Organisational change

A couple of weeks back I (Gary Hamel) provided you with a synopsis of Vineet Nayar's new book, "Employees First, Customers Second," which has been recently published by Harvard Business School Press. In it, Vineet, CEO of HCL Technologies, talks about the progress his company has made in making managers more accountable to those on the front lines. Having posted my summary, I invited you to submit your questions to Vineet, and many of you did, along with plenty of piquant comments. Herewith, Vineet's reply. He begins by providing a bit of context, and then takes on a few of the most-asked queries.

"We're shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business."

Was there more to Mark Hurd's exit from HP last week than the claims of sexual harassment and expense code improprieties? In his Talking Business column in Friday's New York Times, Joe Nocera digs deeper into the reasons for the decision by HP's board to send their CEO packing. Hurd led a remarkable turnaround at what became the world's biggest computer company under his stewardship, making HP what Fortune write Adam Lashinsky called "the benchmark for efficiency in an industry known more for its whiz-bang appeal than its operational excellence." So why was the board quick to end his tenure?

Technology has dramatically changed our world. However, most often, these changes were not planned for or expected. In a similar way, when we try using technology to drive change, results are in general highly unpredictable.

"Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great. Technology can accelerate a transformation, but technology cannot cause a transformation." Jim Collins. Good to Great.

In life and in business, agility is a major advantage. However, in life it seems to come more or less naturally, while in business it seems an impossible dream. Some thoughts on change.

t took decades to build the managerial foundations of the modern industrial enterprise, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries-and it's going to take time for today's management pioneers to lay the groundwork for Management 2.0. These trailblazers need our constructive criticism and encouragement, and we should take time to provide it-because we all have a stake in their success.

There have been a lot of great summaries of what was discussed at last week's Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston. But for me, the most interesting topic was one that was not discussed: Culture. That's a big change.

In order to really achieve great things, we sometimes have to take a step back. We have to reconsider our options. Great things rarely come naturally. They are planned. The same goes in the social enterprise.

After having participated in about 15 different re-design projects over the years, one key observation is that the complexity of the re-design challenge often exceeds the ability of individual managers and teams. There are simply too many known and unknown variables and too many shifting parameters for the human brain to make logical and consistent decisions. At the same time, I have observed the relative scarcity of analytical tools. Critical decisions affecting thousands of employees are sometimes based largely on intuitive reasoning.

While revelling about the marvels of a given tool, we often tend to forget that every tool will be used 'in context' and that, in most cases, the presence of the right context will prove to be more important than the choice of the right tool. Also in a network economy, this rule still holds.

Number of followers, connections, reputation, influence... they all become increasingly important social metrics. However, are we measuring the right things?

Design thinking is the new mantra. Redesigning the enterprise and our society. But will it succeed where so many other approaches have failed?

We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces - places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates.

I'm a big fan of New Yorker cartoons. There's usually at least one in every issue that provokes a wry smile or a wince of self-recognition. While I've never actually participated in the magazine's weekly caption competition, I occasionally gin up a prospective entry. Last week, the contest featured a drawing of a couple sitting in a living room. The husband (perhaps?) was perusing a newspaper on the sofa while his wife lounged in a nearby armchair. She was a mermaid-naked from the waist up, her large flipper resting demurely on the floor. With her head angled towards her companion and her mouth open in mid-sentence, I imagined her to be saying: "After ten years, I think you could have learned to scuba dive," or "Hiking in the Alps again? I thought we could take a beach holiday this year."

Dear World Leaders,\nThis relationship isn't working out. Its time for us to explore other government opportunities. We've tried to make it work. But it's not us - it's you (really).

Do we all look at the world in the same way? Hardly. We can each look at the same scene and focus our attention on something completely different. Individual idiosyncrasies definitely play a role, but broader patterns of perception are at work as well. Are certain patterns of perception more or less helpful in these rapidly changing times? Most definitely - in fact, they may determine who succeeds and who fails.

Earlier this week, Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup oDesk announced a new service called oDesk Staffing, which gives U.S.-based freelancers access to benefits (including health coverage, retirement plans and education savings accounts), along with other services. This move by oDesk, which describes itself as a marketplace for work, is a smart one, as it positions the company to take advantage of a major societal shift.

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than on their behaviour taken separately - Russell Ackoff

I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me.