The 21st Century is the Future

The thing about reading a lot of business/management classics, which I’ve been doing lately, is that in order for a book to have been around long enough to become a classic, it had to have been written before the era of the computer-dependent, networked organization.

As I’ve been reading In Search of Excellence, I’ve been wondering how their eight principles of excellence would look in a virtually connected organization. Their examples and themes (e.g. getting plant managers, engineers, customers, and marketing all together in the same room; communication unlimited by organization structure; ad hoc and voluntary task forces; building a learning organization) still seem relevant, but what do they look like in today’s organization? I find that even email (let alone all the other ways to work virtually) can make so much invisible – even working in an office as small as 15 people, it’s easy not to know who works most with whom, who is most connected to whom, who is collaborating with whom, because so much of what happens is only visible one inbox to another. Some online connections become visible through social networking sites like facebook or LinkedIn (see Common Craft’s video explaining how LinkedIn makes connections visible), but those are inter- rather than intra-organizational.

Here are some examples I’ve thought of that bring In Search of Excellence’s principles into the world of the future:

autonomy and entrepreneurship – Tales from Google staffers come to mind

simple form, lean staff – modelled by the “lightweight organization”, e.g. Common Craft’s commitment to running a light operation.

bias to action – echoed in the prototyping phase of Theory U (although all of Theory U before that phase is about not doing)

Finally, the book Getting Real (a short, quick, and free online read) – a manifesto for building a lean and successful organization – is pretty much a Web 2.0 era guide for all the principles incorporated in the bias to action section of In Search of Excellence: chunking, speedy systems, abandoning formal structure in place of ad hoc systems of what’s needed, doing things quickly, putting units in simultaneous competition with each other, and generally letting information flow freely.

Returning back to making connections visible, I sometimes think that the work I do as a facilitator (creating spaces and enabling possibilities for listening and learning) has a lot in common with social media. And while I’ve been looking for ways for us to learn together, listen to each other, and reinforce each other in person, it turns out that my brother has been figuring out how organizations can do all of these things virtually too. He’s one of the brains behind Thoughtfarmer, “social software for Intranets”. Their blog gives lots of examples of how an organization can use social software to give employees the ability to connect with each other, recognize achievements publicly, and access the information they need, all while minimizing layers and barriers that might otherwise exist structually in an organization.