Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. [1] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [1] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like. Read a recent review [2].
Social media is a colossal echo chamber.
Social media is a colossal echo chamber where all cognitive processes are surrendered to one single driver: confirmation bias. People read what they want to read. People hear what they want to hear. Preconceived ideas are confirmed. Common enemies become more common. The system increases mistrust of others outside the chamber, whilst reinforcing one single acceptable worldview. Homophily (bonding and binding with ‘people like me’) rises steeply. The population in that colossal echo chamber becomes more homogeneous and predictable all the time, so that social media algorithms become more robust and your targeted news and advertising reaches you safely and securely. It’s a wonderful life.
Social media is a colossal echo chamber where all cognitive processes are surrendered to one single driver: confirmation bias. The only solution is periodical rehab. Make yourself offline for a while. Read books with physical pages. Send handwritten letters to friends.
Computer screens are the new silos.
Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. If you amalgamate non-collaborating silo A with non-collaborating silo B with the hope of creating a collaborating non silo C, good luck. People will bring their screens with them anyway.
Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. Most structural solutions (amalgamation of divisions or groups) are a response to behavioural problems (e.g. lack of collaboration). Entire reorganizations, with hundreds of people disrupted, are triggered by very few people being the problem. The so-called Big Collaboration Problem between Marketing and Sales can actually be traced back to Peter, Head of Marketing, and Mary, Head of Sales. The rest have no problem but are forced to migrate with their screens. I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames.
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Continue the conversation.
Find out more about our free webinar, High touch and high tech in the digitalization era [3], on 13th August, with Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects.
The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.
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Out Now! – The Flipping Point [1] – Deprogramming Management by Leandro Herrero – his new booking challenging the trend for adopting absurd management ideas. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.
