Technology, Organizations, and People — Let’s Take it from the TOP
I’ve been talking about TOP Management for a while (here, here & here), but I’ve yet to devote a post to defining the importance and boundaries of this concept.
TOP Management includes:
- Technology: Applications, network infrastructures, and even hard technologies like assembly lines – the quality, access, integration, and support of these systems
- Organizational Policies, Procedures, and Structures: Approaches to recruitment, hiring (both contract and permanent), training, evaluation, pay and other performance management activities; Team or individual contributor focused structures, layers of management, focus on outsourcing, and the like
- People: How many of them there are, the skills they have when they are hired, the basics of human reactions (people go towards rewards and away from punishment), their demographic backgrounds, languages they speak, etc.
The background to this image is the Context: Local or global, leader or follower in industry, pace of industry, types of competition, and so on.
Our work is not done in silos – yet much of our technology infrastructure and work practice are built as if it were. Too often discussions of management practice look at technology, people, or organization. Rarely do we see them addressed in a balanced way.
Modern management means thinking of ways to weave tools, practices, and employee capabilities into a single strong, yet flexible, fabric. We all need to practice a bit of systems design and have systems savvy, but we need to understand the breadth and opportunities of these broader intertwined systems. TOP Management gives us this breadth.
I’ve been using the Obama campaign as an example of an organization practicing effective TOP Management. They used social media technologies in an organized way. Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s four founders, left Facebook to work on the Obama campaign and this digital outreach worked. In July of 2008, the Nielsen tracking company reported that the Obama campaign website had 2.3 million unique visitors during the month, compared to McCain’s 563,000 (pdf of report). Many credit the campaign’s fund raising success with their ability to energize a new set of voters in this new way. The campaign understood the technology, they effectively created organizational practices to leverage the technology, and they understood the people who they were trying to reach.
Had the Obama campaign used social media in an uncoordinated way (ignoring the organizational aspects), they likely would have failed. Had they ignored younger voters (a particular focus on people), they likely would have failed. Had they ignored the opportunities of the social media technology, they likely would have failed as a key segment of their voters were not paying attention to traditional TV advertising. The value came when they intertwined these dimensions to create powerful new approach to running a campaign. (See discussions of the challenges the Obama administration faces now that they are in office and constrained by Federal limitations on technology use.)
The ability to practice TOP Management may be the most important skill a modern manager can have. Having “emotional intelligence,” “soft skills,” and the like are key, but the big impact comes from knowing how to work with technology, organizational practices, and people at the same time. Technology and organizational practice are what allow us to leverage the skill and motivation of our people.
21 Responses
August 31st, 2009 at 11:43 am
[...] TOP Management highlights that Technology, Organizations, People need to be considered in concert for success. Miss any one of the three dimensions, and you risk failure. This next series of posts will highlight mistakes. I suspect that you have a few of your own. I’d appreciate your examples in the comments below. The more we can illustrate the risks, the more likely are people to make the effort required for success. [...]
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
[...] A TOP Management Failure is one where organizational decision makers error by not considering all aspects of the foundations of organizations: Technology, Organizations, and People. [...]
September 10th, 2009 at 10:04 am
[...] Brainstorm story is an example of systems savvy and ongoing TOP Management — and goes to show that you don’t have to have decades of experience to have savvy. [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
[...] of the organizations are on-board, we just need more people to be energized and aware of how to effectively weave the parts into new organizational forms. Perhaps we can increase the pace of organizational change by even more education and support of [...]
September 21st, 2009 at 9:32 am
[...] seems to be a promising overlap between the opportunities of adopting new technology, the necessary transformation of the organization, and the pursuit of the organization’s [...]
September 24th, 2009 at 3:31 am
[...] TOP (tech, org, people) Management isn’t just about action. It’s also about being able to do effective analysis. It’s the ability to avoid the problem of having only a hammer …and so seeing all issues as nails. It’s also the ability to avoid errors of attribution: for example, attribution theory tells us that people have a self-serving bias such that they attribute positive outcomes to themselves, and negative outcomes to external factors. TOP Management pushes us to consider at least three sources in any analysis. This high-level “checklist” can help us get to the root cause of issues more effectively than could any approach focusing on a single attribute. [...]
October 14th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
[...] Do you think that a better term would have made the ideas more sticky? Here’s hoping that TOP Management can hold our attention long enough gain some [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
[...] Organizations are global, partnered with other organizations, and more and more run via virtual teams with limited physical interaction… and those are the recognizable organizations. There are other organizations that remain on the fringe in that their work is done by freelancers so indirectly connected to the organization that it’s hard describe them in organizational terms. Wired’s recent article (by Daniel Roth), The Answer Factory describes one organization where clear decisions have been made to freelance some work, and turn other work over to computer algorithms. True, and thought provoking, integration of technology, organizations, and people. [...]
November 11th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
[...] without technology examples, this was TOP Management. I expect this panel and audience had a clear vision and control over over their supporting [...]
November 16th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
[...] Suzanne Kirkpatrick (Microsoft) says her epiphany regarding the need to work with all three TOP dimensions at once came during Strong Angel III, an international disaster-response demonstration attended by [...]
November 28th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
[...] couldn’t help but be amazed at their work and used the TOP Management framework to try and understand how it comes [...]
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:11 am
[...] known as American Society for Testing and Materials) is among the organizations that practice TOP Management as part of their DNA. ASTM supports the development and archiving of high-quality, market-relevant [...]
December 6th, 2009 at 1:06 am
[...] the value in the MIT approach. They didn’t just rely on social networking, they practiced TOP Management. Technology: They built a solid website enabled to take in exactly the information they needed and [...]
December 17th, 2009 at 9:05 am
[...] of the technology tools, the organizational practices, and the people involved — T-O-P Management. For Stuart DeSpain of Microsoft, the intertwining is very explicit in the form of: One Team, Many [...]
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:26 am
[...] technology, organizations, and people? How about a book that supports some of the key issues of T-O-P Management? Some of these books you can find in your local book store. I bet the rest are available as ebooks [...]
December 29th, 2009 at 9:56 am
[...] than focus on the intricacies of T-O-P Management (technology, organizations, & people), today I’ve chosen a few recent posts by others [...]
January 8th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
[...] (at least one team did invent – but they didn’t win). Instead, the MIT team practiced T-O-P Management by weaving together existing technology, organization, and people dimensions into a powerful [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
[...] meetings, and presentations count as organizational practices in the world of TOP Management (technology, organization, people). Just as any single technology or person can’t run the business on its own, neither can an [...]
January 21st, 2010 at 10:37 am
[...] help others understand and practice systems thinking, or in my words, how do you help them become TOP Managers – managers able to weave technology, organizations, and people together for effective [...]
January 25th, 2010 at 9:43 am
[...] all TOP Management stories start with a success. Technology projects can develop a life of their own, sometimes to the [...]
January 30th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Public Sector Tenders…
Good Tip…