Rod Collins's Blog, page 18

The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part VI: Iterate and Co-Create

by Rod Collins

 

In the first five parts of this series, we have made the case that a nineteenth century management model is unsustainable in a twenty-first century world. The recent technological revolution has suddenly thrust us into a new world with a completely different set of rules. This new world is a hyper-connected global village where, for the first time in human history, we have the means to self-organize the work of large numbers of people without the need for central organizations. And what’s most amazing is that, as inconceivable as it may seem, we are learning that the new forms of self-organized networks that have recently emerged are often smarter and faster than their traditional bureaucratic counterparts.

Before the digital revolution, Wikipedia, Linux, and other forms of crowdsourcing were simply not possible.  Twenty years ago, few of us could have imagined that you could build a successful computer operating system or an online encyclopedia using only volunteers working without a plan, without assigned tasks, and even without pay. Yet today, the open source Linux operating system is a $35 billion enterprise with a 12 percent market share, and Wikipedia has completely displaced a two-century old business model in a single decade. We do live in a new world with new rules.

As managers come to the realization that the future of management will work very differently from its past, they need to be clear about what’s changing and what remains the same. The primary work of management is the performance of two timeless accountabilities: strategy and execution.  That’s not changing. What is changing is how these two responsibilities are carried out. For well over a century, we lived in a relatively stable world where change was incremental and maintaining equilibrium was a prime value of organizational work. Accordingly, the foundation for strategy was centralized planning and the focus of execution was control. When management’s basic tasks are to plan and control, top-down hierarchies work. They may not necessarily work best, but they do work well enough.

All that changed with the digital revolution. In today’s fast-forward world, change is far more disruptive and resilient adaptation has become the prime value of organizational work. When business survival depends upon the organization’s capacity to rapidly adapt, the foundation for strategy shifts from fixed plans to continual iteration and the basis of execution shifts from top-down control to highly collaborative co-creation. The reason that networks are outperforming and displacing hierarchies in in our new hyper-connected world is because they are better designed for iteration and co-creation.

Each of the innovative models that we have presented in this blog series values iterating and co-creating over planning and control. In Gore’s lattice organization, because there are no bosses, no one can bark orders or demand compliance. Gore’s bossless model requires people to learn how to iterate and co-create if they want to produce results. The fundamental dynamics of the Agile movement call for cross-functional teams to work in short sprints and frequently bring everyone together to agree on what’s working, what’s not working, and how they can improve for the next sprint. At the core of Radical Management is the notion that the purpose of a business is to continually delight customers, and that purpose is met best when self-organized teams create extraordinary value by working in client-driven iterations. And Wiki Management’s fundamental proposition is that the most effective organizations in a rapidly changing world build collaborative networks that leverage the collective intelligence of the many rather than top-down hierarchies that amplify the voices of the few. Collaborative networks are inherently iterative and are great enablers of co-creative activity.

Despite the remarkable performance of innovative business leaders who have built their organizations around the dynamics of iterate and co-create, traditional managers fiercely resist the future of management because they find it very difficult to break the habits of planning and control. Their professional identities have been built upon the notion that power and the compensation that comes with it belong to those who are in charge. If they are not planning and controlling, they fear they will lose both their power and their compensation. Unfortunately, the insecurities of managers more focused on preserving their organizational standing than on adapting to rapidly changing markets could very well be the single greatest threat to the survival of many of today’s best-known businesses. And what’s most interesting is when well-known businesses fall, most of us hardly notice. Few of us are missing Borders when Amazon makes getting books so easy or Blockbusters when we have the conveniences of Netflix.

However, attempts of traditional managers to thwart the future of management are futile. In a post-digital world, we are rapidly learning that power is more a function of being connected than being in charge. That’s why one viral YouTube video by a mistreated customer can cause highly paid executives to quickly regroup and defer to the wishes of the crowd. Today’s best-run organizations—Amazon, Google, Gore, Morning Star, Valve, Whole Foods, and Zappos—understand this new realty. They understand that managing great change means changing how we mange and that the most effective organizations are networks where highly-connected workers continually iterate and co-create on behalf of their customers rather than hierarchies where a few at the top manipulate the levers of planning and control to preserve their vested interests. These early pioneers are harbingers of the future of twenty-first century management—a future that’s inevitable for the simple reason that the technology revolution strongly favors iterative collaborative networks over tightly planned and controlled hierarchies.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part V: Wiki Management

by Rod Collins

 

Today’s managers face a difficult and unprecedented challenge: The world is changing much faster than their organizations. Every industry, without exception, has been overtaken by an accelerating pace of change that shows no signs of letting up any time soon. In a world where change is constant, it’s not surprising that many managers feel overwhelmed by what appears to be a completely unmanageable state of affairs.

However, there is a small but growing group of vanguard companies that are thriving in this time of great change. While most companies have had to trim their sails to weather the storm of the Great Recession, this small group has experienced relatively smooth sailing with steady growth, increasing profits, and the creation of new jobs. The vanguard group, composed of companies that we love engaging with as consumers, includes Amazon, Google, Threadless, Valve, Whole Foods, and Zappos, among others. What separates these vanguard companies from their traditional counterparts is that their managers understand a fast-changing world is not necessarily unmanageable—it just needs to be managed differently. That’s because, with the rapid emergence of the Digital Age, we suddenly find ourselves in a new world with a completely different set of rules. The managers of the vanguard companies are thriving because they have mastered these new rules, and in so doing, they have completely overhauled the fundamental disciplines of business management.

I call this new world the wiki world and the new management model used by the leaders of the vanguard companies use to master the new rules Wiki Management. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “quick” or “fast” and aptly describes the new set of management disciplines designed to help managers keep pace with accelerating change. Wiki Management assumes that the most effective organizations are highly connected, self-organized collaborative networks that leverage the power of collective intelligence to achieve extraordinary results. When we closely examine the organizational behavior of the companies that are practicing Wiki Management, we discover that these enterprises are built around five very different disciplines that are rarely, if ever, practiced in traditional businesses. These five disciplines are:

1. Understand What’s Most Important to Customers. In a hyper-connected world, the best companies are customer-centric. Their people clearly understand that they work for the customers, not the bosses. Accordingly, they build their strategies around what matters most to customers and design their processes to give delighting customers priority over pleasing bosses.

2. Aggregate and Leverage Collective Intelligence. In a knowledge economy, organizations are fundamentally intelligence systems. Today’s most intelligent organizational leaders no longer leverage individual intelligence by constructing functional bureaucracies; they cultivate collaborative communities with the capacity to quickly aggregate and leverage their collective intelligence. These enlightened leaders fully understand that nobody is smarter and faster than everybody and, as they build their organizations, show a clear design preference for building networks rather than hierarchies.

3. Build Shared Understanding by Bringing Everyone Together in Open Conversations. Companies that successfully manage at the pace of accelerating change understand that the most powerful organizations are those that have the ability to gather the whole system in one place. By bringing everybody together and creating innovative processes to expand the conversations and effectively integrate diverse points of view, they have the rare ability to co-create a powerful shared understanding that drives clarity of purpose across an entire organization. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, managers are increasingly discovering that shared understanding is far more effective that compliance in fostering organizational excellence.

4. Focus on the Critical Few Performance Drivers. The most effective leaders know that management is about creating the future. And when they are good at creating the future, they never have to explain the past. That’s why smart leaders don’t focus on outcome measures; they focus on the driver measures that create the outcomes. If you want to manage at the speed of change, it’s far better to lead than to lag.

5. Hold People Accountable to Their Peers. The secret to mastering the unprecedented challenges of the wiki world is to make sure that no one in the organization has the authority to kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive. In the best businesses, leaders aren’t bosses; they’re catalysts and facilitators orchestrating collaborative networks. The leaders of these networks consistently achieve extraordinary results because they understand holding people accountable to their peers rather than to supervisors is the great enabler of the collaboration necessary for speed and innovation.

If traditional managers want their organizations to have the capacity to change as fast as the world around them, they will need to embrace the new reality that managing great change is only possible if they change how they manage.  They will need to accept that a nineteenth century management model is unsustainable in a twenty-first century world and, like the successful leaders of the vanguard companies, redesign their organizations as collaborative networks. To learn more, I invite you to read my new book, Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).  

The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part IV: Radical Management

by Rod Collins

 

Stephen Denning’s highly acclaimed book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century, is a primer for business leaders who are ready to embrace a radically different way of managing. With return on assets for U. S. firms at a mere quarter of 1965 levels, only one in five workers fully engaged at work, and customers virally ravaging brands on You Tube when bureaucratic minions turn deaf ears to their reasonable complaints, it’s very clear that the traditional management model is not designed for the unprecedented challenges facing business leaders in these first decades of the twenty-first century. We suddenly find ourselves in a new world with new rules. Radical Management is a management alternative that enables business leaders to master the new rules of twenty-first century business.

Radical Management is a completely different way of thinking and acting about management that starts by getting the goal right. Denning argues that the purpose of a business is not about creating shareholder wealth; it’s about delighting customers. Citing numerous examples from an emerging group of innovative companies, such as Salesforce.com, Total Attorneys, Systematic Software, and Thogus Products, Denning describes how their leaders apply this radical notion to achieve extraordinary results and provides compelling evidence that the pathway to product excellence and its corresponding profits is to remain riveted on what’s most important to customers.

Shifting the managerial focus from shareholder wealth to customer delight calls for a complete overhaul of management principles and practices. Denning’s model is based upon five fundamental principles that serve as the foundation for the twenty-first century organization:

1.    Organizational Goal: A shift from an inward-looking goal of making money and maximizing shareholder value to an outward goal of delighting customers profitably. Innovation and transformation are no longer options: they are now imperatives. In today’s hyper-connected world, the companies that are most likely to endure are those who know how to continually delight their customers and turn them into active promoters of the company’s goods and services.

2.    Organizational Structure:  A shift from managers controlling individuals to enabling collaboration among diverse self-organizing teams, networks, and ecosystems. Self-organizing structures are better suited for the exploratory and iterative effort needed to solve today’s increasingly complex problems. Without someone in charge, self-organizing teams are more likely to venture into the unknown and make the unusual connections that are the crucibles for discovering new ways to exceed customer expectations.

3.    Coordination of Work: A shift from coordinating work by hierarchical bureaucracy with rules, roles, plans and reports to dynamic linking, with iterative approaches to development along with direct customer feedback from, and interaction with, teams, networks, and ecosystems. In dynamic markets, efficiency has less to do with reducing costs and more to do with delivering value to clients more quickly. That’s why the practitioners of Radical Management don’t rely on abstract status reports to gauge their progress; instead, they produce finished work in short iterations so that actual customers or their proxies can touch and feel the developing product. If the work is missing the mark, the work team finds out sooner than later; if they are delighting the clients, they can quickly proceed with a greater sense of certainty.

4.    Values: A shift from a single-minded preoccupation with economic value and efficiency to an embrace of values that will grow the firm and the accompanying ecosystems, particularly radical transparency, continuous improvement, and sustainability. When work is iteratively performed by self-organizing teams in a context of relentless transparency, workers get to the root causes of problems more quickly and the company learns and improves far faster than happens in hierarchical organizations where, far too often, making managers look good takes precedence over getting it right for the customers. In the transparent work environment, work teams enjoy what they are doing, want to get better, and collectively find ways to become more productive.

5.    Communications: A shift from top-down directives to multi-directional conversations. Instead of telling people what to do, leaders inspire people across organizational boundaries to work together on common goals.  Leaders in Radical Management organizations are catalysts and facilitators who enable interactive conversations, active listening, and deep inquiry. Rather than advocating a point of view, they pose open-ended questions and encourage open communications to enhance learning and to help the team find its own path. 

The five principles of Radical Management are not a futuristic theory about what a workplace could be. They are the components of a management system currently used by some of today’s best-run companies to achieve extraordinary results in fast-changing markets. Radical Management is accomplishing the task of reinventing the workplace and is tangible proof that the future of management has already arrived.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part III: The Agile Movement

by Rod Collins

 

In February 2001, seventeen software developers gathered in Snowbird, Utah to pool their collective intelligence and formulate a strategy for radically transforming the practice of software development. Among them were Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the co-authors of what has come to be known as Scrum, and Ward Cunningham, the originator of the wiki, which became popularized with the explosive growth of Wikipedia. These software developers were convinced that there had to be a better way to do their work that would overcome the intrusive and unproductive constraints of traditional management practices. The result of their efforts was the crafting of the one-page Agile Manifesto and the birth of a management movement that, with the adoption of Agile management structures by such innovative companies as Twitter, Whole Foods, and, most recently, Zappos, now extends beyond the realm of software development.

 The Agile Manifesto is a set of four management principles that outline a better way to align organizational work around speed, innovation, and collaboration. These management principles provide a compass for making value choices among four sets of paradoxical values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan.

In approaching each of these choices, the selection of one value does not imply the dismissal of the other, but rather a balance between the two values with a clear preference for the values on the left over those on the right. This compass is a significant departure from the traditional ways of managing that have long preferred the values on the right, sometimes to the exclusion of those on the left.

Agile management methodologies call for doing work in self-organized, cross-functional teams. These teams generally work in two-to-four week iterative phases with clear deliverables at the end of each phase. The interim deliverables are assessed in facilitated collaboration sessions to make sure the work continues to meet customer expectations and to incorporate any changes that may have emerged during that phase.

In Agile software development, the role of the manager is radically transformed. Rather than being the overseer or controller who is directing and manipulating all aspects of project development, the manager’s principle role is to coach the collective team and its individual members, to guide the group in reaching its own conclusions about the state of the project, and to facilitate effective discussions in the cross-functional collaboration sessions.

Since its inception in 2001, this management movement has produced extraordinary results in hundreds of companies around the globe under the labels Scrum and Agile. Nevertheless, the way Agile teams achieve their success has remained largely “under the radar” because software developers are often fairly isolated from the rest of their business colleagues and their MBA counterparts do usually not perceive engineers as “real managers.” Despite its extensive influence on the practice of software development, this highly effective management system has been hidden in plain sight.

For more fifty years, we have known that participative management is far superior to traditional legacy management. Beginning in the 1960s with Douglas McGregor’s identification of Theory X and Theory Y and with Abraham Maslow’s penetrating insights into the higher reaches of human nature, we have understood that when managers involve employees in defining the work to be done, the workers are more engaged in their efforts and more committed to performance. Unfortunately, this knowledge has had little real impact on organizations. While the interpersonal skills of business-school-trained managers have improved when compared to some of the Draconian practices of the mid-twentieth century, the involvement of workers by traditional executives has been limited to selective consultation. When it comes to implementing the insights of the human relations discipline spawned by McGregor and Maslow, management’s accommodations have been far more about style than substance.

Nevertheless, with the company-wide adoption of Agile management methods by Twitter, Whole Foods, and Zappos, it is clear that substantive change is coming to management, and it’s not coming from the insights of the psychologists or the organizational specialists, but rather from the innovative practices of engineers. The Agile Manifesto was written by software engineers. It was engineers who created the wiki and founded Google. And it was an engineer who, in 1958, created W.L. Gore and Associates—a company clearly ahead of its time—in which there are no supervisors, and which has, over its fifty plus years, made a profit in every year as it has grown to become a $3 billion business with 9,500 associates in 30 counties around the world. The psychologists and sociologists may have provided the insights, but it’s the engineers who have found a better way to organize our work.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).  

The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part II: The Lattice Organization

by Rod Collins

 

In 1958, after a seventeen-year career at the DuPont Company, a middle-aged engineer named Bill Gore decided it was time to do something radically different. He left behind the security of a well-paying job with a world-renowned company to literally start a business in his basement. From the very beginning, Gore knew that he wanted his new business to be different, especially in the ways that the people communicated with each other. Gore had no interest in building another corporate hierarchy where people watched what they said for fear of drifting from the “corporate line.” He wanted his new company to be a bazaar of innovation and a marketplace of creativity. To accomplish his dream, he knew he needed to build a network, not a hierarchy.

Gore’s time at DuPont taught him that hierarchies inhibit the most important conversations and that their top-down power dynamics too often killed good ideas and kept bad ideas alive. Gore often said that in hierarchical organizations, “communication really happens in the carpool,” meaning that the carpool was the only place where people felt free to talk with each other without worrying about the chain of command. In his new company, Gore didn’t want any impediments to conversations because he understood that the free interchange of ideas was the soil of innovation. And so, Gore built what he called a lattice organization where there would be no traditional organization charts, no chains of command, and no predetermined channels of communication. Instead, work would be self-organized by teams, projects would be accepted rather than assigned, and people would be held accountable to the members of their teams. A peer review process, similar to that used in law firms, would determine individual compensation. Thus, the workers would be rewarded based on their contributions to team success and would have an incentive to commit to more rather than less work.

Bill Gore’s organizational approach was extraordinarily innovative for the 1950s. No other company at the time was using a networked-based management model to organize the work of large numbers of people, and we can be sure that few, if any, of Gore’s management contemporaries would have given his company any chance of surviving. According to the management mindset of the mid-twentieth century, a lattice organizational model would have been perceived as a guaranteed formula for chaos and failure. After all, how would anything get done if there were no bosses?

As it turns out, a great deal can get done in networked-based organizations. With its consistent appearance on Fortune magazine’s annual list of the “Best Companies to Work For” and its enviable track record of more than fifty consecutive years of profitability, W.L. Gore & Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex and countless other innovative products, is living proof that there is a radically different alternative model that companies can use to organize large numbers of people into a sustainable, thriving, and highly adaptive business.

More than fifty years after its founding, there are still no organization charts at Gore, and all work continues to be accepted rather than assigned. While Gore does have a CEO and a small number of designated leaders for its four divisions and its companywide support functions, such as human resources and information technology, these leaders don’t assign work to anyone. Nobody at Gore—not even the CEO—tells anyone what to do or how to do it. There are no vice presidents or supervisors; there are only associates. Some of the associates may serve as leaders from time to time, but another leader never assigns this role. If you want to lead a project at Gore, you have to recruit followers. In true self-organizing fashion, the followers determine the leaders, and the leaders remain in their roles as long as they continue to maintain the respect and support of their peers.

Gore’s longstanding success in employing its lattice organizational approach is a valuable management asset in a new world where the digital revolution has suddenly made networks far smarter and faster than hierarchies. As the new technologies of our rapidly changing world continue to spawn a new breed of companies, we are seeing increasing evidence that a well-designed organizational network is a far superior alternative to traditional management structures. For those business leaders who are ready to accept that managing great change is only possible if we change how we manage, hidden in plain sight for the past 50 years is the time-tested lattice model of W. L. Gore and Associates.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

Looking Ahead to 2014: Trends in Digital Asset Management and Metadata

by David Lipsey

 

I’m spending a lot of time in New York City these days, and this is the time of the year when all of the beautiful candy stores are filled with Valentine’s Day gifts. This got me to thinking—what would I like my Valentine to bring me in a box full of DAM treats?  Below—a few thoughts on this…..

Metadata becomes a household word:  This is the year when, with our passion for the critical role of “metadata”, we could finally see our beloved term achieve widespread recognition—and even appear in more newspaper headlines.   While the circumstances were a far cry from “watch how library science can enable great results on consumers finding your content or products, make social media and search deliver better results and help your internal staff reduce duplication and find assets more quickly”, NSA helped us to make the power of metadata No Secret Anymore!

Creating an anticipatory and adaptive framework for metadata:  As we have watched the need for product and content assets to “self-express” themselves and be discoverable through countless devices and channels, we’ve also learned that how we manage our terms of solicitation cannot rest on fixed fields of yesteryear.   To continue, we can make No Such Assumptions!  We look ahead to creating a much more dynamic set of structures of how, and when, metadata is assigned to assets.  We are tracking the ability of content creation tools and work flows to more dynamically inject assets with context sensitive meanings. We are also carefully tracking tools in semantic inference, crowdsourcing, and the real world challenges in finding the human capital through partners such as Amazon Turk in capturing the human aspect of meanings.

Content, content, everywear:  Along with the ever expanding quantity of devices—which we think of as the horn of plenty and the horn of anxiety—content now involves our wristwatches (how appropriate!) and in the not too far off future, eyeglasses. Beyond that, along with the kinesthetic reengineering of fabrics to achieve dialogue with our digital devices, the fabric itself will become expressive of imagery and text.  Anticipating the need to content-aware devices is a trend that content managers are working towards.  And managing this incessant percussive need for content transformations puts demands on the content experts—wherever they are located in an organization.   From the Nike wristband to Fitbit to on-demand exercises on my iPad, the ingenious use of purposeful content is rapidly evolving.  Related to this is a radical rise in the understanding that DAM can drive DIY materials, repair manuals, and should be tightly bound with all customer service operations—linking the CSR to product manuals, imagery, customer photos of broken products, etc.

“Honey, I shrunk the production cycle”:  Viewed more broadly, managing digital assets better continues to be measured by the nonstop need to compress both production and time to market cycles.   An engineer wants to see near-real time changes from an overseas design studio; no problem in many CAD workflow tools, but in today’s world of parallel production awareness, someone in packaging wants to see the same new design on the packaging mock-up and the digital marketing team has the same request for the social media campaign. And via mobile, if you please?   The ability—or at least the need—of digital asset management to facilitate these parallel workflow and calendaring streams will grow exponentially in the coming year.  Assets, with the correct privileges and rights sanctuary around them, can no longer stay trapped in their traditional work flow systems—access to DAM as core service will take on more and more centrality for business operations, from concept to distribution.  At the same time, we recognize that our ability to better accomplish the workflows vital to asset fulfillment in both end state manufacture-on-demand and mass personalization (e.g., Zazzle, Vista Print, etc.) has gotten significantly better.

Power to the (content) people:  One of the greatest areas of change we’ll watch in the coming year is where DAM and content control is organizationally located.  It’s essential to track two trends here.  First, watching the centralization of enterprise DAM and the recognition that great metadata and taxonomy work has no single master in DAM, web CMS, document repositories, or any other sole source of content management.   DAM will increasingly seem out of place in the marketing—or any other singularly defined—department.  Central DAM (and allied metadata services) is as core to today’s enterprise as centralized payroll and a well-functioning ERP system from SAP or Oracle.

Second, the central role of decentralized content stewardship should be recognized.  At one time, a handful of power users who knew the ins and outs of asset uploading were thought to be the primary users in a DAM system.  Today, we need to recognize the role of the departmentally based (or sourced from IT or Operations) content steward who can position the vitality of content assets and work flow to everyday operations as well as next year’s strategic plan.  Attending to the job description, organizational placement, incentive program and community exchange between and among content stewards will be trending this year.

Measure twice, or three, or four times, cut once:  And forget the cut part!   One of the most important trend lines is an increasingly sophisticated answer to the question of “how are we doing”.  Reporting about DAM must evolve past the interesting, but simplistic, ideas of how many assets ingested and downloaded.  We’ll be working on projects to help tie our DAM systems to SAP or Oracle; our understanding of the value of assets will deepen as we both measure and work towards better visualization of asset patterns.  From this, we’ll engage in deeper conversations about return on investment, as well as more vibrant reporting to upper management and project sponsors about the business valuations of DAM.  We also expect to see better communication from the content stewards and DAM managers back to original project sponsors, who often get forgotten as DAM matures and diversifies over time.

Beam me up—or down, Scotty—3 D printing:  DAM has the potential to play a significant role in securing the market and/or economic meaning of 3D printing.  The increasing use and remarkable spread of 3D printers rings with both business risk and business opportunity. Companies can play both sides of the production cycle with 3D printing—product manufacturers can provide the 3D instructional file to make, for example, a customized model toy car or repair part.  Equally feasible, a company can receive and relicense instructional files.  In either of these bi-directional workflows, marketing materials, imagery and the file itself can all be seen as assets.  And they’ll need to be managed.

78, 45, 33 and beyond:  Records management and DAM:  The explosion of managed content is concurrently creating a secondary set of issues in records management.  As the cost, reach and frequency of e-discovery increase, the need for discovery-centric metadata is a trend worth watching.  The exponential growth of digital assets also creates policy issues for archiving and disposal; other issues arise for accurately tracking the location of massive asset stores as they move to the cloud and cloud storage vendors go out of business or change ownership.  An area we are watching is using the “metadata-only” management behaviors of DAM to track asset location independent of the actual asset location.  We’re also closely monitoring the role of Records Information Management Stewards to see if and how this role matches up to content stewards.

I’ll keep looking for the candy box of my DAM wishes—and if any of you know where these DAM treasures are wrapped up, send me a note and share!  And, both here at Optimity and at the DAM meetings we attend around the world, we’ll help you to unwrap the meaning of DAM throughout the year.

 

David Lipsey is a Partner at Optimity Advisors and Chairman of the global conferences onThe Art and Practice of Managing Digital Media and The International DAM Foundation.

The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part I: Hidden In Plain Sight

by Rod Collins

 

The practice of management needs a major overhaul. The top-down hierarchical model that has served as the fundamental platform for how we organize the work of large numbers of people is rapidly becoming obsolete in a business world that is being radically transformed by the forces of accelerating change. Put simply, a nineteenth century management model is unsustainable in a twenty-first century world. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, it is unrealistic to believe that a century-old management model will somehow endure while the rest of the world is reshaped by the technologies of the digital age.

The reasons for the inevitable obsolescence of traditional management have been cogently described by the business thinker Gary Hamel in his most recent books, The Future of Management and What Matters Now. The essential tools and practices of what was once known as modern management, Hamel points out, were invented to guide business leaders in building and preserving sustainable business models and maintaining highly efficient operations. However, in today’s rapidly changing world, keeping pace is more a matter of adapting and innovating than preserving and maintaining. Thus, Hamel correctly concludes what ultimately constrains the performance of so many businesses in this time of great change is a deeply entrenched management model designed to propagate the status quo.

However, while Hamel outlines in great depth why traditional management’s days are clearly numbered and presents compelling examples of companies, such as Google, Gore, Morning Star, and Whole Foods, whose leaders manage very differently from their traditional counterparts, he somewhat surprisingly concludes that what he terms “Management 2.0” has yet to be invented. He urges his readers to become part of the movement to reinvent management for the twenty-first century by sharing new practices in online forums such as the Management Innovation Exchange in the hope that a new management model, which is better designed to successfully guide leaders in meeting the challenges of a rapidly changing world, will eventually emerge from the dialogue.

Hamel’s conclusion is surprising because the future of management has already happened and many of his examples are evidence of the new management model’s arrival. His conclusion is even more puzzling because in What Matters Now, Hamel notes that the future usually starts on the fringe rather than the mainstream, citing the science-fiction writer William Gibson, who once wisely observed, “The future has already happened, it’s just unequally distributed.” And so it is with management: While its future is present today, it’s not equally distributed, and thus, remains hidden in plain sight.

Part of the reason we may have difficulty in recognizing the new management model is because it works so very differently from the old model. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the prevailing theory known as Scientific Management assumed that organizations were essentially machines, and that they worked best when the functional parts were correctly aligned and properly controlled. The new model, which some have called Creative Management, sees organizations as evolving complex adaptive systems rather than static machines. This new model is a well-developed management system that is guiding its practitioners to consistent extraordinary performance, despite the challenges posed by the forces of accelerating change.

The workings of this new model are reflected in the well-established—but little known—practices of management innovators, which are detailed in two books; The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning and my own recently published Wiki Management. These sources describe the innovative processes and practices of the revolutionary new management model that is hidden in plain sight. They spotlight a very different business world where leaders are catalysts and facilitators rather than bosses, workers are highly engaged in shaping strategic thinking and operational practices, and business processes are designed around what’s most important to customers. In the next five installments of this blog, we will summarize the key content of each of these sources and highlight the fundamentals of the future of management.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014). 

The Wisdom of Crowds: Myth or Reality?

by Rod Collins

 

With the rapid expansion of the digital technologies of mass collaboration, our capacity to tap into what has become know as the “wisdom of crowds” has become a common experience. On a regular basis, literally billions of us rely upon Wikipedia as our primary reference source and rarely a day goes by that we don’t do a Google search. Both of these applications leverage the collective intelligence of their users as foundation for their operating systems.

In a 2012 Future Trends Report from the DaVinci Institute, futurist Thomas Frey argues that the recent popularity of the notion of the “wisdom of crowds” is nothing more than a passing fad, and he suggests that this vogue idea will be replaced by three emerging forces: a new generation of “super-influencers,” instant data-mining-based decision making, and what Frey calls “real human intelligence.” Frey seems to imply that a new breed of experts with new technological tools will restore our confidence in the supremacy of individual genius.

As evidence of the folly of the wisdom of crowds, Frey cites the shallowness of many of our past popularly held beliefs. For example, before 1929, it was common knowledge that stocks were a great place to put your money, and up until the recent financial collapse, no one questioned that real estate values would always go up.

While Frey correctly makes the point that crowds are not always wise, perhaps he paints with too broad a brush by totally discounting the crowd. Before dismissing the multitude, it may be important to understand the distinction between complicated problems and complex problems, and we may need to be careful not to confuse collective wisdom with conventional wisdom.

Whether the wisdom of crowds is reliable depends upon the circumstances. It depends upon whether the problem to be solved is complex or complicated. For most of the Industrial Age, our challenges have been mechanical problems, and mechanical problems are generally issues of complication. Solutions to mechanical puzzles often involve the search for the elusive fundamental cause – often referred to as the “silver bullet” – that is driving the undesired effect. If you need to find a  “silver bullet,” rely on an expert. That’s why, in an airplane at 30,000 feet, we usually trust the pilot over the crowd. However, when the issue involves a complex problem, we are more likely to be dealing with a paradox than a puzzle. Thus, the solution is more likely to emerge from a holistic blending of several seemingly unrelated perspectives rather than from the search for a “silver bullet” by a trained expert. When this is the case, we often find that diversity trumps ability as we witnessed in the summer of 2011 when a group of online gamers on Foldit solved in ten days a difficult problem in AIDS research that had alluded the world’s best expert scientists for ten years.

The reliability of the wisdom of crowds also depends upon whether the conclusions are based on conventional wisdom or collective wisdom. The notion of the wisdom of the crowds was recently the subject of a book by James Surowiecki. He points out that crowds often outperform experts when four conditions are present: 1) diversity of opinion, 2) independent thinking, 3) local knowledge, and most importantly, 4) an aggregation mechanism. Without all four conditions, then the crowd can easily descend into the conventional wisdom of an unintelligent mob or myopic groupthink.

The debunked popular beliefs about the stock market and real estate values are examples of conventional wisdom. As Frey rightly points out, this type of wisdom is not always reliable because it is highly susceptible to bias from undue social influences. However, when Surowiecki’s four conditions are present, we have the capacity to tap into what is arguably the highest form of human intelligence, our collective intelligence. Perhaps that explains the incredible performance of the Foldit online gamers.

Until recently, tapping into our collective intelligence was not practical because we didn’t have the aggregation mechanisms to integrate our best thinking. Without these mechanisms, so-called super-influencers have been able to both dominate and color the thinking of the crowd. However, that’s all changing thanks to the digital revolution. Advances in digital technology have made wikis, Google and other forms of open sourcing possible. They have expanded our ability to aggregate human intelligence in the form of sophisticated data-mining technology. Thus, rather than displacing the wisdom of the crowd, this force is more likely to be an accelerator of our collective intelligence. When this happens, we will discover that the “real human intelligence” that Frey refers to is actually nothing more than our mastery of our emerging capacity for collective intelligence. The next generation of super-influencers will become a diminishing force as more of us gain access to our real and highest form of human intelligence.

While it is true that not all crowds are wise, sometimes crowds do outperform the experts. Given a complex problem and the presence of the right conditions, the wisdom of crowds is a reality and not a myth. There are circumstances where nobody really is smarter or faster than everybody.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World.

The Heroic Spirit of Capitalism

by Rod Collins

 

In the wake of the recent Great Recession, capitalism has taken a beating. The popular narrative spun by an informal coalition of politicians, academics, and media voices is that a bunch of greedy Wall Street moguls cooked up a scheme to extend mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them and packaged those loans into fraudulent securities so they could reap great profits for themselves. The bad guys in this narrative have become the faces of capitalism and the proof, according to the coalition, that business, left to its own devices, is fundamentally corrupt.

The problem with this narrative is that it reflects a partial truth and ignores the complete story. Absent from this narrative is how a bi-partisan policy shift to extend home-ownership to a larger number of people gutted a highly effective self-regulated system that assured that only those who could afford the cost of home ownership received high-dollar mortgages. “Liar loans” were not a spontaneous invention of miscreants bent on exploiting the public, but rather a response to the pressures of well-intentioned government bureaucrats implementing a flawed economic policy. Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And despite their noble motives, the bureaucrats are just as culpable as the financial industry players in creating the worst recession since the Great Depression. There are no heroes in the complete story.

According to John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, the authors of Conscious Capitalism:Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, the popular narrative is more a caricature than a reflection of the way the world really works. They believe that the true fabric of capitalism is defined more by the legions of innovative entrepreneurs than by a few greedy scoundrels. Nevertheless, the scoundrels get more publicity.  Although free market economics has enabled more prosperity than any other socioeconomic system, the authors lament, “rather than being seen for what they really are—the heroes of the story—capitalism and business are all too frequently vilified as the bad guys and blamed for virtually everything our postmodern critics dislike about the world.”

Mackey and Sisodia highlight the lesser-known attributes of capitalism that are often taken for granted: value creation, entrepreneurial passion, voluntary exchange, and the reduction of poverty. When business is done right, its heroic spirit has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other human effort. Citing examples from many of today’s vanguard companies, such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and Mackey’s own Whole Foods, Conscious Capitalism describes what business looks like when it is done right.

These vanguard companies don’t fit the caricature propagated by the popular narrative. These enterprises understand that the purpose of a business is not to maximize shareholder wealth, but rather to create customer value because they know that without happy customers there are no profits. According to the authors, “The paradox of profits is that, like happiness, they are best achieved by not aiming directly at them.” The authors also highlight how these high performing organizations rely on the collective intelligence of their workers and customers rather than the whims of the bosses to manage the day-to-day business because they appreciate that nobody is smarter than everybody. According to Mackey and Sisodia, the best companies are designed as “agents of creation and collaboration” and are able to cross-pollinate human potential into extraordinary performance by increasing the quality of life for both those who buy from them and those who work for them.

Conscious capitalists are important heroes in the evolving story of the development of human potential and the betterment of our social lives. You won’t hear about them from the informal coalition of politicians, academics, and media stars because the contributions the conscious capitalists don’t fit the preferred narrative of the pundits. If you want to learn about the higher reaches of business behavior and the heroic spirit of capitalism, you’ll need to read books like Conscious Capitalism. 

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World.

Sometimes Diversity Trumps Ability

by Rod Collins

 

In a world reshaped by the new tools of mass collaboration, businesses with overbearing bosses amplifying their individual prowess through the power to command and control the work of others are no match for organizations that have the wherewithal to harness the diverse perspectives of self-organizing teams. When we look around at who’s succeeding in these early days of the digital revolution, the most effective business leaders are innovative catalysts, not traditional bosses.  If companies want to succeed in the post-digital world, they will need to abandon the long-accepted notion that a single intelligent and talented individual can lead organizations to greatness. That’s because, when you have the technology to aggregate and leverage collective intelligence, there are many times when diversity trumps ability

We recently experienced the incredible the power of collective intelligence when, in the summer of 2011, Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, decided to do something different to accelerate the progress of solving a molecular puzzle that had stumped the world’s best scientists for over a decade. The evasive puzzle involved figuring out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in monkeys. Because this enzyme plays an important role in the spread of the virus, Khatib knew that figuring out its structure could be the breakthrough needed to arrest the medical malady.  That’s when Khatib turned to Foldit.

Foldit is a collaborative online video game developed by the University of Washington that enlists players worldwide to solve difficult protein-structure problems. There are no special requirements for joining the Foldit community. All comers are welcome, which explains why most of the over 235,000 Foldit players have little or no background in biochemistry. Khabit recognized that the molecular challenge was a good fit for the capabilities of the Foldit game. Incredibly, what had evaded the world’s best individual scientific experts for ten years was solved by the collective knowledge of a diverse group of online gamers within only ten days.  When you have the capability to aggregate and leverage collective intelligence, you discover that wisdom of the old adage that none of us is smarter than all of us.

Today the smartest organizations are not the ones who build command-and-control hierarchies to amplify the influence of individual heroes and stars. They are the ones who build networks with the capacity to quickly aggregate and leverage the collective intelligence of all the people in their organizations. As we continue to marvel at the continuing evidence that nobody is smarter and faster than everybody, we can expect that traditional organizations will feel the pressure to morph themselves from top-down hierarchies to collaborative networks if they are to have any hope of succeeding in a post-digital world. And when they do, they will need to dramatically change the way leadership is practiced.

When business organizations are designed as collaborative networks, their leaders don’t fit the mold of traditional bosses such as Donald Trump, the star of The Apprentice, or Lee Iacocca, the legendary savior of Chrysler in the 1980’s. They behave more like the late Bill Gore, the humble founder of the maker of Gore-Tex, or Linus Torvalds, the innovative unassuming catalyst behind Linux. The most effective leaders today are facilitators who build collective learning processes and provide the tools for self-organizing teams to consistently and reliably deliver customer value. In a hyper-connected world, the true measure of a leader has more to do with mobilizing human capacity than with motivating individuals.  When it comes to leading others, they’re focused more on enabling connections than giving orders.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World.