Online multiplayer games teaching management

May 13, 2010

Teams are the archetypal functional units of a firm. They provide the means to combine the different skills and perspectives that are needed to get things done. Interaction between people is relatively easy because of the co-location of the team. People are physically together in the same place at the same time. The office space and office hours matter because they make managing easy. Coordination and communication are efficient and low-cost. Recently, however, many teams have been organizing themselves very differently. Teams increasingly consist of people who are scattered around various locations.

Almost all teams are dispersed on some level. Their members can belong to different organizational units. They can be spatially separated with work-spaces on different floors of the building. According to recent research, this is equal to working in different cities. They can also be temporally separated, meeting seldom or even working in different time zones.

Research has shown that even small degrees of separation affect the quality of collaboration in traditional settings. I understand collaboration here as an equation involving three variables: communication x coordination x responsibility. My idea of collaboration is thus very close to the mainstream understanding of the role and tasks of management. The more collaboration there is, the less (command and control) management is needed. You get my point?

It is no surprise that conventional management thinking has suggested that performance suffers with increasing dispersion. Because of this, managers have typically seen mobile and distributed work as liabilities rather than as opportunities. Geographically distributed teams have commonly been called virtual teams and seen as a secondary, less real, alternative to real teams. This label is not adequate any more. Distributed teams are very real!

Distributed work is not an alternative work practice any more, but the default state of value creation. Distributed participation offers tremendous opportunities and can significantly outperform co-located work when the setting-up and management are done in the right way.

The new landscape of work is alien territory for most of today’s business leaders and business schools, but things are already moving towards a new world. Important decision making is often distributed in order to enable fast responses to change. A lot of the work is done in global teams. These teams are often partly composed of people from outside of the corporation. Teams assemble for a single project and the leader has no formal authority.

The most interesting thing is that coordination and communication take place mainly through digital, rather than face-to-face interaction.

The new rules for network based work

The new landscape of work consists of the network as the architecture of work and work as interaction between non-co-located but interdependent people. The astonishing thing is that we can find an existing, efficient, working model for this kind of digital work. It is multiplayer online games and the game environment in general.

The game environment may be the best productivity suit available for digital work. Adopting the qualities of the multiplayer games could help firms to meet the pressing challenge of mobile and distributed work. What then can be learned from these games?

The pace of games is normally very fast and requires fast decision making. Decisions are typically based on incomplete information and are iterated as more data become available later. You can’t take a lengthy pause to weigh up the options. The culture needs to embrace changing decisions and adopting constant corrections to the course that was initially chosen.

Acting in the game environment is always based on uncertainty. You can’t succeed in an uncertain environment without trial and error, without taking risks. You can’t embrace risk taking without accepting failures. Here the game environment is fundamentally different from most corporate cultures. In corporations the often-heard objection to trying out something is: “We’ve already tried it and it didn’t work!” The game environment approach is “Let’s try that again. The situation has changed and we have learned!” Frequent risk taking and confronting risks routinely help players to learn to keep paradoxes alive calmly and to live efficiently with continuous uncertainty.

Leadership in games is often temporary. Leaders switch roles. They direct others one minute and take orders the next. Leadership is a task, not a position or part of the identity of an individual. Players with good relational skills are efficient at forming teams and keeping them motivated. The leader of the group in the forming stage knows that someone else’s skills may be better suited for the next effort. The group often makes the choices about who will lead and who will follow. These decisions are most often based on volunteering, not dictated by a higher authority.

Companies often identify people as leaders because of the high potential they show early in their careers. That model may not work in the future. The growing complexity of business means that no single leader can handle all the different challenges any more. Treating leadership as a temporary state and a task can be the new model of the future. The assumption that leadership resides within an individual may not be correct.

Getting the network environment right for collaboration is much more important.

Foursquare and Facebook likes

To get the network environment right, there are some readily available lessons from which to learn: We can learn from Foursquare, Facebook and the World of Warcraft. The takeaways from Foursquare and Facebook likes is that digital credits that are earned can (and will) be a synthetic currency. People care a lot about gains and losses of points that are made visible immediately after a task is completed. The gains are even more interesting if they can be compared with the scores of other players. People could get credit/synthetic currency from their peers for contributing a blog post, or even re-tweeting important information. Pushing the Facebook  like button could mean giving virtual money.

Transparency allows the taking of responsibility

Efficient digital environments like the World of Warcraft make information open to all of the players, all of the time. This information includes performance statistics and trend information for reflexive work. Real-time status updates on operations make planning the next move easy. The mainstream corporate approach to knowledge management has assumed that thinking and doing are separated. In the game environment a player is expected to act on the available information, without waiting for instructions from the boss. The most interesting thing in the game environment is that transparent information allows players to take responsibility, to assume leadership as needed.

Widespread adoption of the approach of the game environment to communication, coordination and taking responsibility would require a dramatic change in the mainstream organizational culture. However, these games are here today and the generation that has grown up playing the games is growing up and joining corporations. They are going to be the drivers of the change towards a more productive and more fun work environment.

Thank you @Joi Ito and Thomas J. Allen

Background:

Real-time information. The Sandbox Summit. The Diaspora project. On collaboration. Jane McGonigal. Seriosity. Vili Lehdonvirta

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Competitive and collaborative games

May 9, 2010

When coordinated behaviour takes place without the intervention of a regulating authority, we often attribute the coherent action to the existence of values and ethics. We tend to think that the existence of a strong value base means that less or even no regulation is needed. A decay of values conversely means that rules and regulation are needed.

A game theory approach to values assumes that people choose the kind of behaviour that gives them the highest expected benefit over time, given their expectations about what the other players will do and the rewarding or punishing feedback they get as a result of their own actions. Players learn by trial and error, keeping strategies that work and altering the ones that turn out badly. Players always observe each other. Those with a poor performance often tend to imitate those who are doing better. What has worked is likely to be used again.

In most games who wins and who loses is the whole point of playing. It would be hard to imagine a more unpopular outcome in the reality TV-series that today are watched by millions, than an announcement that all the players ended up as winners! It is, of course, beneficial that the place of the lazy, the incompetent, and the unmotivated is taken by better-motivated and more enterprising players.

Competitive games require rules to prevent players from cheating. Competition should be as fierce as the existing laws allow, we think. Any ambiguity in the regulations is immediately exploited. This is where our thinking does not serve us any more. Innovations by the players often make existing rules obsolete and call for new ones, as we have recently experienced in the financial markets. The present relationship between regulators and financial institutions is a competitive game in itself. Instead of a home audience watching, here we have the markets watching. The principle is the same.

There are also other growing problems with the games we play. In competitive games, there is always a lack of appreciation for the need of complementarities. You are supposed to manage without help from others. As a result of competition which excludes, diversity is reduced in the system that the game is played in. There are also more losers than winners in our games. Losers multiply as winning behaviours are replicated in the smaller winners’ circles and losing behaviours are replicated in the bigger losers’ circles.

As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The divide between winners and losers grows constantly. This is why, in the end, the winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the divide, the bigger the price that has to be paid. The winners end up having to take care of the losers, or two totally different cultures are formed, as is happening in the big US cities today. Psychologically, competitive games create shadow games of losers competing at losing.

The games we play have been played under the assumption that the unit of survival is the player, meaning the individual or a company. However, today the reality is that the unit of survival is the player in the game being played. Following Darwinian rhetoric, the unit of survival is the species in its environment. Who wins and who loses is of minor importance compared to the decay of the (game) environment as a result of the competition.

We need a new concept of the game

In games that were paradoxically competitive and collaborative at the same time, losers would not not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to learn from the winners. What prevents losers learning from winners at the moment is our outdated zero-sum thinking and the winner-takes-all philosophy. In competitive/collaborative games the winners would be all those whose participation, comments and contributions were incorporated in the development of the game.

The most important reason why we need a new concept of games is because the players and their contributions in the real world are, at best, too diverse to rank. They are, and should be, too qualitatively different to compare quantitatively. In competitive games the players need to have the identical aim of winning the same thing. Unless all the players want the same thing, there cannot be a genuine contest. Zero-sum games were the offspring of scarcity. In the era of creativity and abundance, new approaches are needed.

In competitive/collaborative games the approach to rules is very different from before. The rules should be created, agreed upon and changed by the players themselves as the game continues. As there absolutely cannot be pre-existing rules for every conceivable situation that might arise, we have to move beyond seeing the players and the rule-makers as separate parties. The games are too complex to be governed totally from outside. We desperately need values-based participation as a prerequisite for taking part.

The players have the responsibility not only for adhering to the existing rules, but also for developing the rules further – specifically when the game (environment) decays as a result of the actions of the players.

The criteria for success in competitive games do not lie solely in winning but in the development and continuation of the game itself through collaboration.

Thank you Fons Trompenaars and Robert Axelrod

Background

Situational values or sustainable values.

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The real Enterprise 2.0

April 30, 2010

Lenin famously said that the economic system in Russia would be run as one big factory. Many economists at the time said that this was impossible. Yet there were already big factories in the West then, and there still are, so why not? Is there a limit to the size of a factory that cannot be surpassed, or is it because the factory logic cannot be used outside of a real factory?

The typical hierarchical form of an organization is meant to simplify communication, accountability and the coordination of tasks. In theory an employee needs only one connection, to the boss. This is far easier than communicating with all and trying to coordinate actions with everyone. And what about accountability? The worker is accountable only to her manager. That manager reports to her manager on the next higher rank, and the chain goes further, leading in the end to – Lenin.

During the centuries since the publication of “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, in 1776, the principal theme of most economists has been that government regulation or centralized planning were not necessary in order to make an economic system function well. The coordination would be the result of markets. Lenin and the communists were advised to move to a market economy. The parties in that system follow their own self-interest and are governed, when it comes to the actual choices they make, by a system of prices. This is the polar opposite of centralized planning. Adam Smith was a proponent of extreme decentralization.

A 21-year-old comes out with a revolutionary new theory

Ronald Coase was one of the first economists who started to question mainstream thinking in economics. If a system of prices and competition would do all the coordination necessary, why did we have centralized planning, not only in the now bygone communist countries, but also in well functioning and successful firms? Why did we need management, whose function was to coordinate?

Ronald Coase set out to bring the different views together. It is almost impossible now to fathom that he found the answer as early as during the summer of 1932, at the age of 21. He realized that there were costs involved in using the pricing mechanism. The needs and offerings have to find one another. The prices have to be discovered. Negotiations need to be undertaken. Contracts have to be made. There may be disputes that later have to be settled. These costs were not part of “the invisible hand” equation of Adam Smith. Ronald Coase called these costs transaction costs.

The first revolutionary argument was that a firm would emerge, exist and continue to exist successfully only if it performed its planning, coordination and management functions at a lower cost than would be incurred by means of market transactions, and also at a lower cost than would apply if the same things could be performed by another firm.

The second revolutionary argument was that a well-functioning economic system needs both markets and planning. This depends on the size of the organization and the level of the market side transaction costs. Increasing the size increases (internal) transaction costs. Running an organization is difficult and running a bigger organization is more difficult.

Management is an overhead

Managerial overhead increases as the organization grows. Management, communication and coordination are all transaction costs. Every sales call, every offer, every agreement and every meeting also consumes limited resources and increases transaction costs. As the corporation grows, all its energy finally goes into maintaining the corporation and does not benefit external stakeholders.

Whenever transaction costs inside the organization reach the level of the transaction costs in the markets, markets outperform firms and outperform central planning/coordination in general. This was the main theoretical argument against Lenin. The same thing is clearly still evident today in companies like GM, or organizations like large health care units. Communist countries learned their lesson, but we still haven’t.

An organization can only be successful when the costs of hierarchical coordination are lower than the gains achieved from that coordination.

The existence of high transaction costs outside of firms leads to the emergence of the firm as we know it now, and management as we know it now. A large part of corporate economic activity is designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier.

The Internet is an extinction-level event for the traditional firm

If the (transaction)costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically, the form and logic of economic and organizational entities also change! Accordingly, a very different kind of management is needed.

Today, with social media, we stand on the threshold of an economy where the fundamental processes of communication and coordination are being transformed.  Familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the Internet, not the traditional organization, becomes the most efficient means to communicate, coordinate and exchange value.

For most of the developed world, hierarchies, as much as markets, make up the dominant economic pattern. The Internet is nothing less than an extinction-level event for the traditional firm. The Internet makes it possible to create new forms of value creation and new forms of value exchange. It changes our views of markets and hierarchies in ways that Adam Smith or Lenin could never have imagined.

Thank you @cshirky

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Communication and diversity secure system-wide performance. Competition doesn’t

April 20, 2010

In our competitive view of the world, we often think that the most capable are those who are the most competitive, and accordingly that competition creates and secures efficiency. But it may be that high performance is incorrectly attributed to competition and is more a result of diversity, self-organizing communication and non-competitive processes of collaboration.

Competitive processes lead to the handicapping of the higher-level system that these processes are part of. This is because competitive selection leads to exclusion: something is left outside. Leaving something out always means a reduction of diversity. The resulting less diverse system is efficient in the short term, but always at the expense of flexibility. Agility and complex problem solving require diversity. Everything goes fine if nothing changes and if there are only easy problems to take care of!

Self-organizing, non-competitive processes are about interdependent individuals and groups solving problems in a shared context. Interaction creates capability beyond what could ever be predicted just by looking at the performance of the individuals involved. The higher performance and robustness are emergent properties of interaction. They are not attributable to the parts of the system.

Social networks provide problem-solving capability that results directly from the amount of communication and level of diversity of communication. Most organizations would soon fail if all their employees thought alike or had little or no contact. There are two new challenges. The first is to understand the need for networking with views and values that are different. The second challenge is even bigger because of the mainstream reductionist thinking: our assumption has been that by understanding the parts in detail, we understand the whole. This is simply not possible! What happens in interaction between the parts is more important than the parts. The whole is the emergent pattern of that interaction.

Diversity here means the degree of unique information in the network. If all contribute the same information, then diversity is low. If each agent contributes relevant, unique information that is not shared by others, then the diversity measure is high.

Networks with a wide spectrum of information/experiences are resilient to noise. This facilitating effect of diversity is critical when dealing with difficult problems where false information can lead to expensive consequences.

Higher system performance and robustness occur through the simple combination of the different experiences of individuals, even though each individual takes part in communicative interaction from their own limited perspective.

The importance of self-organization and diversity is unfortunately still greatly underestimated today, particularly in hierarchical, centralized, monoculture systems – like firms. One of the great societal promises of social media is that interaction in wide-area networks, with enough diversity, can solve problems beyond the awareness of the individuals involved.

Thank you Stuart Kauffman, Sari Baldauf and Norman Johnson

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Networks are the new commons

March 28, 2010

According to simplistic management thinking stimulus and response processes control human behavior: you get what you measure; you get what you reward. This means that people are understood as having no real connection to what they are actually doing.

A somewhat more modern way of thinking states that human beings actively create meaning in life through attempts to understand their own experiences. Intrinsic motivation – peoples’ relation to what they do, the meaning of work – replaces extrinsic rewards. People connect with what they are actually doing.

A new third way of thinking is enfolding. Since we cannot experience everything ourselves, other people become the co-creators of information, experience and meaning. Relations, connecting with others, create a new, networked way of knowing and learning.

As a result, people can now connect both with what they do and with their peers, their network, making them much more knowledgeable than their colleagues who lack these capabilities.

Information is, paradoxically, simultaneously both social and personal, with multiple, variable goals and constantly negotiated premises. Information creators, publishers and curators, are not the traditional verified experts; rather, information is created by a broad collection of reflexive practitioners sharing in the construction and ongoing evolution of a given field.

Information becomes a process of continuous facilitation and networked negotiation. Information networks are a valuable, shared resource making the interactive movement of thought possible.

These networks are the new commons. Sociologists call such shared resources public goods. A private good is one that the owners can exclude others from using. Private has been valuable and public without much value during the era of scarcity economics. This is now changing in a dramatic way, creating the confusion we are in the midst of today.

On the new commons, people with many ties become better informed and have more signaling power, while those outside and with few ties may be left behind. This may be the new digital divide.

Network inequality creates and reinforces inequality of opportunity.

In the age of abundance economics, public is much more valuable than private.

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Lessons from the early adopters of corporate social media

March 15, 2010

The mainstream approach to management places a heavy emphasis on the formulation of plans and intentions and then communicating them as actions to be implemented by the organization. The starting point for change involves conceiving a picture of the future that is somewhat different from the picture of the present. After the content side is taken care of, the focus is then on providing tools for the process of change.

The approach that is made possible through enterprise social media is very different. The question that is now asked is: “How can people participate in such a way that things develop and change over time?”

The strategic focus of the early adopters of corporate social media is an ongoing continuous movement that is open-ended, and always incomplete. The strategic logic has been temporal rather than spatial. When following a spatial metaphor, there is a territory that can be explored and understood, but here the territory is seen as being under continuous development and formation by the exploration itself. “It is impossible to map an area that changes with every step the explorer takes.” People inhabit a world of emergence, uncertainty and responsive change.

Themes such as communities, social network analysis and social graph underline a fairly strong sense of definable relationships and a sense of “us”. Our studies, however, show that social media create a dynamic and shifting sense of groups one belongs to. Conversations always follow from previous conversations and move on involving others, often as a result of responses from outside the corporate firewall. Work utilizing social media has much less clear and managed beginnings and endings. There is, typically, no pre-conceived design for the pattern of work: it evolves live.

Corporate life is improvising together

Physical meetings in organizations are often more or less orchestrated and planned in advance: “You should come prepared. There should be a clear goal for the meeting.” Following this thinking, there is no true sense of creating the future together. It is much more likely that people construct what they have always constructed. When people use social media to connect, they experience the potential inherent in communication, depending on how they express themselves, and how they respond. “Social media create the experience of acting into the unknown, creating the future together, improvising together.”

By linking improvisation to a group, like in theatrical improvisation, we get to what is in fact happening in social media. All of us with our differing intentions, hopes and fears, are acting in corporate plays that are very close to improvisational theater. We are self-organizing in shifting social configurations in the responsive interplay of different players.

We are fellow-improvisers in corporate ensembles constantly constructing the future, and our part in what is happening, in responsive interaction. The idea of improvisation is often associated with notions of unrehearsed, unintentional action. However, the more skilled we are, the better we can improvise. The better we have planned, the more flexible we can be. The more intensely we are present, the more responsive we can be.

The real time web is creating a real time company

The most important outcome is that social media focus attention more on what people are doing in the present than on what they intend to do in the future. The focus is on communicative interaction, the next tweet and the latest blog post.

The pattern of relating also becomes very clear: “We get to see who is talking and who is silent? Who is invited to join and who is excluded or opts out?” The focus of attention is on the processes of participation and the life stream as the narrative of progress.

A senior manager in a very large multinational corporation explained the impact of social media: “Since I moved away from thinking that what I do is manage the corporation through communicating with the whole corporation, I have started to pay attention to my own participation with the people I meet or should meet, and my responses in everyday interaction. Through asking different kinds of questions and through pointing to different kinds of issues, through changing my own participation, I have in fact changed my company.”

Thank you Keith Johnstone, Srikumar Rao, Patricia Shaw and Doug Griffin

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Learning from the Fat Duck

March 13, 2010

Organizational practices that are related to earlier technologies significantly influence how firms adopt and use new technologies. IT still today widely mirrors old manual tasks; sending an email is mimicking sending a physical letter. The vast majority of corporations choose incremental migration paths to the future. Past processes structure present ones. Most firms clearly prefer to use new technologies in the least disruptive way possible, creating as much continuity with past practices as possible. Communication researcher Carolyn Marvin has explained this tendency the following way: “Early uses of technological innovations are often conservative because their capacity to create social change is intuitively recognized amidst declarations of progress and enthusiasm for the new.” There is fear to expose old ideas to revision from contact with the new.

The preferred incremental migration paths also explain the productivity paradox. Many economists and managers have claimed that information technologies have failed to boost the productivity rate of the firms investing in IT. But new technologies coupled with old ways of doing things cannot generate change in productivity. Manuel Castells claims that organizational and cultural changes are necessary before productivity gains can be achieved. He writes: “For new technological discoveries to be able to diffuse throughout the economy, thus enhancing productivity growth at an observable rate, the culture and institutions of society, such as business firms, need to undergo substantial change.” This statement is very appropriate in the case of the technological revolution centered on information and communication that we are in the midst of today. Why is it then that most firms choose the slow migration path while some are able to learn and change much faster? What kind of revolutionary thinking is needed to benefit from revolutionary technologies?

The Fat Duck is one of the best restaurants in the world. From the very start, chef Heston Blumenthal decided that, far from avoiding technology and science in his cooking, he would try to find people who could answer his questions and doubts about the accepted wisdom that was passed from chef to chef. The timing was perfect. There was already a small group of people, some scientists and chefs who met on a regular basis to discuss the issues of new science and new technology transforming the habits of cooking. To make sure that the efforts were taken seriously, they coined the term “molecular and physical gastronomy” in 1992. The scientific understanding of the factors that determine the pleasantness of food is of importance, because it provides a new platform for helping to make foods that are healthy, but are at the same time delicious. Heston Blumenthal thinks that new technology and the art of cuisine have much to offer each other and there is much that can be achieved by using them in mutual support. It is not just about the three star restaurants in the world, but the everyday practices around nutrition. The starting point however, is the combination of an experimental chef and new technology.

The leading figures in combining the role of science and the kitchen have been Ferran Adrià, Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. They don’t like being labeled molecular gastronomists because this interpretation reduces their culinary intentions to a simplistic agenda. Perhaps it is accordingly time to stop calling Google an Internet company. The Internet is not a simplistic agenda reserved for the Internet companies any more. The timing is now right for those leaders who are willing to doubt accepted wisdom regarding how things are done in firms and are prepared to experiment with new interaction technologies. Anyway, it is time to gather and talk, perhaps in the kitchen.

Thank you Joanne Yates and Heston Blumenthal

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Bridging the gap between knowing and acting

March 6, 2010

Bridging the gap between knowing and acting is one of the main challenges for knowledge management. Organizational reality is often seen in terms of processes and actions that are based on plans and designs. Acting should thus be based on this knowledge. Thinking is seen as preceding acting.

Databases and documents are usually thought of as stores of knowledge.  From the mainstream Knowledge Management perspective, knowledge is understood to be stored in individual heads, largely in tacit form. It can become the asset of an organization when it is extracted from those individual heads and stored in documents as explicit knowledge.

But the everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions. What really takes place is very rarely a predictable repetition of our plans.

The actions always vary, as those with whom we interact change and as the context of the interaction changes. In other words, there is normally always variation in processes, routines and actions. Actions are thus not based on knowledge that is separate from those actions. Accordingly actions are never fully explainable through documentation. Knowledge, in this sense, cannot be seen as residing in databases and attempts to store it in documents of some kind will capture only partial aspects of it.

Knowing cannot be separated from acting. Interaction is the process of knowing!

From the point of view taken here, knowledge is always a process of responsive contextual, live interaction as Ralph Stacey points out. It cannot simply be located in an individual head to be extracted as an organizational asset and then shared. Knowledge cannot be shared!

Knowledge is the act of interacting and new knowledge is created when ways of interaction, and therefore patterns of relationship, change. The knowledge assets of an organization are the patterns of interaction between its members and knowledge is destroyed when relationships are missing or are destroyed, as is happening widely in the corporate world today. Key corporate assets are lost through mismanagement!

Organizational change, learning and knowledge creation are the same as changes in communication.  Enabling new habits of communication and improving the quality of the conversation are the most important processes of knowledge management, and management.

Thank you Ralph Stacey

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Newspapers, Universities and the Internet

February 27, 2010

Newspapers and universities are in the same business. They are in information logistics; they are in the research, creation and transfer of information. The Internet now threatens both institutions. The writing on the wall is already very clear for the newspaper business, but not yet for the universities.

Newspapers have been the logistics channel for journalism. But newspapers have been just as much in the print advertising business, as they have been in the business of selling content written by journalists. On the ad side, newspapers have enjoyed a more or less local monopoly over the market. That money is now gone. It is lost to Google.

Universities have been the logistics channel for education. As of today, there’s no Google destroying that. Instead of having monopolies over advertising, universities have enjoyed barriers to competition in the form of local language and accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to blog or to tweet. Not anyone can sell recognized degrees. But the number of people who associate being informed and learning with following experts they recognize on the Internet is soon reaching hundreds of millions. More and more people think that the most valuable learning takes place in bite-sized chunks, every day, through reading the contributions of people we recognize as being worth following.

We know that degrees don’t signal competence and thus they have less and less true human capital value. However, learning, as a way of life, without beginnings and ends, is becoming more and more valuable.

Leading institutions like Stanford University and MIT are giving lectures on the Internet. Apple iTunes is aggregating those and hundreds more like them into playlists, which may be the new way to see course architectures. The way peer learners have experienced their unique combination of these learning playlists may be the most valuable starting point for any individual learning path. Is the Amazon recommendation system then the way classes should be filled? Is iTunes the Google challenge for universities?

People will argue that the best university courses are superior to any online offering, and they are often right. There is no substitute for a live meeting of minds. But that’s far from the experience of the student sitting in the back row of a lecture hall.  All she’s getting is a live version of what iTunes offers, without the ability to participate, to rate, discuss with peers, rewind, bookmark, return to later and forward to others.

People in the traditional print media have dismissed online writing because of its low average quality. The average quality of the writing online isn’t what the print media are competing against. They’re competing against the best writing online. And often, they’re losing. This is what is going to happen next with teaching. Universities are going to compete against the best bloggers and the very best aggregators of learning content. The sad truth, both when it comes to the newspapers and to the universities, is that if you are used to being a monopoly, you create habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly face competition. The Internet is now transforming the consumption habits of newspaper customers. There is an even bigger change happening in the learning related habits of people. Hopefully, the universities won’t fight as much against their customers’ new habits as the newspapers do!

Thank you Riel Miller. Based on Kevin Carey. Mimi Ito and Paul Graham

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Leadership in the time of Social Media

February 25, 2010

We are used to thinking that what happens in organizations is the realization of the choices of powerful people. They are supposed to know what is going on as they make those choices. However, the stories about decision making during wartime, or during the recent financial crises, make it very clear that politicians and executives are far from sure of what has been happening and they simply don’t know what is now happening.

Partially, it is because of corrupted communication. The results of failing communication can be catastrophic. In today’s FT Tim Harford quotes a study on communication and decision making during the Vietnam War: “The joint chiefs of staff were warned that Lyndon Johnson did not like split advice. Robert McNamara also argued that government would be inefficient if department chiefs were to express disagreement with the president.”

The leader who isolates himself from dissenting opinions is bound to make disastrous decisions. The failures in communication in Vietnam continued in Iraq. According to researchers, Donald Rumsfeld and his immediate subordinates made dissent extremely difficult during the first years of the war. It is normal, but costly in corporations and disastrous in politics to filter out information that contradicts preconceptions.

Failures of leadership are failures in communication.

All organizations are power and communication structures. Very often communication is corrupted just because of power. “If you deliver differing views to your boss, it is highly likely that you are not going to be listened to in the future.” For ambitious people, this is the worst possible fate. What social media try to achieve, is subordinates giving truthful information about what is going on, which they don’t do, and bosses listening attentively, which they don’t.

If this dynamic is taking place at every level of the organization, you are in big trouble. Each organizational level that creates a strong boss, ambitious subordinate relation is a distorting barrier to communication and informed decisions.

Business leaders try to know what is going on in the corporation through employee surveys and 360-degree appraisals. Organizations are full of local knowledge, but if bosses need to ask outsiders to tell them how their organization really works, there is trouble in store. If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate elements of bottom-up, real-time information delivery and real-time listening into their management thinking. Be that pushing real-time updates or subscribing to people who matter.

The role of the effective leader during the time of social media is to widen and deepen communication. Leadership is participating and exercising skills of conversation which uncorrupts information, keeps the necessary paradoxes alive, and keeps on opening up the possibility of new meaning rather than closing down the further development of thought.

Thank you Tim Harford



Posted by eskokilpi
Filed in Social Web / Social Media
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