Adventures in Corporate Education

Besides working on my two performance classes, I’ll also be attending a couple of Boston-based events.

Tues Nov 3 I’ll be at the Mass chapter of ISPI to hear Cammy Bean talk about eLearning authoring tools. Several other #lrnchat folks will be there too.

Tues Nov 17 I’m planning to go to the Greater Boston ASTD meeting to hear Dave Wilkins speak about Social Learning and Social Networking.

As you know if you are following me on twitter, this semester I am taking two performance classes. This means I’m paying more attention to things that measure performance and performance gaps. Since I’m always hyper-focused on social media, I’m also looking at how emerging tools can be used to close performance gaps.

This report from McKinsey talks about the importance of collaboration to knowledge workers. Interestingly enough, they did an analysis on how things are right now, or the current state of performance of knowledge workers. The report says in some industries knowledge workers make up about 75% of the workplace. The authors found a “performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. So organizations with knowledge workers have not figured out what sorts of remedies need to be apply to close performace gaps for knowledge workers.

Its actually worse than that – the researches also found that measurements for effective “collaboration productivity” doesn’t really exist. Everyone says they want a highly motivated, highly collaborative workpace, but no one knows how to measure what’s going on now and no one knows how to get people to that highly collaborative state.

The report has a neat tool that breaks up well-known roles by tasks and possible social media tools that could help them be more effective (in a tag cloud no less!).

The report also suggests a very strategic approach to choosing the tools to create the desired collabortive state:

1. Understand the specific requirements of interactive tasks
2. Identify which tasks create disproportionate value for the organization
3. Determining the types of inefficiencies and wasted efforts that bog down many interactions

It is a great report. More and more we’re talking about disruptive technology, but this technology is also going to disrupt our known ways of doing things. We’re going to need folks to get their arms around this idea of measuring performance by what is really going on, not by how things used to get done. And this approach seems like a practical way to blend the new technology into current organizations.

What are you seeing?

In my last post, I talked about the Gervais Principle and the Company Hierarchy diagram:

Notice the huge bottom layer of “losers”. Losers isn’t necessarily this sort of loser:

But as Venkatesh Rao (inventor of the Gervais principle) explains, loser is more in the economic sense. You have this huge mass of people who give up their chance to fully participate in the economy to work at company. They gain the security of working for an employer in trade for doing as the company directs. In the sense that they have given up their economic autonomy, they are losers.

That term losers is so loaded isn’t it? Language contains the cultural cues that help us define our world. Gendered language keeps popping up for me in this blog and in my personal life. So this post is about how gendered language perpetuates losers by homogenizing (or flattening) out that bottom section of the triangle.

Let me give a specific example. Yahoo hosts Open Hack Days for developers that use their APIs. For the last couple of years (at least) the Open Hack Day in Taiwan has included “Hack Girls”. Not strippers really, sort of cheerleaders in skimpy outfits who dance like strippers with some  of the participants. Yahoo apologized after there was an online outcry over pictures of the “Hack Girls”, and they promised it would never happen again.

This post isn’t about that event, or how Yahoo has responded. It is about the language used by the techies responding to the issue.Here are some of the responses to Yahoo’s apology:

• “We’re adults here, let’s act like one instead of acting like a little revealing clothing offended our Puritan hearts so much”
• “This is Taiwan… the other side of the world to you Americans. If China invaded would you care? Nope. But some dancing girls appear at a technology function and you’re all jumping up and down screaming about inappropriate behaviour. Again forcing your views on what’s morally right on the rest of the world.”
• “Honestly I think everyone is getting worked up over nothing. The fact remains that the majority of attendees at these events are men. Men like scantily clad women. It’s not hard to understand why they were there.”
• “Making a gigantic fuss and screaming about feminism is the problem. Hell, I’m a woman and it annoys me. Get over yourselves. If you think that the strippers at this event are undermining your talent, then obviously you’re not a very good developer.”
• “Women in IT who flaunt their intellects make it very uncomfortable for the hack girls who just want to be able to trade off their good <looks>. Get over yourselves”

The same sort of language is used every time someone brings up the issue of institutionalized discrimination against women in the IT industry. You will always hear variations of these words:

• Stop being so uptight
• Boys will be boys
• Only men show up, so what do you expect
• I’m a woman and I am ashamed of all women who speak up
• If you are complaining, you are obviously not an “awesome” enough coder/developer/engineer..
• Get over yourself

All of these words serve to marginalize those who point out discriminatory practices. Women who speak up are told to stop being uptight, embarrassing the other women, and their skills are called into question. Its almost like the only buckets for women in IT are a hot “Hack Girl”, a woman who is “one of the guys” who won’t speak up when she feels uncomfortable, or the angry feminazi who is always bringing everyone down.

The words are used over and over again. They are what permit these narrow views of what a woman in IT should be – they homogenize us all. They keep us all in that bottom loser category. Not just the women, but the men too. If you can’t see another type of woman, you’ve been homogenized too.

If we want to get to the point where we have a connected world, where we are able to make full use of everyone’s contributions, where the value networks that are constructed to get the work done include all workers, we have to start thinking about our language.

I challenge all of you to wrestle with these terms, with these definitions. I urge all of you to realize that the words we use to deal with the problem of the lack of woman in IT are huge indicators of the real underlying problem. Make it easy for women to speak up. If someone points out an obvious example of sexism, speak out against it! Don’t say, well that is an isolated example or yes but that is not why there are not women in IT.

I believe if we can change the language of oppression, we can work together to eliminate that loser section of the triangle, and move instead to a more connected way of management and working.

A few days ago I wrote about the history of management, and specifically the Gervais Principle.The Gervais Principle states:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

This principle was based on this image of Company Hierarchy by Hugh MacLeod. This image is a take on the Peter Principle, or the idea that in a hierarchy a person will rise to his/her level of incompetence.

The Gervais Principle asserts that hierarchies are not the victim of the Peter Principle, but they create this crazy triangle of power out of necessity.

In the previous blog post, I bemoaned the fact that I am learning about the guys who wrote all the top down, command and control management theories in one of my classes this semester. So great – I’m learning the management schemes that prevent collaboration and innovation.

So maybe I should look at this from a performance standpoint. We know the actual performance state of many companies is this chart. We know this because of the popularity in comic devices such as Dilbert, Office Space, and The Office (which has a UK and US version, proving the triangle problem is global).

If this is the actual performance state, what would be the desired performance state of a company’s management system?

Polly Pearson blogged about an inverted triangle. Could this be the desired state?

I think this may be closer. Here is what she had to say:

Today, EMC is moving rapidly toward to the Inverted Pyramid, the one where everyone can have an idea, be passionate about it and facilitate success.  We are transitioning from the world of one spiritual leader/mentor/motivator in a company to Many — all joined by community, customers, and a common goal. This is our 2009 Pyramid, reflective of the faces behind the best ideas from the more than 1,400 submitted by EMCers in 19 countries this past few months.

Here is my idea: manage the organization, from the inside out using value networks.

Take Polly’s inverted triangle, and build one for every organization in the company. Point all the smallest angles of the triangles at each other to form a circle. Put the executives in the middle of the circle, with connections to every part of the organization. Give the little guy like me a way to network and use our expertise to help the business.

I think it would look something like this image:

I need to work on that image, I know. Hopefully my idea comes across. What do you think? Does this sort of management principle already exist?

If we can agree that top-down, command and control management doesn’t work, we know we need to get rid of the triangle. Is my circle idea a desired performance state for management? If so, how do we get there?

Someone tweeted a link to Tagul. It makes very nice tag clouds. You can save clouds, and have the option of updating the clouds automatically. If you click on a word in the tagul, it opens a google search with that term. Pretty cool.

Will need to play with this more after midterms, but here is my first attempt: