Beyond Management Workplace_10

218 Notes people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely noth-ing.” He also said: “in this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.” Topping the original quote, Oskar Kennedy says, “there are three types of people. Those who can count and those who can’t” (http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/ are-there-only-two-types-of-people-in-the-world/). 11. The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edn, 2000) defines management as: “1. The act, manner, or practice of managing; handling, supervision, or control....2. The person or persons who control or direct a business or other enterprise.” 12. The “view from the top” is a metaphor which refers to what people know or “see.” It is not a literal description of where they stand or sit. The Coen brothers’ film The Hudsucker Proxy has an engaging visual portrayal of the view from the top, which is important in the film both for the plot and in creating the visual impact of partic-ular scenes. Various sequences either depict “the top” as it might appear to others, particularly to people at “the bottom,” or show aspects of organizational life from the perspective of the top. I’ve used the expression for quite a while, contrasting it with the “view from practice.” Recently, I discovered that at least one other person uses it, though somewhat differently. Theodore Taptiklis has a chapter called “The View from the Top” in Unmanaging. Chapter2 1. The official Dilbert website is www.dilbert.com. The Office began as a BBC comedy written by Ricky Gervais who also played the lead. It was later Americanized with Steve Carell in the lead. The official NBC website for the U.S. version is www.nbc. com/The_Office. 2. For one view of the social nature of work life see Dennis Sandow and Ann Murray Allen, “The Nature of Social Collaboration: How Work Really Gets Done,” Reflections:The SoL Journal 6, nos 4–5 (2005): 1–14. 3. An especially egregious case, outlined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, involves IBM and the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposed Advanced Automation System for air traffic control. This software development and equipment design project was shut down after more than 10 years of work, when 2 billion dollars had already been spent. See Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic Environ-mental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable World (New York: Vintage Books, 2002): 183–4. Another example, outlined in a story in the Washington Post, involves the Commonwealth of Virginia’s decision to consol-idate its computer operations into one agency and contract out the running of its computer system. See Anita Kumar and Rosalind S. Helderman, “Va. Pays Dearly for Computer Troubles: Northrop Grumman $2 Billion Upgrade Disrupted Services,” October 14, 2009: B01 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/ 13/AR2009101303044.html). 4. Edsel wasn’t just a brand name or model, but, briefly, was a division of Ford. See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Edsel. 5. Military hardware programs that result in technologies that are dysfunctional or anachronistic belong in the same category. For example, programs which produce cold-war-era weapons systems when the military’s target is terrorism. The Strategic DefenseInitiative,or“starwarsprogram,”astill-fancifulmissiledefenseshield,which Notes 219 was initiated when Ronald Reagan was president, is one example. In one form or another it is still rolling on and might end up costing billions of dollars, although, as I write, judging by what many experts say, it can’t and won’t provide protection and is certainly not a shield against incoming missiles. 6. Arguments along these lines are exceptionally well articulated by Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan author and scholar, in his interview with Krista Tippett, the host of the National Public Radio Program, Talking of Faith, titled “The Ethics of Aid: One Kenyan’s Perspective” (http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/ 2009/ethicsofaid-kenya/). 7. The fact that teams exist in name only explains the title of Michael Schrage’s book, No More Teams!, where he takes a close look at collaboration and how to foster it. See Michael Schrage, No More Teams: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1995). 8. Zachery A. Goldfarb has a fine example of this type of breakdown in “SEC’s Regional Offices Present Managerial Problems, Become an Obstacle to Reform,” Washington Post, June 10, 2010: A13. He writes that “for nearly a decade, Julie Preuitt told her col-leagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission...that she had found problems at a fabulously successful investment firm...But officials in the agency’s enforcement division weren’t interested in complex cases, just quick-hit lawsuits that would make the regional office look active, according to a review by the SEC inspector general.” 9. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2010 the United States total military spending of US $698 billion accounted for about 43 percent of the world’s total military spending of US$1630 billion. See the Institute’s “Back-ground paper on SIPRI military expenditure data, 2010,” at www.sipri.org/research/ armaments/milex/factsheet2010. 10. The Government Accountability Office that oversees United States government departments. 11. April Witt, “Fatal Inaction,” Washington Post Magazine, June 18, 2006: 22. Another widely reported set of breakdowns had to do with the shockingly poor way in which soldiers who needed treatment for physical injuries and traumatic stress syndrome were actually treated (i.e. “handled”) by various agencies and departments like the Veterans Administration and military hospitals. 12. Two books, by ex-management consultants writing with views from practice, provide good insights into the work of consultants: not least the heavy-handed and self-serving way they wield the “tools” of their profession. See Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); and Theodore Taptiklis, Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to Its Own Unspoken Knowledge (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 13. Many books and articles define “management” and examine the paradigm. One is Stephen Linstead, Robert Grafton Small, and Paul Jeffcutt, eds., Understanding Man-agement (London: SAGE Publications,1996), an edited volume, with a postmodern orientation, in which contributors highlight the complex, social nature of manage-ment and managing. See also Dan Growler and Karen Legge, “The Meaning of Management and Management of Meaning,” in Understanding Management, ed. S Linstead, R.G. Small, and P Jeffcutt (London: SAGE Publications, 1996). 14. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W.W. Norton, 1911; reprint, 1967); Frederick Winslow Taylor, “The Principles of Scien-tific Management,” Bulletin of the Taylor Society, December (1916). Henri Fayol, 220 Notes General and Industrial Management, trans. C. Storrs (London: Pitman, 1949). The huge literature on Taylor’s work includes these contributions: Gail Cooper, “Frederick Winslow Taylor and Scientific Management,” in Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, ed. C.W. Pursell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Fredrick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997). Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth, has a unique perspective on Taylor, arguing, ironically, that it was his ability to tell a good story that brought him both fame and fortune, not “the numbers” he professed were so important and, evidently, was so passionate about. 15. On the evolution of science and the ideas that contributed to the Enlightenment, see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambi-tions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Hugh Willmott refers to Heidegger’s description of the “period we call modern [as]...defined by the fact that man becomes the centre and measure of all things.” Hugh Willmot, “Bringing Agency (Back) into Organizational Analysis: Responding to the Cri-sis of (Post)Modernity,” in Towards a New Theory of Organizations, eds. John Hassard and Martin Parker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). On mod-ernism in organization and management studies see the following which, as they deal with worldviews and the contrast between modernism and postmodernism, are all philosophically oriented: Robert Chia, “From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis,” Organization Studies 16, no. 4 (1995); Robert Cooper and Gibson Burrell, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction,” Orga-nizational Studies 9, no. 1 (1988); Susan Stanford Freidman, “Definitional Excur-sions:The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001). 16. Tim Hindle, “The New Organization,” The Economist, January 21, 2006. 17. The injunction to “be objective” seems far less onerous, technically and perhaps morally, for astronomers, physicists, and the like, who deal with inanimate objects, than for anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and even economists, who study people with attitudes, values, and beliefs, who live relationship-filled lives. What’s more, if their relationships, attitudes, feelings, and values are what make people tick and make them interesting, wouldn’t their efforts to put their feelings and relationships aside make experts less than human? Why would we want less-than-human experts explaining human behavior or human societies? On the whole question of objectivity and subjectivity in science see R.J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 18. Fantastic Voyage is not a particularly memorable film. Although it won some awards forspecialeffects,toatleastonerevieweritwasavehicleforsqueezingRaquelWelch, a leading 1960s sex symbol, into a white neoprene wetsuit. 19. Another difference between knowledge-work and industrial-work is that, in facto-ries, the distinction between “inside” and “outside” doesn’t matter as much. If you are watching people on a production line filling boxes of corn flakes or, in rows, at benches, assembling electronic components, you have a good idea of what they are doing just by observing them, no matter that you’re not actually doing the same work. 20. Julian Orr highlights the importance of stories at work, in conversations that may not specifically be about work. Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Notes 221 21. It is not uncommon, these days, to hear people talking about “knowing” rather than “knowledge.” See Frank Blackler, “Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation,” Organization Studies 16, no. 6 (1995). Scott Cook and John Seely Brown make the distinction a theme in explaining the synergy between the knowledge and knowing. See Scott D.N. Cook and John Seely Brown, “Bridg-ing Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing,” Organization Science 10, no. 4 (1999). 22. The “view from the top” makes the connection with top-down management easy. Remember that the view from the top is a metaphor. In every organization lots of people work from this view and, because it can be very useful, at times it is desirable, even necessary, that they deliberately adopt a view from the top by “stepping back” from their work and looking at it from the outside as it were. The problem is that a management lens only permits the view from the top, which is wrongly presumed to be the view you must have to organize work. 23. The fad for “reengineering” work processes, to make organizations more effi-cient, is directly attributable to this view. I discuss reengineering more fully in Chapter 8. 24. As you’ll see, a good deal of knowledge-work consists of organizing, and much of the work of organizing involves making sense of what happened, such as what people said or did, and then deciding what to do. I’m going to call this “meaning making.” Karl Weick calls it “sensemaking” and has written a book explaining that this is mostly what people do in organizations. Work is nothing more, or less, than sensemaking. Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Pub-lications, 1995); and Making Sense of the Organization (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001). Chapter3 1. Stephen Fineman, Daniel Sims, and Yannis Gabriel, Organizing and Organizations, 2nd edn (San Francisco: SAGE Publications, 2000): 6–7. 2. There is no direct English equivalent for the German word Verstehen. Scholars translate Verstehen as “interpretive understanding” or “subjective understanding” or (more recently) “meaning-making.” See Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Eco-nomic Organisation, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1964); Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. F.R. Dallmayr and T.A. McCarthy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); Mario Truzzi, ed. Verstehen: Subjective Understanding in the Social Sciences (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974). The tradition of interpretive understanding (or meaning-making) actually began before Weber with the first generation of scholars who coined the term “hermeneutics.” They were interested in biblical exegesis—how to interpret the Bible. After the Reformation (which coincided with the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism and science), people came to accept that you didn’t have to rely on the church hierarchy to interpret the word of God for you; you could do it for yourself. It was not only church teachings but also hierarchy that was being challenged. In the absence of an expert or single authority who told you what to believe, the question was how to draw out the (real) meaning of the Bible. The challenge was the “hermeneu-tic circle” or the relationship between whole and part. You can’t make meaning of 222 Notes the whole until you understand the individual parts and you can only interpret the parts when you understand the message of the whole. This provided a context for appreciating the subjective and intersubjective character of meaning-making. 3. On the question of how we construct meaning of the social world, see Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. F. Walsh and G. Lehnert (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972). The original German title of this book translates as The Meaning Construction of the Social World. See also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1967). 4. Renate Mayntz describes a network, succinctly, as a form of governance, “characterized by negotiation and collaboration—purposeful co-operation over time.” Renate Mayntz, “Modernization and the Logic of Interorganizational Networks,” in Societal Change between Market and Organization, eds. John Child, Michael Crozier, Renate Mayntz et al. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1993): 11. 5. On the shifts in thinking at this time, see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2001). Charlene Spretnak argues, convincingly, that it is precisely the kinds of knowing that began to be rejected at this time—bodily (feelings, emotions) and spiritual (beliefs) knowing, as opposed to mental knowing (reason)—which are, for humans,what “real”knowledge is.Fromherperspective,postmodernism,whichrelates knowing to the construction of meaning, represents a “resurgence of the real.” Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997). 6. “Get the beat” is the first step in what Donella Meadows calls “dancing with systems.” This is what she says: “Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been aroundalongtimetotellyouwhathashappened.”DonellaH.Meadows,“Dancingwith Systems,” Sustainability Institute (www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/pubs/Dancing.html). Chapter4 1. For another example of how these types of projects can go wrong see Dan Eggen and Griff Witte, “The FBI’s Upgrade That Wasn’t,” Washington Post, August 18, 2006, p. A01 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/ 17/AR2006081701485.html). 2. If you have ever tried to demonstrate computer technology to a group of people you havealmostcertainlyexperiencedMurphy’slawfirsthand.Nomatterhowmanytimes you test your setup and no matter how many times you check it to see that everything is working as it should, when you get to the actual demonstration you will find that anything that can go wrong has gone wrong. See www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/ murphy-true.html. 3. This passage and others remind me of why software developers adopt the agile programming methods which I’ve written about in Chapter 9. 4. With all the interest in knowledge management, lots of people now know and use the term “tacit knowledge,” which is usually contrasted with “explicit knowl-edge.” I believe Michael Polanyi was the first to write about tacit knowledge in his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). See also Kazuo Ichijo and Florian Kohlbache, “Tapping Tacit ... - tailieumienphi.vn