In the day to day world, the Churchills write books in the country, the Mandelas serve their prison sentence and the Grants get drunk. The bureaucrats run countries, banks, schools, armies, drug companies, government agencies and our lives. My hope though is that the bureaucratic power is revealed for what it is by organizations that adopt the use of social software. My hope is that as millions of young enter the workforce expecting to use social software that they will open up the internal workings and “out” those that have little to say about the real work of delivering the result to the customer, or the voter, or the patient, or the student.
Tag: business
I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!
I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time. It took a while for firms to figure out that this was a stupid thing to do, but most carried on with a limited ban, usually on international direct dialling. That lasted a little longer. Then, by the early 1990s, when internet e-mail emerged, it too was banned. In fact there are stories about the banning of corporate e-mail as well, continuing into this century. Soon it was the turn of Instant Messaging to bear the wrath of Corporate Policy. Then came blogs and wikis and social software in general. Now it’s about social networking.
only companies with already low productivity would think about banning social networks. how about working on the real problem: people running around looking busy and doing nothing?
More Jingoist H1B Politics
“chinese spying on the rise” with stories from 1987. the us is working hard to become a failed state.
Zombie institutions
Most institutions today are Zombies. What do I mean by this? I mean that they have bodies. They have thoughts. Superficially, they look human. They can move around, talk and eat you but they are not alive. They have no feedback mechanisms. They are closed systems. They have exceptionally limited ability to sense what is going on inside and outside.
Skill
It’s cheaper to pay someone to screw together that toy over the whole production run for it than it is to make a steel tool with the necessary precision so that it just snaps together.
Dedication
not a single one hesitated for a moment, not a single one complained, not a single one lost focus on the problem, people cancelled dinner plans with friends without even batting an eyelash. If they weren’t needed that moment they were busy overseeing others.
Feeding the Factory
Foxconn–the place that makes the iPods and iPhones–consumes 3000 pigs a day.
Scale
Foxconn is where all of the iPods and iPhones are made. It’s a huge facility, apparently with over 250000 employees, and it has its own special free trade status.
Dreyfus Model experiment
The Dreyfus Model is a model of skills acquisition that describes how people progress in their knowledge:
- Novice – Needs to be told exactly what to do. Very little context to base decisions on.
- Advanced beginner – Has more context, but still needs rigid guidelines to follow.
- Competent – Begins to question the reasoning behind the tasks, and can see longer term consequences.
- Proficient – Still relies on rules, but able to seperate what is most important.
- Expert – Works mainly on intuition, except in circumstances where problems occur
When we are involved in a discussion, guess the Dreyfus level of participants. Then, tailor the conversation to that. If you are the lower number one, bring the conversation to your level. Conversely, be sure you aren’t talking over the heads of the other participants.
why rules hurt experts
What are you busy doing?
It’s not a trick question. Workplaces everywhere are full of people busy doing next to nothing . . . only they don’t realize it. What these people are doing is mostly shifting information around. They spend large parts of their days responding to e-mail and voice mail; they attend meeting after meeting after meeting; they watch scores of presentations and prepare still more. It all appears extremely important and productive, but when you look at it closely, what you see is an organization that spends nearly all its time swapping information from person to person, without having the time to consider fully what it contains, let alone act on it.
looking busy doing nothing: going to meetings, preparing presentations that no one reads, cc everyone. this piece has all the symptoms of a dysfunctional organization (ie, most of them).
Gregor J. Rothfuss 