Wharton Professor Eric Clemons, a noted expert on the strategic implications of information technology spoke at Supernova 2008 about monetization models for the next generation of Internet businesses. Due to a medical issue, Eric was unable to fly out to the conference, so he recorded his remarks, and engaged in a live Q&A session via videoconference. His PowerPoint presentation (PDF) is also available.
Founder of Excite, then of Jot (Jotspot) .. his focus at Google is on social computing
He’s on the board of EFF
Many people are saying “social is the new black”
People have been fascinated with each other for a very long time.
Most of the popular Web 2.0 applications / platforms have been about people connecting .. that process is now now more efficient, but not new
1. The nature of information discovery is changing … from solitary search, to a social and interactive information discovery … horizontal, word-of-mouth combines with hyperlinks (hypermouth, liplinks ?)
Joe gave us an example of getting a custom cake built for his 6th wedding anniversary, based on a word-of-mouth recommendation that came via him as king a question using Gmail Chat.
Sharing today is (still) done with email .. this is something that today requires “high social activation energy” Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO of Sun, as well as a highly active blogger. His talk at Supernova 2008 is, as he noted, about the highly “exciting” topic of data centers.
To open his talk he talked about what happens when the marginal cost of acquisition of new customers plummets to zero.
Then he shifted to the history of ZFS, a data system which is designed to handle massive data sets, which cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in research costs over many years and then in 2005 gave it away, full source code included, for free.
And then he talked about Thumper, a massive storage device which runs ZFS and which then went from zero to over $100M in revenue in two quarters.
He talked about how each registration adds a dot on a map, which in turn shows Sun where their customers are. The acquisition of MySQL adds 100,000 dots per day to the map, that’s 100,000 people downloading and registering MySQL each day. Read the rest of this entry »
Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management.
This call to exploration, exploration and action is concomitant with the emergence of the much-debated arena of what has been called Enterprise 2.0.
Here’s a key excerpt:
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This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.
Most of us grew up in a "post-industrial" society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.
Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by "managers". To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.
While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: "The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization." This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.
It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
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Today it is clear that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding their ways into the workplace. Why wouldn’t they ? After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment. People have always been creating and building up "... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things."
The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment. Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.
What we now call Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities. These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as Hamel asserts, it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart. See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail
We need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making. It’s not that we need to replace hierarchy holus-bolus … rather, executives and managers everywhere can benefit from understanding that the capabilities of information systems combined with social computing capabilities and two decades of experience with team development and organizational development processes can permit centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.
As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that includes:
Socio-technical systems approach(es) like self-directed and self-managing teams and "workouts"
Inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods
dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to "management" (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search, Open Space, and dialogue circles.
The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as the application of information to products and services in ever-increasing amounts and more and more rapid and both integrated and fragmented flows.
Now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The principles cited in the paragraph above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiatives and requires collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use.
The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed. That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as deciding what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,
Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades. The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.
I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so. To reiterate, as it has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while coping with what actually "is". Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, has often suggested that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as the proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.
OD (Organizational Development) usually suffers from being seen as "soft" and a "nice-to-have-time-to-do", especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century. While it is a maxim in the OD field that "the soft stuff is the hard stuff", it can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hardnosed management hard-asses, the "I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack" crowd.
Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. It may well be that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0.
However this possible model is not seen today as that which constitutes "management".
The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.
Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need. Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:
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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both."
In this interview with Jonathan Schwartz, President and CEO of Sun Microsystems, we discuss the things that are on his radar as changing the tech industry over the next 10 years. I asked him about being the “poster child” for CEO bloggers, and we talk about how “the Network is the Computer” is more accurate today than ever.
We talk about consumer trends and how they are shifting the needs in data centers and servers.
He discusses the MySQL acquisition and Sun’s long term position on open source as a competitive advantage. There’s a discussion of cloud computing, mobile and gaming, and what the kids today are using that will affect tech in the long run.
Jonathan Schwartz is one of the speakers at Supernova 2008, and this is just a preview of what you can learn from him and other speakers, June 16th - 18th at the conference.
Lili Cheng has done much at Microsoft, from some of the earliest experimenting with v-chat to the user experience for Vista. Lili is currently a Director in Microsoft Research focusing on “creative systems”- how people interact and use tools to create projects.
In this conversation over Skype, she describes some of the things that have her attention, including social networks in a business context, as well as how kids can learn programming using what they know about gaming.
Eric Clemons: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
