New units:

• Certificate of existence = 280 characters (Twitter)
• Presentation of ideas, maximum attention span = 18 mins (TED)
• Digital reading, maximum attention space = 1 or 2 max smartphone screens. (Not a long time ago we used something called ‘one page’, as in, ‘I’ll send you a one-page summary’. It was a unit in its own right. This is now a smartphone screen with the exceptional allowance of a bit of scrolling down).
• Business time unit = a quarter (long time in existence substituting the Gregorian calendar)
• A dialogue = a digital chat (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Text message, etc)
• Business reality: whatever can fit on a PowerPoint slide and bullet-pointed (like this text, of course).
• A book page = a kindle screen.
• Busy-ness score = number of emails in my inbox.
• What your boss needs to know = Executive summary (most likely she will never read the 30 pages behind it).

Disruptive Innovations coming up strong:

• The book (hardback is more innovation-disruptive)
• A physical letter (handwritten even more disruptive; try to write one to your children, it’s a perfect start)
• A face-to-face conversation (incredibly disruptive, if with a loved one and a bottle of wine, but also works with colleagues at work, loved or not)
• A briefing document with no Executive Summary
• Presentation with no slides (this disruptive innovation has been in the making for years, but it has not quite made it yet)
• Bookshop and library browsing
• Silence (included in my ‘Border Diet ^[1]’)
• Banning the word ‘Basically’ at the start of a sentence.

(Sorry, I am running out of screen…)

Somebody asked a group of senior IT people about to buy a whole new software infrastructure based on the ‘agile’ approach, what would be the most important thing they wanted the software to do. The answer was: getting home for dinner on time.

Many years ago I was involved in setting up a new collaborative structure for a pharmaceutical R&D client. It was a combination of structural, behavioural and (enabling) technologies approach. Our IT partners did a lot of analysis on the needs of the Research Division.  This division was populated by PhDs and MDs, ‘la crème de la crème’ of the industry. Our IT partners, who needed to provide the ‘collaborative software’ part of the solution, asked similar question: what is your number one priority?

The expected menu of answers included a brand new ‘combinatory chemistry’ software support and a real-time collaborative tool between researchers at different R&D sites scattered around the world. The number one request of the highly skilled, highly paid, highly published and highly scientifically avant-garde executives was: could you speed up these laptops, please, they are so damned slow!

There is an obvious pattern here. The most basic needs are often overlooked in favour of more sophisticated, game-changing aims. But the reality is that there is nothing ‘basic’ about getting home on time or expecting the computer to fire in less than the time it takes to read War and Peace.

The two examples have however one very good thing in common: people asked! Well, don’t take that for granted, since we often act as if we (managers, consultants) knew very well the motivations of people, or what would be ‘unquestionable’. The word says it all: we don’t need to question.

Entire compensation schemes, for example, are created without asking people what would motivate them. Since money is ‘the easiest’ and supposedly most universal one, we create a structure about this. Which it may be the right thing to do, but it is often done without a single question to people.

My followers know that my favourite employee engagement survey has one single question: why are you still here? Frankly, we take this as a bit of a joke, but it is far from it.

If we keep asking questions… we have a better change to understand the real world around us. And, getting home for dinner on time, would be a bonus.

 

 

 

 

 

There is an anecdote in a recent piece by Noemi Klein’s in The Guardian. A young girl had some kind of operation and she remembers waking up and not saying ‘mum!’ or ‘nurse!’ but ‘my iPhone!’

Are we all screenagers who need to be rescued in analogue?

If so, the analogue rescuers are strange things such as face to face, doing stuff together, sharing person-to-person, no screen to screen.

Oh! One screen is not enough. Multi-tasking and multi-screening is the new normal. Did you know that you can be on Face Time with somebody, play x-Box at the same time, and have an iPad on the side with some un-finished YouTube, not counting streamed music from somewhere in cyberspace? And doing homework. Of course you do. You have scr(t)eeenagers at home. Or your neighbours.

Some teenagers rooms look today more like a command and control centre for a movie set, something to lend to Homeland producers, or the Spooks people. And some teenagers rooms have more updated technology than the Organizational Development department.

When I started working in the pharmaceutical industry, after clinical practice, and before my current consulting companies The Chalfont Project and Viral Change LLP, companies had more technology than homes. I was the proud home owner of a fax machine and was well ahead of the game. Then, at some point of the digital evolution, the inversion took place. There are more apps and digital stuff in our hands ‘outside work’ than at work. Your home broadband is very good, and the intranet in the office still so slow.

I attended a Digital conference last week. One of the presenters asked the audience if checking their iPhone (universal proxy for smartphone) was the last thing they did before going to sleep. Overwhelming hands up. If checking their iPhone was the first thing they did when they woke up. Same. There were no teenagers in the room. All screenagers.

We talk about these tings as if they were curious anecdotes, findings worth an ethnographic entry in a field book by an alien anthropologist. But this is us today. There are not Digital Natives as opposed to the non digital. We are all colonised.

By the way, that piece in The Guardian ended with assertions about the loneliness of the generation Z, who follows the Millennial generation (those Millennial are getting older!) and how hard is for them to break away from it. Some of them apparently said things such as ‘Life for us is hard. A struggle’.

The comments section of any digital article is often more interesting that the article itself. Here is a comment from an older reader:

Laughing my head off! Life for every generation was a struggle.
I mean…people were dropping bombs on our heads, or the only factory in town was closing down or we only had a pair of short trousers to wear on the below freezing walk to school or every year we suffered debilitating asthma because of the mould and damp on the bedroom wall where we slept.
The only difference between this generation or previous ones….is that no-one ever asked us how we felt about it…because no-one really cared.

But now we have screens. And you reading this on one.

Is that singularity ^[2] that near?

 

 

 

 

Peter Drucker put it in his own style:

‘No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each one’s strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common people to do uncommon things.’

The collective, the ‘social organism’, the organization, is a beautiful vehicle to gain the social advantage. If you follow this principle, organizations can be small and big, physical and virtual. And the keyword is ‘enabling’.

No big deal here? Sometimes I feel that we may be taking for granted the collective brain. If ‘the organization’ does not emphasize enough that ‘total that is bigger than the sum’ of the pieces, we will loose the essence. When we do that, then, ‘organization’ becomes ‘structure’.

When we talk about being organized in this or that manner, or needing a reorganization, the structural design (which reductionist version is who reports to whom, and an organization chart) takes over. And in this takeover (mentally, often unconscious) we loose sight of the social, multiplying purpose and function.

It is possible for common people to do uncommon things together, if they use the collective brain. But some organizations seem to be composed by hundreds of freelancers occasionally glued by some managers. Sometimes, one smells the individuality, the juxtaposition of people, the almost individual task (owner) sitting next to another one. And when you add digital, and people wear their headsets, you get an environment of pilots piloting in their cockpits.

I suppose a simple Drucker-ian test would be to asses if we really see the ‘uncommon things’ coming out from common people working together. Zero innovation and zero improvement dwell well in ‘the commons doing just common’, the managingb of the inevitable, the ‘work as task’.

And for that, the days are counted. A technological solution is already at the door.

Back from a conference on ‘technology and management’ (Drucker Forum, Vienna), I realise how futile some discussions on ‘technology’ are. We are often discussing ‘technology’ as if it was a single monster: is technology good, or bad? Is it transforming management, yes or not? Is technology replacing jobs? Is technology making A,B,C redundant?

The discussion is flawed. There is no such a thing as ‘technology’ in the quest for answers. You can’t put together in the same basket twitter, Facebook, instagram, email, videoconferencing and artificial intelligence. Well, you can, the conference just did. But this is messy thinking.

Twitter is cold, antisocial, pointless for some and instant social trigger for people mobilization in an uprising for others. Is this good or bad?

Texting is distracted, wasted, addictive activity for some, a way to announce the availability of a doctor in an African village for others (to quote an example of the conference). Is this good or bad?

iPhone is instant multi channel communication of power and reach never achieved by mankind, or a toxic conversation killer, hypnotic, antisocial, nasty disruptive at the family dinner table. Is this good or bad?

The questions are bad questions.

The so-called’ technology’ is challenging us not the ‘what’ we can do: lots. But the ‘why’ we do things. The ‘technology’ is not good or bad. It simply is. We use it because we can, because it’s available. Start with why, please.

Also, to put together all ‘technologies’ in one basket would be the equivalent of debating the merits of the telephone, telegraph and telepathy together.

Comparing Artificial Intelligence ‘technology’ with the ‘technology’ used by Uber, is pointless. The former is sophisticated technology; the later is not a big deal at all.

The real questions are about what all this do for us, how much we want to control, how much is advancing humanity, how much is convenience, fashion, or simple speeding over something that was slow before.

We need to deconstruct the discussion about ‘technology’ and call out those who use it as proxy for anything digital or internet. We can do better at arguing, we can bring better critical thinking.

PS. The modern conference obsession with panels, with panelists giving us our views in minutes and then going to (democratic) ‘debate’ is killing the real discussion. Why don’t we do instead either (a) permanence Q&A, or (b) serious long presentation (I repeat, long. No, I have not gone crazy, not yet. Give me a long, deep, thorough exposition of principles and I will give you back all the ‘panel debates’ that belong to entertainment; and I will throw in most TEDs, sorry)

 

 

In a study conducted with Fortune 100 companies, and quoted in Sherry Turkle’s new book ‘Reclaiming Conversations ^[3]’, the following statistics about what people do during conference calls are revealing, if not a confirmation of what you have always suspected: 65% of people are doing other work at the same time; 63% do emails; 55% are eating or cooking; 47% go to the bathroom and 6% are also in another call.

I do not have these statistics in my case, but, in the conference calls I participate with clients, I have always suspected that the number of people emailing was higher. It’s a relief to know that 37% are not. Also, I think that close to 50% are taking a nap. I also suspect that a percentage, to be defined by sophisticated research I will undertake at some point when I don’t have so many conference calls, are in the wrong meeting and/or have dialled the wrong number.

Some clients have a default solution on ‘a conference call every week’. When the team is small and they know each other well, this works very well. It could be a refreshing way of not just updating each other but ‘checking in’ the collective tribe. Connectivity, communication and collaboration works well here. But when digital connectivity has been imposed as a structural solution for collaboration with lots of people who are not a tribe ( a group, a team, a collective with a purpose) the risk is that you fool yourself. Sure, something good will come up, but at a cost.

What is interesting is that in my unofficial, unscientific statistics, 90% of those attending these swarmed conference calls, feel very frustrated with the experience. But we keep doing it.

Sherry Turkle ‘reclaiming conversation’ theme, the latest in a series of her publications ^[4] about the digitalization of the self and other changes in our humanity, is a reminder of the need to go deeper and find ways to achieve that ‘conversation’: home, family, kids, the office, the Strategic Business Unit. That may or may not entail a digital flash mob in the form of massive conference calls.

Digital collaboration will get more and more sophisticated, and technology will offer more and more sophisticated forms. We all will be tempted to use, and will be users. But the more we go in that direction, the more we need to ask ourselves if what we are achieving is digital connectivity or human collaboration. They may or may not go together.

The topic is far from peripheral. It impacts on our human nature that is progressively reshaped. Turkle, MIT professor, trained psychoanalyst, serious social researcher and writer, is very worried. Others, and there is a legion, would say that she misses the point and that the extraordinary connectivity and its potential is short of evolutionary Darwinism achievement. The origin of the Species now contains a chapter on Facebook.

My own view is that Turkle is right, in a minority, and may lose the argument. But my day to day organizational work sees the struggle between the illusion of collaboration and the ubiquitous connectivity, the fallacy of a technological solution for behavioural problems, and the corrosion of the conversation on behalf of the bullet points.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love with himself when looking at his own image reflected in the water. It was, of course, all Nemesis’ fault, who had noticed Narcissus’s fondness for himself, and took him to a pool of water where Narcissus discovered how beautiful he really was. He died, admiring himself, stuck looking at that pool.

That was when the Selfie was born, but, of course, neither Narcissus, nor Nemesis had had a chance to patent this new concept. Narcissus did not have a smartphone to take a picture of himself, just the water as a high resolution camera.

Never in history has humankind had the opportunity to be more self-centred. The instant broadcasting of ‘Me’, plus the colossal interconnectedness between individuals, coupled with ‘the end of distance’, ‘the end of time’, and the ubiquitous social media, makes Narcissus’ possibilities unlimited. The new digital world is a Narcissus pool of water of pan-galactic dimensions.

What is the point of posting that you’ve just arrived at Frankfurt airport and it’s raining? Or posting a picture of your bowl of cereals on the breakfast table? Perhaps pictures of yourself looking at yourself via your iPhone?  Downloading an entire Dictionary of Quotations, one quote an hour on Twitter? Checking in with yourself? The point? To reaffirm your own existence, I suppose.

(Nothing as irritating as David Cameron, UK Prime Minister congratulating the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their new-born baby, via a posting in … LinkedIN!).

‘Come on!’, my Jiminy Cricket/ Pepe Grillo says, tapping on my shoulder. And, as with the conscience of the Disney character, Pinocchio, I must pay attention to him. ‘Ease up! – he says – it’s all good. It’s all sharing. You use social media too Leandro (yes I do, modestly, but not on the cereals side) and you write and broadcast a Daily Thoughts (yes, until I stop making sense)’. OK, I’ll ease up now.

I still worry about the self-centrism that we are generating. I must confess I worry less about adults taking picture of themselves ‘because they can’ than kids learning that the centre of the Universe is that image that they can see in their smartphone screen.

As I flip screens on my MacBook Air on a quiet Saturday morning, I see the world around me. One Facebook screen shows three selfies of ‘friends’ last night after a few drinks. Next screen is BBC’s news on Ebola and some dantesque pictures in Africa. A twitter feed has just popped up with somebody I don’t know telling me that ‘He has absolutely zero motivation this morning’. Another screen on The Guardian online shows me an article entitled ‘Big pharma has an interest in rich people being sick’. An alien just landed would say: ‘what kind of mad world is this?’

OK, this is my world this morning. Mad. Perhaps taking pictures of oneself is not so bad after all.

But, of me? Don’t even think about it.

Jill Lepore, author, staff writer at The New Yorker, and Harvard professor of American History has created a little storm, which thanks to her New Yorker pulpit, has not been contained within the academic class. She has dared to challenge every single bit of her fellow Harvard colleague, Clayton Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Innovation: ‘The Disruption Machine. What the gospel of innovation gets wrong’ ^[5]

Here is one of her gems:

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

Mr. Christensen is not amused and calls Lepore’s piece ‘A criminal act of dishonesty—at Harvard, of all places.’ Note the ‘of all places’, to remind us, the rest of the mortals, that we inhabit ‘the other places’.

Lepore is bright and razor sharp. Christensen can’t believe that his empire of ‘Disruptive Innovation’ (and it is an academic, consulting, publishing, cult empire) can be challenged. Almost nobody has done it so far.

Regardless of the academic and historical scrutiny, and suspecting that the pin-pong will go on for a bit, (as we are used to seeing in ‘the other places’), one thing is at the core of the issue: the absurd overuse, ubiquitous utilization of the word ‘disruptive’, making it overworked, trying, even exhausting. It has been used to explain everything. If you used to go to the cafeteria for lunch and now you get a sandwich from a newly installed vending machine, chances are somebody will call this ‘disruptive’ (the vendors, the decision, the policy) even if the only real disruption is in your stomach and your taste. ‘Disruptive’ has taken over a great deal of the airtime in the managerial sphere. It’s now a word for all seasons.

The reality is that you will find a spectrum of uses. The ones who say Skype is a disruptive technology (accurate), the ones who call disruptive to may forms of change (they may or may not be seriously disruptive) and the ones of the type of the vending machine above. Kevin Rose of The New York Times begs us to put a stop to this in his article: ‘Let’s All Stop Saying ‘Disrupt’ Right This Instant.’ ^[6] As you can see some people are desperate. Jim Naughton of The Oberver/The Guardian, also seems distressed: ‘Clayton M Christensen’s theory of ‘disruption’ has been debunked. Can we all move on now, please?’ ^[7]Although there is no single line is his article where he explains why ‘it has been debunked’.

I am personally Marktwainian here and I do think that the death of Disruptive Innovation has been largely exaggerated. What we are desperate for, is the end of its use as a cliché that ‘explains everything’.

In 2008, I myself, wrote a book entitled  ‘Disruptive Ideas’ ^[8] but (Thank God!) I gave a definition in the first pages: ‘Disruptive [management] ideas are those that have the capacity to create significant impact on the organisation by challenging standard management practices. They share the following characteristics:

They are simple.
There is a total disproportion between their simplicity and their potential to impact on and transform the life of organisations.
They can be implemented now.
You can implement them at little or no cost.
They are most likely to be contrarian.
They are also most likely to be counterintuitive.
They pose a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed.
They can spread virally within the organisation very easily.

You only need a few disruptive ideas to create big transformation without the need for a Big Change Management Programme. The impact of a combination of a few is just like dynamite’.

And we run an Accelerator ^[9] based in those 30 ideas of the book. No apologies! I’ve got my definition up front.

It’s clear that Language Takeover is a feature of management thinking. The warnings about ‘Disruption’ are timely and sound. That’s far form writing the death certificate of the concept. But please Mr. Christensen and Ms. Lepore, do continue the ping-pong for a bit longer. There are aliens outside of Planet Harvard who appreciate the play.