Category: Organization in the Collaborative Age

Why you should Fully Segregate Manufacturing and Creative Activities

Manufacturing (Industrial Age) and Creative (Collaborative Age) organizations require different approaches and skills. They are two different business models. As such, organizations should not try to run them in the same business unit.

Manufacturing organizations require:

  • compliance to the rules;
  • minimum variation;
  • carefully evaluated changes thus, continuous improvement;
  • production of large quantities and high physical capital intensity to achieve the necessary economy of scale.

Creative organizations require:

  • non compliance to rules, misfits and weirdos
  • discontinuous and radical change
  • small scale production and low capital intensity (outside human capital)
Apple Designed in California, Manufactured in China
Apple is a key example where creative and manufacturing activities are separated. You are not obliged to treat manufacturing as subcontractors; but you need to make it at least, a separate business unit

How can you even imaging having these two kinds of activities under the same roof, under the same budget, under the same responsible person?

Following a very general recommendation in the field of entrepreneurship and even of management, two different business models should be separated. If not run in different legal entities, they should be run in different business units. Creation of the product needs to be separated from manufacturing production. The necessary interface needs to be managed through a carefully arranged agreement.

Separate fully your creative, project creation side from your traditional manufacturing side or you’ll never manage to take advantage of the Fourth Revolution!

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Stop to be Excessively Specialized – Become a Generalist to be Successful in the Collaborative Age

In the late Industrial Age, to be successful in our careers we were supposed to be specialists. How often did I hear career advice in the form of dismissing any effort at being rather a generalist (and generally, deploring that I did not want to specialize in a well-recognized discipline).

Mutitasking (exaggerated)
Are you a Jack of All Trades?

Being specialized was great for the organization because the bureaucracy could fit you in a pre-determined box, could figure out what you should or could become, figure out what to pay you and in general, identify you as a particular commodity type. The Corporation hated types that could not be classified properly.

In the Collaborative Age, being excessively specialized is becoming a burden. We are not speaking here of being a Jack of All Trades; what we support rather is that the Knowledge Enhancing Exchaning Networker (K.E.E.N.) of the Collaborative Age needs to be a generalist with a few areas of particular excellence.

Excessive specialization precludes agility. Specialization is based on deep knowledge of something which necessarily stems from the past; it might help understand similar features in the future but certainly not significant, disruptive changes that would come from somewhere else. The specialists of the cathodic screen – a highly complicated device – have been wiped out by flat screens in a merciless manner.

Today you need to understand enough of the world to be agile enough. That is being a generalist. being well-travelled is a great way to understand the limits of personal assumptions. Of course, you also need to be world class at certain skills – and they might not be those skills that had been painfully codified by the Industrial Corporation. It might be creativity, leadership, networking, a gift for understanding computer code…

In start-ups everybody needs to do a bit of everything – which is also why deep specialists won’t fit in. Start-ups are about creating a new way of doing certain things – not repeating the old ways even slightly better. They don’t need specialists to thrive. They need generalists.

Even the Harvard Business Review makes the case for General Managers in this post “Bring back the General Manager“, lamenting that departmentalization of corporations since the early 1980’s has fostered specialist careers and that organizations are missing generalist General Managers!

Successful people of the Collaborative Age will be generalists with certain highly developed gifts. Don’t become a too narrow specialist. Open your eyes to the world and get ready to contribute through multiple channels.

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Today More Than Ever, Powerlessness Doesn’t Fly! Do Something!

“Today more than ever, claiming powerlessness doesn’t fly. Excuses suck. There are people changing entire roles, departments, organizations.”

Leading Change
(courtesy of ondemandleadership.com)

“There are people starting companies because they couldn’t find one they wanted to work for. There are people changing careers, changing their lives, changing the perspectives of the people around them and earning the permission to do something new and different in even the most notoriously complex industries.” That’s a quote from Amber Naslund on her blog Brasstackthinking (read more of that post here).

She goes on – “Hell, people are reinventing industries right out from under the old models, and creating markets we’ve never seen.”

Are you still there, or already on your way to create something new and great?

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Industrial Age’s Compliance Doesn’t Work any More for Creative Organizations

In the Industrial Age, the typical manufacturing worker had to be compliant. Follow orders. In the Collaborative Age, where creativity matters as a key competitive advantage, using the same approach leads to disaster.

Paramilitary training
Getting Industrial Age recruits ready for service

One of the best examples I got about the spirit of the Industrial Age comes from a plant project in a remote areas. It is important to employ locals – who had until then been only in the Agricultural Age. The key initiation for the new recruits is a paramilitary boot camp. Why? Because it trains for compliance, obedience, rigor, timeliness, self-maintenance… everything that you would expect from an Industrial Age worker. Thus the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age is about imparting compliance. That’s exactly what the mandatory public school, after 1850, did to our economies (and still does, which is a problem).

Today, in the Collaborative Age organizations, the key is creativity and difference. In an excellent book “Weird Ideas that Work: How to Build a Creative Company“, Robert Sutton explains clearly why having people that don’t fit in the mold, misfits that don’t obey the organization’s social codes, is a key ingredient of success for creative organizations. Here are some of his weird ideas:

  • Hire slow learners of the organizational code and misfits
  • Hire people who make you uncomfortable even those you dislike
  • Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

Note exactly what you would expect to happen in a manufacturing organization!

Think about it. We are so much used to the Industrial Age organization that we take for granted that employees should be compliant. That’s true in manufacturing activities where you seek repeated similarity and minimum variation. That’s suicide in the creative organizations of the Collaborative Age.

Which side is your organization? Are you sure you are doing the right thing and not falling off to the comfort zone of the Industrial Age?

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What is Strategy really about? Analysis or Action?

“Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do”. This quote by David H Maister in “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but Not Easy” is actually a great insight. Read it again just to get it.

Fat person working out
Will you make the first step like this guy?

His view is that it is quite easy to know what you need to do; but that genius lies in effectively doing it. Like the Fat Smoker knows he needs to stop smoking and needs to go on a diet but for some reason it turns out to be too hard.

Would competitive advantage be more on the execution side than on the conceptual strategy side? As mentioned often in the field of startups, ideas by themselves have absolutely no value; what gives them value is their realization. It is the fact that you battle the world to give shape to your idea – probably pivoting and improving from time to time as you get feedback from the world.

Of course then all the usual issues about changing behavior and doing new things apply: do not set unrealistic expectations, set achievable intermediate goals and follow up on the long run, get support on your commitment from your environment, etc.

Remember that doing more theoretical analysis of your strategy is not very effective. What’s effective is to plow your way decidedly. Take action. Now.

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If a Team could not Solve a Problem, the Person with the Information you Need was not Invited

This quote is from a presentation by Matt Fourie, a consultant specialized in problem-solving and thinking tools, at the last Project Management Institute regional conference in Singapore.

Empty chair in a meeting
Who in your your organization knows about the issue?

What he means is that throughout his decades of experience as a consultant helping organizations solve problems, he has found that in more than 95% of the cases, the solution and the understanding of the problem was known by someone in the organization. But that this knowledge was not mobilized effectively. This very much connects with my experience too – often by listening to the front line people, the answer is obvious.

Usual issues that impede proper problem solving are:

  • problem-solving meetings involve managers that do not know about the details of the operation
  • there is a disconnect between management and operators
  • people jump to conclusion (and action) without analyzing the data

It is where all the initiatives such as Total Quality management are really useful, as they seek to mobilize effectively all the organization members’ knowledge. Today with internal social networks we have a further opportunity to leverage that knowledge.

Next time when you face an issue in your organization, rather than looking for external answers, the first question you should ask is: “who would know the answer in the organization, who should I include in the discussion?”. Do that today! You’ll see the difference.

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How to Respond to the Question: “Who Are You To Do This?”

As I try new things outside what people would expect to be my normal occupation (as defined by my diplomas, certificates and list of positions), a question I often get is “Who are  you to do this?.. do that?..”.

Distinguished Professor teaching students
Do you need to be certified, chartered, PhD to teach effectively?

At first I was a bit disturbed by the question. I did not have the certificate to train! I did not have the diploma to facilitate! I am not a certified consultant (yes, certification programs also exist for consulting!). My answer now is: “I am a passionate human being”.

Of course there are some areas for which I needed to have additional education. I am a Certified Professional Coach because I needed a structured program to get the competencies it entails. But for many other activities I have no formal paper to certify my competency. Still I manage to develop my brand and I get more and more clients.

As soon as you’ll try new things outside what non-imaginative people expect from you, based on your standard Industrial Age profile, you’ll get the question: “Who are you to do this, to do that?”. Don’t feel threatened. Know that you do that because you bring value to others and to yourself.

Don’t hesitate. The new world will be created outside the certifications, diplomas, courses and standards. The people that changed the world did that outside the usual framework and values of their time.

Go for it. If you feel you are the one that can do it, do it. For yourself. For the others.

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Why Competence is the Enemy of Change, and What to Do

“Competence is the enemy of change“, says Seth Godin in his school transformation manifesto “Stop Stealing Dreams” (free download). He continues by writing “Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat“.

competent professionalsLet’s take a moment to ponder the depth of these words and how this effect really impacts our world. How it slows down the necessary transformation of the world.

Competence is somehow linked to people’s identity as professionals. Fundamental transformations such as the Fourth Revolution threatens many professionals in their own identity. They cannot any more assert the value of their knowledge (painstakingly built through courses and checked through standard evaluations and certificates). In deep societal transformations, there are no standard evaluations and certificates. There is no reference. Competency cannot measured any more. Actual competency might be adaptability and agility, and not fixed knowledge. And so those that define their worth through ‘competence’ resist any change. They feel on the edge of a chasm of unknown, without any fixed marker.

How can we overcome this major hurdle to any disruptive change? Probably by putting less emphasis as a society on formal competence and knowledge. That will be hard, as it has been ingrained by decades of Industrial Age where your worth was measured by your certificates and past positions.

How much do you feel that formal competence defines yourself? How much are you ready to let it go as an identity and instead, identify yourself as an experimenter of life, a human being?

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How a Team’s Consistent Time-Orientation is Key in Team Effectiveness

Our time-orientation (future, present or past) is somewhat part of our personality. To be effective, teams might need to be constituted by people that share similar time-orientation. In fact it might be one of the most important recruitment criteria.

Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd in “The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time that Will Change Your Life“, argue that we have quite different perspectives on time and they are quite stable through time.

The Marshmallow Test
How do your recruits fare on the Marshmallow test?

Present-oriented people tend to be hedonistic, and future oriented people tend to defer gratification (like in the famous marshmallow experiment: leave a child alone with a marshmallow for a few minutes explaining that if he/she does not eat the marshmallow he/she’ll get a second one – observe the reaction).

In “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but not Easy“, David Maister argues that effective implementation of a strategy by a team can only happen if the team’s time-orientation is consistent. If the strategy is very much about making an effort or even a sacrifice to reach an improved condition, you’d better have around the table people that share the same preference for deferred gratification, i.e. that are strongly future-oriented.

I find increasingly that personal time-orientation is definitely a major criterion for hiring in particular for a startup – you want people that are ready to make the effort, forego gratification like time for themselves and with their families, to build something better in the future – you want future-oriented people.

In other occupations you might rather want present- or past-oriented people.

How do you know people’s time-orientation? Actually it is generally quite obvious from observing and listening to people. People that are present-oriented will need to spend a lot of time caring about themselves and will generally make sure they enjoy to the most their current situation. People that are future-oriented will live stoical lives and invest heavily for some distant future.

Look at your prospective hires’ time orientation to check it is fit with your preferences and what you want to achieve! I make it an ever increasing important criteria for recruiting fro my team!

Do you want to know your time orientation in a scientific way? Take Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory and compare yourself to other people!

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How Education Accreditation Impedes Change towards Excellence

One institution of the Late Industrial Age is university and, in general, education and training accreditation. National (governmental) or professional bodies decide what the education program should be and expect the university’s or the school’s program to be fully aligned.

Accreditation Seal
Is your education accredited? By whom?

And behold those education institutions that would not fit in the mold! They take the risk of losing the right to use certain nationally and internationally recognized titles for their diplomas of achievements, and thus to lose the interest of prospective students.

Of course on one hand, accreditation guarantees a minimum quality. But on the other hand, what a formidable hurdle to educational experiments!

A university in Malaysia tried to implement a new, original education system with many advantages to prepare students to work life (as it included many work-related projects and close relationship with industry). Discussing with the university founder, he described how painful it had been to have to fit finally within a standard education framework determined by bureaucrats – for fear of losing the right to use the normal university grades and titles.

Accreditation is beneficial at the beginning when a profession first forms. Like any institution is soon impedes change and tries to defend itself against the external world. As everything becomes global, standardization of accreditation is another significant issue. The only remedy is to create a new education brand that will be stronger in terms of recognition than the conventional accredited grades and diplomas.

This new, strong brand of an education adapted to the Fourth Revolution will appear eventually. The format of delivery education will change, needs to change with the Fourth Revolution, online education, and the need to foster improved emotional intelligence in the new generations to come. Accreditation programs will slow this evolution – but like any institution will finally have to give way.

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Real leaders prove themselves in times of crisis

It is easy to be a successful leader in times of growth and economic bounty. What actually proves leaders is how they act and lead in times of crisis.

Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill, a leader proven by the WWII crisis

Real leaders prove themselves in the midst of uncertainty, when the world seems to collapse around them. It is in these situations that their determination, ruthless persistence, skillset proves itself. It is in these situations that they will lead the transformation.

A real leader is not proven until he/she is proven by a crisis. Behold to excessive adulation of leaders that seem successful just because they are lucky to be in an easy environment. They are not necessarily going to be the ones that will prove to be the leader you need in times of crisis. At the same time, many historical examples show that the leaders that prove themselves to be the one people follow in a crisis might not be the shiny leaders of an easier time. Many of them were barely noticed, struggled and were only discovered – and discovered themselves- upon the crisis.

In the Collaborative Age where discontinuities will happen more frequently, we need those leaders that will lead us through these transformations. We need avoid those easy-going leaders that will shrink at the sight of the first unknown difficulty.

Where can we find those leaders we need? How can we know if the current leader will fit the bill? There is not other alternative: throw them out in impossible situations and see whether they float or sink. Do that early enough when they are unknown. Give them the learning experience of harsh times.

Don’t rely on shiny leaders of easy times. Make sure you rely on those leaders that have seen it through successive crisis, that have mastered their inner game and know when and how to be persistent against all odds. Rely on leaders that failed hard and managed to make it through. Rely on leaders from discriminated communities that managed to elevate themselves against the odds.

The Collaborative Age will need tough and generous leaders that will lead us through the crisis. Be sure to choose the right leader.

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Must Read: “Makers” the Manufacturing Revolution

Chris Anderson, the author of “Free” and “The Long Tail“, and editor at Wired, has produced another great book to help us understand what is happening today: “Makers“. A must read for your holidays!

Cover of 'Makers" by Chris Anderson“The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world”

Chris Anderson makes the case of manufacturing coming into the age of collaboration with 3D printing and other manufacturing techniques allowing to produce economically small series of objects (a few to a few thousands). This will change the face of manufacturing. Exactly like ‘Print on Demand’ is changing the publishing industry, ‘Produce on Demand’ starts to change manufacturing.

Chris Anderson makes the case that because the logic of large commodities production is becoming less prevalent, manufacturing will return closed to where the consumer are. In any case, distances are abolished as your 3D plans can be sent to any suppliers to be produced in any quantities. Design is important, manufacturing in any quantity becomes a commodity.

Welcome to the Collaborative Age of tangible things. Read this book to understand the seismic wave that is changing manufacturing forever, right now under our eyes. It might take a decade to bring our industry upside down, but it will certainly transform it completely. The old Industrial Age manufacturing is obsolete.

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