Emerging Management Paradigms

Thinking about progressive workplace, i found this article about beautiful workplaces written by Tim Brown and it is interesting how can we re-think the organization not only in terms of “hard” performance, where everything is set for efficiency.

But what happens with the aesthetics of the workplace? Can this dimension be part of the equation to find the sweet spot for the progressive workplace? I think it does. What do you think?

Happy Holidays, it was a really nice semester.

Seba

We talked a lot about how to find a management model that will allow for more work-life balance. However, what if that is not what the employees actually want? How to deal with that?

Andrew Isaacs from Haas challenged me last week on the meaning of work-life balance. And I started thinking if work-life balance is maybe a misnomer? This term tries to oppose work as not being an integral part of our life and suggests that work is something bad.
Should we rather call it work-play balance? And what if the work is actually fun (play) … Is it fine to use more than 8 hours a day doing that? If so, what about the consequences like burnout?

And of course there is a question of how much managers should be aware of these different aspects and not only look at the actual working hours that people spend at work?

It seams that not only me struggles with this question. I found a couple of articles/blogs with different ideas around how to see work-life balance:
– it is not about the work-life balance but an integrated life:
http://www.openforum.com/articles/balance-of-work-and-life-is-a-myth
– it is actually a balance of work-play-sleep that matters:
http://www.worknplay.net/work-play-and-sleep-finding-the-balance/

Leslaw

Check out Information Week’s top 15 apps for virtual collaboration. Information week points out that ‘Certainly, businesses are investigating — and investing in — tools that help employees brainstorm, locate each other, schedule meetings, and communicate via social networks’. ‘AtTask’ beats out Webex and Chatter for #1. The list has a few interesting familiar and not so familiar applications further down.

http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/slideshows/view/229300480/top-15-cloud-collaboration-app

Ariel

This article fits well with our conversation about multi-tasking parents during our last class.

“Dr. Turkle said that she recognizes the pressure adults feel to make themselves constantly available for work, but added that she believes there is a greater force compelling them to keep checking the screen.”

kristine

Daniel Pink gives an interesting take on motivation theories in his book “Drive:The surprising truth of what motivates us”.

The book has two parts of which the first part examines the problems with the current “carrot and stick” motivation theories used for rewards in businesses. He calls these theories as “Motivation 2.0” which worked for the Industrial Age. He gives several reasons and talks about a research where it is clearly proved that for tasks which require the use of the left brain, we cannot simply use the carrot and stick motivation techniques where “pay more do more” will not be sufficient.

Hence he introduces the theory of intrinsic motivation. He says that just extrinsic motivation is not enough but a person should be intrinsically motivated when he doing a task.For this, in the second part talks about the three elements which are at the core of using intrinsic motivation namely

1) Autonomy: People should be given freedom to choose their task, timelines,team and technique at their workplace.

2) Mastery: Using Goldilocks tasks which are just right so as to guide a person to master a task which is given to him/her.

3) Purpose: Giving the employees a sense of purpose which is bigger than themselves will often be an important of motivating the employees to do the job.

He calls the above model as “Motivation 3.0” which is more relevant to the Information Age. The employees of todays technology industries are information workers who need to be creative and hence we cannot have the same “Motivation 2.0” tools in this case.

The example which I liked the most is the power of open source software. We can see all the above mentioned factors are work in the open source field. The people are not motivated by extrinsic factors.However, they have autonomy in what they are doing. The tasks which are done by the open source community are voluntary in nature and so they come with real autonomy where the person can choose all the mentioned attributes namely the task itself, timelines, team and the technique.They are doing it in order to gain mastery over an open source technology/platform. They want to get better at the software component that they are building. They also have a sense of purpose in that they are contributing to the society at large and will potentially be used by a large user base.

The book “The India Way” explains the sources of Indian success and how a country with a lot of challenges with transparency, efficiency, grinding poverty and adult literacy managed to make a huge progress in last decades.

The India Way is about survival, winning against the odds, about ‘jugaad’ (manage in spite of lack of resources) and ‘adjust kar lenge’ (adjust and accommodate)

The message from Indian leaders to the world is surprisingly “human” and explains:

• How to engage with employees in a holistic way
• How to improvise and adapt
• Identifying products with compelling value
• Broad mission and purpose (beyond profit)

Can this model be adopted elsewhere? Most likely not. The authors express these doubts themselves – these concepts are deeply rooted in the culture however American leaders should at least take a few lessons from “The India Way” – limit the excess of their model and learn to act more responsible towards the society.

I must say I really like the India way and this book completely changed my view on Indian society and companies. The world would definitely be a better place if leaders allover the World listened to the advice from India and used it.

Leslaw

Here is a review of one of the books on “how” to balance. The author argues that the balance is a myth and that we need to look for satisfaction in both. The summary review gets at this.

http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog/2011/10/worklife_balance.html

Many Silicon Valley companies are known for their strict hiring standards, which include only hiring from a short-list of the top schools. Some companies have created a new strategy that circumvents this old method along with the costly salaries. IGN Entertainment is one of the first companies to spearhead a program, Code Foo, that looks beyond the resume to find potentially successful programmers. Read more about it here: Silicon Valley’s New Hiring Strategy. While this method does level-out the playing field for individuals who are self-taught, it seems to be a better fit for left-brained skills like programming.

kristine

From the urban design perspective, extremely related with our class. (not sure if I can make it after class though).

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http://www.spur.org/events/calendar/future-workplace-0

In recent decades, the corner office has diminished in importance as communal desks have increased and work settings have evolved. Many workers and occupations are no longer tied to an office. How are these changes affecting the culture of the workplace? How do they change how we design buildings? And perhaps most importantly, what do they mean for the future of cities and suburbs and the quest for locating jobs in places that attract top talent? Join workplace strategists Randy Howder and Laura Crescimano from Gensler as they share insights from their recent paper and SPUR’s broader Future of Work project

A recent article about personal IT technology at work of the Economist got me think about how this trend changes workplace innovation (http://www.economist.com/node/21531112). As the article says, people use more and more their personal IT devices for their work. Companies, especially professional service firms, allow access to business applications more and more as the diagram in the article indicates.

How does the trend of using personal devices for work impact workplace innovation? I think it accelerates the speed of workplace innovation because the trend makes it easy to work regardless of locations using their personal computers and mobile devices. In addition, this trend will help lower the boundary between work and life by using same physical tools for work and life.