Technology and Organizations

Looking for a last minute perfect gift for someone who needs to manage 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 — no shipping required!

I prepared the following material as background for a book I’m doing — Yes, you heard it here — TOP Management: Driving Success with Today’s Technology, Organizations, and People is in the proposal stage. The books below are complimentary in that they either highlight an organizational strategy that will benefit from TOP Management skills or they focus on a particular aspect required for TOP Management. Groundswell, Reality Check, Deep Smarts, and the already reviewed, The New How, highlight modern organizational strategies. I believe that managers and users will be more effective at implementing the discussed strategies to the extent that they have TOP Management skills. Change by Design, Emotional Intelligence, Grown Up Digital, Market Rebels (see prior comments on Market Rebels here), and Information Technology for Management each take on a particular dimension of TOP Management but do not try to explicitly work with technology, organization, and people simultaneously. Two books that do deal more explicitly with technology, organization, and people (Technology & Society and The Social Engagement of Social Science) are both focused on academic audiences. Happy shopping!

(my comments regarding how these books relate to TOP Management are in italics – the rest of the information is pulled from Amazon. Links take you to the Google Books entry so you can see competitive pricing.)

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (Andrew McAfee). Hardcover: 240 pages. Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (November 16, 2009)

From Amazon: “McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.”

Where TOP Management is general, McAfee’s presentation of Enterprise 2.0 is specific in that he addresses the strategic application of technology-enabled, often emergent, collaboration across customers and employees. While he understands the importance of working with all three at once, I do not see such an approach covered explicitly in his book. For example, in his Chapter 7, “Going Mainstream: A Road Map for Enterprise 2.0 Success,” he presents organizational practices for implementing Enterprise 2.0. He also mentions technology dimensions in context with these practices and what we know of human perception. McAfee is practicing TOP Management, but doesn’t explicitly describe the boundaries for organizational design and change in general. I see most of his book as opening up the strategic possibilities for Enterprise 2.0 and then Chapter 7 as applying TOP Management to the implementation — but TOP Management in general is not his focus. Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools is required reading in my Organizational Analysis course.

Enterprise 2.0 (Niall Cook). Hardcover: 180 pages. Publisher: Ashgate; illustrated edition edition (July 2008)

From Amazon: “”Enterprise 2.0″ is one of the first books to explain the impact that social software will have inside the corporate firewall, and ultimately how staff will work together in the future. Niall Cook helps you to navigate this emerging landscape and introduces the key concepts that make up ‘enterprise 2.0′. The 4Cs model at the heart of the book uses practical examples from well known companies in a range of industry sectors to illustrate how to apply enterprise 2.0 to encourage communication, cooperation, collaboration and connection between employees and customers in your own company. Erudite, well-researched and highly readable, this book is essential reading for anyone involved in knowledge, information and library management, as well as those implementing social software tools inside organizations.”

This work is another focused on changing organizational strategies to take advantage of social media. This, like McAfee’s treatment, is focused on a specific organizational approach with some discussion of implementation. Cook highlights the value of linking technology and organizational practice but doesn’t take on an approach for weaving technology, organization, and people together more generally.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Li & Bernoff). Hardcover: 224 pages. Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; (April 21, 2008)

From Amazon: “Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it is unstoppable, it affects every industry and it’s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.

When consumers you’ve never met are rating your company’s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.”

Li & Bernoff provide an interesting description of the modern environment. While they lay out many of the organizational choices managers make about social technologies, they do not provide an overview for how to think of these organizational changes systematically. My goal in TOP Management is to help managers get through these and future trends.

Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (Kawasaki). Hardcover: 496 pages. Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (October 30, 2008)

From Amazon: “In Silicon Valley slang, a “bozo explosion” is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, “If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense” . . . it’s time for a reality check….

Now, Kawasaki has compiled his best wit, wisdom, and contrarian opinions in handy book form. From competition to customer service, innovation to marketing, he shows readers how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices.”

Kawasaki’s book provides a perspective on modern times and is entertaining. Do your Reality Check, see the need to make adjustments, and then look to TOP Management to help you with developing the needed skills to succeed.

The New How: Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy (Merchant). Hardcover: 288 pages. Publisher: O’Reilly Media; (January 4, 2010) – Link is to O’Reilly site as this is pre-release.

From Amazon: “Once in a generation, a book comes along that transforms the business landscape. For today’s business leaders, The New How redefines the way companies create strategies and win new markets.

Management gurus have always said “people matter.” But those same gurus still relegate strategy to an elite set of executives who focus on frameworks, long presentations, and hierarchical approaches. Business strategy typically has been planned by corporate chiefs in annual meetings, and then dictated to managers to carry out. The New How turns that notion on its head. After many years of working with Apple, Adobe, HP, and many other companies, Nilofer Merchant discovered the secret sauce: the best way to create a winning strategy is to include employees at all levels, helping to create strategy they not only believe in, but are also equipped to implement.

In The New How, Nilofer shows today’s corporate directors, executives, and managers how they can transform their traditional, top-down approach to strategy planning and execution into collaborative “stratecution” that has proven to be significantly more effective.

• Enhance performance and outcomes by deflating the “air sandwich” between executives in the boardroom and employees
• Recognize that strategy and execution are thoroughly intertwined
• Understand how successful strategy is founded in effective idea selection-a pile of good ideas doesn’t necessarily build good strategy
• Create company strategy and link it to targeted execution, using the practical models and techniques provided”

See my earlier comments on The New How here.

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (Tim Brown). Hardcover: 272 pages. Publisher: HarperBusin (September 29, 2009)

From Amazon: “In this book Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, introduces us to design thinking. Design is not just about creating elegant objects or beautifying the world around us. The best designers match necessity to utility, constraint to possibility, and need to demand. These design thinkers rely on rigorous observations of how we use spaces and the objects and services that occupy them; they discover patterns where others see complexity and confusion; they synthesize new ideas from seemingly disparate fragments; and they convert problems into opportunities. Design thinking is a method in which genius, in the end, is not required.

Design thinking is valuable not just in so-called creative industries or for people tasked with designing products. Rather, it is often most powerful when applied to abstract, multifaceted problems: improving a guest experience at a hotel, encouraging bank customers to save more, or developing a compelling narrative for a public-service campaign. It has been used by organizations such as Nokia to rethink global gaming and by the Department of Energy to encourage conservation. Design thinking is now being applied to address a wide range of issues and concerns, from the delivery of clean drinking water in the developing world to improving the efficacy of airport security and microfinancing.”

This is an inspirational treatment of design thinking. I see design thinking as a deeper capability than TOP Management. Design Thinking describes a human skill akin to systems savvy. TOP Management draws on design thinking-like processes and applies them in organizations (making the claim that the keys are technology, organizations, and people).

Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations (Rao). Hardcover: 222 pages. Publisher: Princeton University Press (December 1, 2008)

From Publishers Weekly: “Rao, professor of organizational behavior and human resources at Stanford University, explores the role of collective action in promoting or hindering business innovation. Drawing heavily on theories of social movements, the author posits a cycle of hot causes, unexpected events or innovations, and cool mobilization, activities that channel emotional responses into popular mass actions that anchor new identities embracing or rejecting the hot cause. Rao presents several case studies in which activist behavior either encouraged or impeded the creation and expansion of new markets, technologies or new organizational structures. For example, early 20th-century automobile enthusiasts were able to placate fears about car safety (the hot cause) by staging hundreds of reliability contests that demonstrated the car’s safety and practicality to a wide audience (the cool mobilization). Though dryly written and repetitive, the case studies themselves are fascinating and challenge traditional economic models that privilege individual consumer choice while ignoring broader social mobilizations. A final chapter offers advice and strategies for would-be market rebels looking to harness collective action, making this book a useful resource for both citizen activists and corporate leaders and marketers seeking popular support for their products.”

See my earlier comments on Market Rebels here.

Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom (Leonard & Swap). Hardcover: 272 pages. Publisher: Harvard Business Press (March 1, 2005)

From Amazon: “Deep smarts are the engine of any organization-as well as the essential value that individuals build over their careers. Distinct from I.Q., this type of expertise consists of practical wisdom: accumulated knowledge, know-how, and intuition gained through extensive experience. How do such smarts develop? And what happens when people with deep smarts leave a particular job-or the organization? Can any of their smarts be transferred? Should they be?

Basing their conclusions on a multiyear research project, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap argue that cultivating and managing deep smarts are critical parts of any leader’s job. The authors draw on examples from firms of all sizes and types to illustrate the connection between deep smarts and organizational viability and continuous innovation.”

I see Deep Smarts as being another example of a specific organizational application. TOP Management helps a manager assess, customize, and implement the ideas like those in Deep Smarts.

Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World (Tapscott). Hardcover: 384 pages. Publisher: McGraw-Hill; (October 3, 2008)

From Amazon: “A fascinating inside look at the Net Generation, Grown Up Digital is inspired by a $4 million private research study. New York Times bestselling author Don Tapscott has surveyed more than 11,000 young people. Instead of a bunch of spoiled “screenagers” with short attention spans and zero social skills, he discovered a remarkably bright community which has developed revolutionary new ways of thinking, interacting, working, and socializing.”

Don Tapscott is a TOP manager. He understands the underlying technology options highlighted by the Net Generation, the organizational practices and policies the Net Generation must deal with, and the human development issues that give us the people aspects of the Net Generation and their interactions with Baby Boomers. His book is an example of TOP Management — see in particular his discussions of the Net Generation at work.

Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition; Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (Goleman). Hardcover: 384 pages. Publisher: Bantam; 10 Anv edition (September 26, 2006)

From Publishers Weekly (speaking of the original version): “New York Times science writer Goleman argues that our emotions play a much greater role in thought, decision making and individual success than is commonly acknowledged. He defines “emotional intelligence”?a trait not measured by IQ tests?as a set of skills, including control of one’s impulses, self-motivation, empathy and social competence in interpersonal relationships. Although his highly accessible survey of research into cognitive and emotional development may not convince readers that this grab bag of faculties comprise a clearly recognizable, well-defined aptitude, his report is nevertheless an intriguing and practical guide to emotional mastery. In marriage, emotional intelligence means listening well and being able to calm down. In the workplace, it manifests when bosses give subordinates constructive feedback regarding their performance. Goleman also looks at pilot programs in schools from New York City to Oakland, Calif., where kids are taught conflict resolution, impulse control and social skills.”

Like Design Thinking, Emotional Intelligence is focused on a deeper and complimentary capability to TOP Management. The focus is on the People piece of Technology, Organizations, and People.

Academic treatments:

Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy (Turban & Volonino). Hardcover: 648 pages. Publisher: Wiley; 7 edition (March 30, 2009)

From Amazon: “Information technology has changed how businesses operate and succeed in today’s global economy. Organizations can now use IT to transform themselves and achieve a tremendous competitive advantage. Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy, Seventh Edition highlights how this new technology is changing the current business environment and what effect it has on today’s students. The text addresses the major principles of MIS in order to prepare managers to understand the role of information technology in the digital economy. Revised and updated for a junior or senior level MIS or MBA course, this title will give students what they need to succeed in the emerging digital economy.”

This work focuses on how to use technology in organizations and is less focused on how to effectively manage all of technology, organizations, and people together.

Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future (Johnson & Whetmore, Editors). Paperback: 648 pages. Publisher: The MIT Press (November 30, 2008)

From Amazon: “Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. This anthology focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values. It offers writings by authorities as varied as Freeman Dyson, Lawrence Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Judy Wajcman that will introduce readers to recent thinking about technology and provide them with conceptual tools, a theoretical framework, and knowledge to help understand how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology. It offers readers a new perspective on such current issues as globalization, the balance between security and privacy, environmental justice, and poverty in the developing world.”

Johnson and Whetmore focus on how technologies come to be and how social settings affect their implementation. They provide good background for understanding our interactions with new technologies but not much guidance on how to use technology as one part of organizational design.

The Social Engagement of Social Science: A Tavistock Anthology : The Socio-Technical Perspective (Trist & Murray). Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (June 1993)

This last is the most recent book I am aware of that focuses on an intertwined view of technology, organization, and people. It is part of a three-volume perspective on the early sociotechnical work done by the Tavistock Institutes and is an academic and historic treatment. I do not see modern managers making the jump from the Tavistock presentation to their own settings. To a degree, TOP Management is a popular and modern translation of many of the ideas of sociotechnical design.

What do electric planes, home brewed beer, automobiles, and personal computers have in common? They are all innovations with enthusiast organizations to thank for their development.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about “public” innovation labs like Google Labs, PARC Living Laboratory, and IDEO Labs. At the end, I asked:

Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute?

An excerpt of Huggy Rao’s 2008 book Market Rebels and Radical Innovation gave me some great history and insights (video of Prof. Rao talking about book). He points out that automobiles, personal computers, and home brewed beer each had a “hot cause” to arouse emotion and create a community of members, and “cool mobilization” — think jazz “cool” — to signal the identity of members and to sustain their commitment:

• Automobiles had enthusiast organizations with with hot cause goals of shielding owners from legal harassment and solving problems of transportation (this was the late 1800s). The cool mobilization strategies were reliability contests (though some of them seem to have gotten pretty “hot” – women screaming, men stomping on hats…)
• Personal computers had “the tyranny of the central computer” as their hot cause and hobbyist clubs (most famously, the Home Brew Computer Club where the Apple I and many others made their debut) as their cool mobilization.
• Microbrewing and its American Homebrewers Association had the democratization of the production of beer — with the downfall of “industrial beer” (“thin and overcarbonated”) as their hot cause, and home brewing, frequenting brewpubs, and beer festivals as mechanisms for cool mobilization.

I’ve added electric planes to give us thoughts for the future. Electric plane enthusiasts have EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association), the CAFE Foundation, and NASA behind them. While there might not be women screaming and men stomping on hats, there is a $1.5 Million prize “for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon” – and electric power is likely to play a role. Clearly “green” is hot — and NASA is cool.

But such collaboration isn’t natural or easy. In Steve Gillmor’s recent interview with Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and creator of Lotus Notes and Groove), Ozzie says about collaboration:

“… people don’t like to work on things that are joint objectives; they like to work on things that are their key — that satisfy their KPIs [key performance indicators], their objectives, not necessarily the joint ones.”

Rao’s “hot” and “cool” (and his deeper analytic links between radical innovation and insurgency) may be the explanation for our examples of collaborative efforts related to these innovations: the causes were so motivating and the social movements so strong that they did (do) help people meet their own objectives.

Photo by rmhermen

The admonition “don’t do math in public” clearly doesn’t apply to modern R&D. While the Lockheed Skunkworks and Apple are known for their secrecy, many organizations now open up their process so that we can all participate. This is more than “open innovation.” This is public, interactive, innovation.

IDEO, Google, PARC, Yahoo! have/had public websites for their “labs”:

• IDEO Labs: “… is a place where we can show bits of what we’re working on, talk about prototyping, and share our excitement over the tools that help us create.”
• Google Labs: “Explore Google’s technology playground”
• PARC Living Laboratory: “In the spirit of open innovation, this is one of the places where PARC scientists and engineers share their prototype web-based services, alpha-stage software downloads, proof-of-concept for various competencies, and collaborative development programs. These are available free to the public for trial and feedback; in turn, we hope to draw on the diverse perspectives the online community will share. We do not currently provide access to inactive projects (e.g., Map Viewer) here.”
• Yahoo! Next: (defunct?) “… is a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and upcoming projects. It is essentially an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, and a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum. The Yahoo! Next website is currently offline for redevelopment” (from Wikipedia.)

These sites provide outsiders with early access to interesting work, and early feedback from enthusiastic followers. To the extent that we are becoming a sharing/collaborative community, these organizations can gain great value and we can participate in the process.

But, how do you make the choice of openness? How do you decide what to be open with and what to keep secret? There is a full range of possibilities (the range of formal arrangements is nicely covered in When is Virtual Virtuous, by Hank Chesbrough and David Teece). They highlight the issues of whether or not the innovation exists, or must be invented; and whether the innovation will be autonomous or systemic to the organization’s goals and processes. Note: you don’t see Google open sourcing their algorithms.

SAP Labs shows a middle ground. They appear to have standard R&D, but with a local and co-innovation flavor:

“The SAP Labs Network leverages SAP’s rich diversity and technical and business expertise to deliver the best software solutions and services in the IT industry.

Located in high-tech centers across the globe, the SAP Labs Network helps SAP engage the local ecosystems and enable co-innovation.

Seen as a local company within a seamless global network, each SAP Labs location increases SAP’s adaptability and agility to rapidly address changing markets and meet evolving customer needs.” (Thanks, @nilofer for the example.)

Here’s a twist: Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute? I have a couple of examples and will do a follow up post — but it would be wonderful if you could share any examples you have. These can be self-organizing (like much of the open source software), facilitated by membership enthusiast organizations, or….

Neeraj of the ideas-innovation blog and I seem to be coming to the same conclusion — this is an exciting and vocal time in terms how individuals are seen to interact with innovation.

We’re in good company. As Neeraj notes “I feel there is a similarity between the Idea proposed by Seth Godin of people joining Tribes/communities for a meaning & being relevant & in Tim Brown’s Idea of Consumers becoming participants.”

I agree. Over the last week I’ve shown Tim Brown’s IdeasProject interview and Seth Godin’s TED talk in my Technology and Innovation Management class. My last post also focused on the Brown interview. Neeraj gives me the opportunity to continue the discussion here.

Here are the parallels:

Tim Brown:

On one level, you could argue that we all have to become design thinkers. It’s one of those social skills that we all need, that we all have to be able to figure out how to solve problems creatively and to participate, in order to be able to participate.

Seth Godin:

What exactly do the people who are watching this do every day? And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything…. we try to find something that’s itching to be changed, and we change it.

That’s what we do for a living now, all of us I think, is find something worth changing and then assemble tribes, that assemble tribes, that spread the idea and spread the idea…

Neeraj and I come to the idea from slightly different directions, but the key point is the same: technologies are giving people, all of us, the ability to innovate and participate in systems not broadly possible before. We all have to become systems designers to effectively engage with our work and social environments.

My plan is to keep this discussion going. We’re asking a lot of people to become systems designers on the fly. Not everyone has systems savvy. What are the capabilities we all need, and how can we get them?

IdeasProject has a great interview with Tim Brown focused on our shifting roles as users, participants, and consumers. He notes that communication technology enables increased participation in how we interact with service providers and takes us back to an earlier age when people were more active participants in their society.

He goes on to speak of all of our need for design thinking (video version below):

I do believe this idea of participation changes design fundamentally and has to change design fundamentally. On one level, you could argue that we all have to become design thinkers. It’s one of those social skills that we all need, that we all have to be able to figure out how to solve problems creatively and to participate, in order to be able to participate. That’s one place you can put it. You can say, ‘Okay, we need to start teaching design thinking to everybody.’

In this world, I don’t think design ever gets finished. Things continue to evolve and morph and change. We have to get used to this idea that design becomes more of an enabling thing that goes on over a long period, rather than something that gets done, finished, and handed over.

Design thinking, paraphrasing from a 2008 post to Tim’s blog, is matching our needs with what is technologically feasible, perhaps with a focus on business strategy, customer value, and market opportunity. There, I think he was offering a formal designer’s perspective — designing for a market. Now he may be broadening the ideas to consider both formal designers and consumers of design — with the idea that design is never finished and is enacted by users/stakeholders.

There is a great deal of traction around these ideas. I’ve contributed All of Us as Accidental Systems Designers, and Systems Savvy: Do You Have It? (as well as prior comments on IDEO and design thinking). Seth Godin talks about change being the results of tribal action, not the action of a “king.” Many people now even do their sensemaking in public: Consider the number of blog entries around the value and forms of use for Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

I focus on organizational issues as systems savvy (my term for the ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how technology and organizational practice might be interwoven in new ways) has a great deal of leverage there. Systems savvy is critical to modern organizational function given the complexity and reach of organizational systems. I also think there is special opportunity in organizations. In organizations we are are more likely to formally think about practice than, I suspect, in our individual lives.

Our organizations have increasingly sophisticated work systems built up from meshed organizational practices and technology tools. These systems are constantly in flux due to the needs of innovation and the pressures of economics. We can either let these systems evolve, or we can practice design — all of us can practice design, not just change agents. Stakeholders are no longer mere recipients of work system change except as recipients of vision. Instead, stakeholders are active participants though their own sensemaking (the understanding they have of the work system and the possible options for the work system’s use) and active participation in the design of the system. Thus our need for systems savvy, design thinking, and more proactive participation in our how we get work done.

Tim Brown describes these roles and needs as they relate to the power of communication technologies. I’ll push it a bit further and claim that our reliance on software systems, rather than physical ones, gives us greater opportunity to participate in design and change throughout the organization. Henry Ford’s workers were unlikely to be able to re-engineer their assembly-lines. Many of us, however, can easily participate in the design of our workflows.