To be fair I should say that the other day I sent an E-Mail to Novell's
CEO, Eric Schmidt, and described, in very general terms, some of the
things I had tried to do and how they had been received.
He sent a very kind and understanding reply, which, in essence, said he
agreed with much of what I said and that he planned on implementing many
of my ideas. I feel mildly vindicated; and I pity the poor souls have so
ardently resisted the type of change I wanted to help create. My take on
Schmidt is that he has a low tolerance for bullshit.
I asked myself, after I read his reply, what I would do if I were him.
Even though he is the CEO he still has limited capacity for action -- the
heart of the organization is always a long way from the top, no matter how
flat you structure it. . .and it's in the heart that action takes place.
I'm about to conclude (perhaps I have concluded, but just haven't admited
it) that the place to create lasting, meaningful change is in the heart
of the organization -- the people that actually do the day-to-day work.
Technology such as groupware has made it possible for informal
organizations to emerge, and function and operate independent of the
direction of management. This means that an organization is now able to
evolve much easier on it's own. Permission from management is no longer
needed, and often it isn't even sought. People just say to each other,
"Hey this or that is happening, and we need to do this or that so we can
adapt." Or they might say, "Hey what if we did this or that? How would
that impact our success? How would that impact the marketplace?" And then
they just go and do what they talked about.
The memetic implications of networks and groupware are profound. They have
a natural tendency to de-centralize an organization, even if those who are
in formal leadership roles do not want the organization to be
de-centralized.
If this theory is close to being true then a good indicator, in my mind,
of the health of an organization is what the employees talk about at
lunch. Is it work related? Or is it conversation about the football game,
the symphony, or the latest movie? Another indicator is to measure the
number of E-Mails processed by a messaging system in a day. How many were
sent intra-company? How many were sent extra-company? The informal but
highly functional organization will appear in the form of "distribution
lists" in E-Mail, not on the formal organization chart.
For what it's worth. . .
--Benjamin B. Compton bcompton@enol.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>