Chaos by design- an inside story of Google

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/02/8387489/index.htm?postversion=2006100210

I was about to name this post "innovation with no direction", which I believe is the most important managerial lesson we can get from this article. The guys at Google have got it right when it comes to innovation (and other things as well).
In today's world, innovation happens more outside organizations driven by self-assembling groups that pursue their own targets, than inside companies with a well dictated agenda for innovation. Why not try to make it as emergent inside as it is outside?
Well, you can do that if you're prepared to adapt your own business model depending on the results. That is not apt for most companies today. There must be a paradigm shift in the way we think of innovation. In the traditional model the innovation gets killed when it reaches the execution phase. In the new one, it gets killed if it does not fly; instead of death by management, projects can be death by natural selection. Managing innovation is supposed to be finding new ways to do something. Here we're talking about finding new things to do. And that's a different story.

Your investment to improve tacit interactions

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=1767&L2=18&L3=30

If 70% of your workers interactions are what McKinsey calls Tacit, did you ask yourself what percentage of your IT investment goes to support those interactions?

Reengineering and automating processes has taken companies to achieve great productivity improvements. But if we are to live in an era where interactions are more tacit than, transformational or transactional, what is going to be the contribution of IT to improve productivity in this environement?

There are two key areas in IT that companies look at in order to support the new nature of their work:
- Make information accesible. Despite the organizational structure, try to avoid silos in information. Allow the information flow in all directions and break down barriers, hierarchies to become porous.
- Make people accesible. Adopt mechanisms to increase the means you can access people, inside or outside the boundaries of the organization in real time. Provide as many channels as possible in order to maximize the bandwidth of communciation.

As you can read in one of the McKinsey articles mentioned in previous posts, "Tacit interactions reduce the importance of structure and elevate the importance of people and collaboration"

In further posts I explore the details on how to do this and how SOA and Web 2.0 converge.

The new workplace

In this post I try to summarize some of the most important research published lately on the new dynamics of work and the emergence of a new workplace.

An old topic that was fancy in the late 90's is comign to the spotlight again. Judging by the number and quality of articles and research being published, for example by McKinsey Quarterly Journal and recently The Economist, one would argue that the workplace discussion is hot again.

The reasons are quite strong and they tell us that the debate is a very profound one with big implications for modern organizations.

The new interactions described by McKinsey essentially prove that we've entered a different type of economy. The article distinguishes between three types of interactions:
- Transformational- extracting raw materials or converting them into finished goods
- Transactional- Interactions that unfold in a generally rule-based manner and thus can be scripted or automated
- Tacit- More complex interactions requiring a higher level of judgement, involving ambiguity and drawing on tacit, or experiential, knowledge.
The facts are that 70% of jobs created in the US since 1998 are tacit jobs. And these jobs today count for 41% of labor market in the US.

One of the most important implications of this nature of jobs being created today is the difference in the productivity achieved by firms where the majority of the interactions are tacit. Another McKinsey research shows that "...the variability of company-level performance is more than 50 percent greater in tacit-based sectors than in manufacturing-based ones. Tacit activities are now a green pasture for improvement."

The latest contribution has come from The Economist. In it's recently published survey "The battle for brainpower" analyses in detail the new battles to build the "Empires of the Mind"