about everybody.
Push programs have enabled scalable, cost-effective operations. But they’ve come at a steep price: the rigid standardization and specification of activities and tasks they require. What if instead companies were to create more flexible pull platforms to help employees access resources whenever and wherever they are needed? What if, rather than treating exception handling as a nuisance to be eliminated, companies welcomed these problems as opportunities for participants to tinker and experiment?
Pull platforms are essential to fostering learning on the job since they can make it easier to access unexpected resources in unexpected ways and thereby encourage participants to try new approaches that simply would not be feasible in more rigid push programs.
Structures compete for talent; as much as I talk about the frames creating the opportunities for a larger scale of entrepreneurship based on the structures for personal, distributed, collaborative value creation, the issue is truly about economic organization and the rationale for the firm. In essence, firms will adapt to create better structures for organizing and utilizing talent to compete for talent being lost to better organizing firms and to new ventures.
How?
- John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The Strategic Advantage of Global Process and Practice Networks:
… No matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?
… Companies must also participate in (and sometimes orchestrate) new organizational forms and structures called global process and practice networks.
… Both kinds of global networks — process and practice — create opportunities for talent to come together and generate “productive friction”: a powerful force that shapes learning, as people with different backgrounds and skills work together on real problems.
While many executives pursue the nirvana of a frictionless economy, aggressive talent development inevitably and necessarily generates friction. It forces people out of their comfort zone and often involves resolving differences among people with divergent views and experiences.
How? Organize the right environments to generate productive friction and innovate talent management within the firm. Read the rest of the post for details.
What are firms doing to create better structures for organizing value creation?
(Note: organizing value creation is not the same as organizing people.)
- Morten T. Hansen, Harvard Business Review April 2009, When Internal Collaboration is Bad for Your Company:
Internal collaboration is almost universally viewed as good for an organization… But the conventional wisdom rests on the false assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. .. Our research [into 100 experienced sales teams at a large IT consulting firm] yielded a surprising conclusion about this seemingly sensible practice: The greater the collaboration (measured by hours of help a team received), the worse the results (measured by success in winning contracts).
Wait, that’s a surprise? Since when was collaboration merely about the HOURS of knowledge sharing? Since when was collaboration merely about sharing information?
The rest of the article spends its entire time creating a decision framework based on calculating the “collaboration premium” using the benefits and costs from collaboration. Yet no time or thought is spent on the strategies or tactics behind collaboration; the entire article is based on the premise that internal collaboration is equal to time, when in fact many of the real opportunities behind current technologies are to create better structures for collaboration, making time a much less important driver behind collaboration. Collaboration is much more than just sharing information. A waste.
How about a better example?
- Aaron Chua, A crisis in human resources. My comment:
The biggest opportunity is to change the structure of management, the hierarchical systems we created in order to pass down structures and tie people to processes. As our ability to communicate processes and needs improves through better, cheaper, transparent and archivable communication tools management will be less needed, leadership will be more important, and “linear progression” career paths will be less necessary and lucrative.
People follow value creation, and people will follow the value creation to the edges. Now if the edges could just make money
Maybe they can…
- Via Ed Cotton, The Open Company – Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project..
Based on the idea that “self-organizing groups in many cases can outperform traditional organizations”, E-Text Editor is working to create structures to give people “the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to work on”.
Imagine you had a company like this. Totally open. No concept of bosses or employees. Anyone could join in at any time, doing whatever task they found interesting, for whatever time they found appropriate. How could you possibly find a way to compensate them fairly?
The key is in a technology called Trust Metrics. In essence this is a technique for rating each other, but with the key distinction that the way ratings are calculated makes cheating ineffective. This is a new technology, which has not been applied for this purpose before, but it has already proven itself as the underlying principle behind such well known technologies as Googles pagerank and the certifications on Advogato.
By basing the compensation on continuous rating by your peers, it becomes possible to start out by just participating a bit in your free time, and then gradually, as your ratings increase, spend more and more time on the project. It may eventually come to fully supplanting your day job, becoming your primary source of income, or you may choose to just keep it as something you do on the side. And not only can nobody stop you from participating, there is nobody who can fire you either. This makes it a far more secure way to make a living, where your status is solely dependent on your own ability and effort, rather than on arbitrary decisions from some superior.
- Developing open, flexible and transparent platforms to power a new breed of organizations has been a recurring topic of mine: how can we develop the funding and organizational models…
… to incubate and “scale our lives” by creating personal ecosystems…
… using systems such as peer-production and the social venture commons…
… to power our personal “freemium” life models…
… by enabling us to create and “exchange” social capital…
… and lower our inter-personal transaction costs…
… and create cheaper context behind our value-creating actions…
… to create our own hubs on the edges of value creation?Much more on this later…
Can we “pagerank” an organization?
