Doing Management

Two great Knowledge Management practitioners just posted great insights about how Enterprise Social Software transforms the practice into Doing Management.

Dave Pollard contributes a paper on the Future of Knowledge Management. He addresses the primary failings of traditional KM, the rise of new tools and the need for line worker productivity converging towards a Social Software approach for KM.

I believe that if KM hopes to save itself from imminent extinction, it needs to acknowledge and act upon the truth of Drucker’s assertion [greatest challenge to business management in the 21st century is, and will be, improving the personal productivity and effectiveness of front-line workers doing increasingly complex and unique jobs], and the following two principles that reflect what ‘improving personal productivity and effectiveness of front-line workers’ means with regards to knowledge:

1. Knowledge is most effectively and efficiently conveyed to front-line workers by other front-line workers or outside experts, one-on-one, just-in-time, and in the context of solving a specific business problem...

2. Front-line workers have a large array of tools and technologies at their disposal, but rarely know how to use these tools and technologies competently, and when they do, they often find that these tools and technologies force them to think and work in ways that are not intuitive to them, interfering with rather than helping their work effectiveness...

KM is in desperate need of a new monkier, given the costly failings of the previous top-down approach. The bottom-up approach enabled by Enterprise Social Software puts doing things first -- because doing things socially and openly can be more productive, with social capital and institutional memory as postive by-products of effort.

The new emphasis on doing can by found in Jay Fienberg's post on recommendations for an enterprise system that encourages collaboration in a public sphere. He describes a set of activities that are ideal for wikis, weblogs and other forms of micro-content ranging from meetings, documents, metrics and reports, individual and group uses. Notice the focus isn't on specifically identifying experts or more valuable content -- but activities that if done openly using simple and flexible tools yield lasting benefits.

From theory to practice we are seeing Enterprise Social Software being considered not as knowledge management, but as a better way of doing management. The knowing-doing gap is closing, but not as we expected. Facilitate doing in a social context and you gain learning and insights in social context.

Comments

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

"KM is in desperate need of a new monkier, given the costly failings of the previous top-down approach."

Attempting to manage Knowledge is an oxymoron. What you can do with it is hide it, which is what is currently happening across organizations, you can share it, which managers are loath to do, as if anybody can play, collating it for spin, credits/ debits make the manager role precarious. And managers will fight empowerment with their dying breath.

Postulating the position that the front line workers should have information beyond righty-tight, lefty-loosey will have the villagers and small businessmen showing up at your door with farm implements and rope. The villagers because they didn't get it, and what was good enough for them oughta be good enough for the next generation.

Typical businessmen are not going to share as they cannot tell their buddies on the greens about their profits and margins if ED's wife tells her cousin Sara about the transparent company Ed works for.

A real good example of this type of thinking is compensation. Most companies discourage any conversation on this subject. With CEO's getting 2000% of a line workers pay, this is understandable.

Very few companies outline what is involved in paying wages. Overhead, Insurance, Workmans, Compensation, Materials, Markup, profit, and what part the employee can play in not only understanding why they are getting only 10 bucks an hour, when in reality their compensation is closer to 17 bucks an hour, but just doesn't show up on their pay stub, and asking for suggestions on what can be done to make the company work better.

Health Benefits is another hot button issue, not only for management, but for line animals.

Scour your brain and ask yourself when the last time was that you heard that the Benefit committee did not start looking until they got imput from all of the front line and office staff before management started looking?

Here is your next challenge and your reward for allowing me to play.

On your next 5 sales calls, and it doesn't matter what industry you call on, I want you to look at the table in the reception area and look for industry magazines. Then I want you to under whatever pretext you choose, go to the break/lunch room and see if the magazines are there.

Here is what I predict, If you find magazines in the break/lunchroom you will be able to make the sale.

If you only find them in the reception area, put your dog and pony back in your briefcase and move on to the next call. Because unless you can sell snowballs to Eskimos, these folks are flashing you and will shine you on.

I will go even further. I will send you 5 bucks for every sale you make with the magazines in the reception area, your end is to send me 5 bucks for every sale you make where the magazines are in the break/lunchroom. I am willing to risk 25 bucks. Wanna Play?

[Ross Mayfield]

Yes! Let's play. Bet is on.

[Ross Mayfield]

Also, sounds like you have a different definition for "doing management" ;-)

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

Bet is on!

The current concept of 'doing' management is what I would call 'committing' management. Committing management is a crime that until recently has not been addressed nor penalized in organizations.

The committing manager is one of the vast hordes of people who can cite you chapter and verse on goals, initiatives, agendas, attend meetings, and despite the knowledge of being in charge of the front line workers who actually produce the widgits that the company is selling, does not understand their functions, which is what creates a bottom line. Entrusting these people to develop a knowledge management system is folly and doomed to failure.

On the other hand the 'committed' manager knows their people, strengths, weaknesses, spouses, kids, birthdays, and is able to listen, articulate and manage this information to increase the productivity of the task at hand.

They understand that the life beyond the job impacts the performance on the job.

I can illustrate this with a story from my past career. My partner and I were sheetrock subcontractors, who made our money based on the footage that we hung.

We got sent to a small housing development where there was a crew of 5 carpenters who were building houses across the street. These guys were running at full speed building their houses. They were taking 5 minute breaks where everybody else was taking 15.

During lunch one day we asked them why they were working so hard. Was it their house? No, they said, they were being paid a salary(at a 20% premium of prevailing wage), which in most construction is unheard of.

Here is the deal, John said: Bill who owns the company, buys us new saws every year, sends our wives and kids presents on christmas and birthdays.
He also takes us fishing for a week in Alaska in the spring, and hunting in Montana in the fall all expenses paid. At the end of the year, he goes through the books and writes us checks based on the profit we made. When any of our familiy gets sick, he takes care of it.

In the same development was another crew building houses, that kept getting stopped as new people were arriving and carpenters were quitting. There was a lot of yelling and name calling going on, and it was taking a lot longer to get a comparable house done.

You can guess which house was easier to hang, being square, having everything nailed down, not having to stop to replace studs that were warped and never fixed, having to install nailers so you had a surface for nailing the sheetrock.

About 4 years later we ran into John on another job. He had the same crew, running at full speed, and he had another crew doing the same thing next door. The other company went out of business three years prior.

[Lisa Williams]

At my last job, we worked with individual software companies and their customers. A vast amount of time was spent simply communicating the "current state" of our clients to each other -- what had we talked about with them last? What was the current status of the project? This was widely acknowledged as a barrier to doing better at our company.

Unfortunately our response was to install a CRM system, which our own management then mandated that each client interaction be logged into. The format for logging such information was so rigid that I never felt that it was of any value to me -- I just fed the CRM beast so that it wouldn't eat me (we were penalized financially and in other ways for not logging transactions).

For a system that's intended to help the front-line "knowledge worker" to do their jobs better, it actually has to do something useful for that worker. In this regard I certainly like the sound of "social software" better than I have previous systems that attempted to categorize or track the work of people like us whose work for individual customers was quite unique from customer to customer.

One of the things I like the idea of is allowing the knowledge worker themselves to define some of the structure of the data or even how the application works for them. I never met a form that I really liked or thought was universally helpful across clients for recording our interaction with them over time -- and in any case, it wasn't possible with my CRM system for me to share my perception of "where we were" with a project with our client. What I would have really liked was a kind of system that allowed me to follow up a meeting or a phonecall with a short message that both people on my side of the corporate fence and our clients could comment on and have an ongoing conversation about.