Tooling for the future business

Source: Flickr

As per Epsilon Industries' Glossary: "Tooling is another name for both the process of creating the molds and other tools necessary for producing parts and the actual molds". And this is exactly what I am trying to do right now, tooling to prepare our clients for the future of business.

I have been looking out for and/or working on the various edge systems that are not yet mainstream in Business IT but will eventually be. I have seen many of them work for my employer and there are many others that I wish they would. But implementation is a pain. I need my patience.

However I was working with very many disparate pieces of the puzzles in different synapses in my brain and they are not yet completely patched up. But I think I have come a long way in the past couple of months than in the past three years to grasping much of what will be required.

These learnings, insights & inspirations have come to me from very different sources, proving to me at a very personal level that The Power of Pull is right, I did stumble upon how to mold Serendipity.

So without much ado let me come to the crux of this post. I shared some of my learnings with the technologists in Bangalore, one of the three geographic spikes for IT technologists along with Bay Area in the US and Tel Aviv in Israel. We had all gotten together at a barcamp, an unconference, mid of this month and shared many insights with each other. These are the kinds of places where serendipity happens and I wanted people to have that from my session too. And this is what I presented at the session:

Institutional & business model innovation for the technologists

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

Each slide in it is worth a post, but the time I had was mere 45 minutes. I could barely touch upon them all. But these are actually to rejig your brain, not to teach you. Hope it gives you serendipity too. Let me know. :)

Future of Work?

Source: Flickr

Millenials, or rather any generation, are a product of their era - especially the one they witnessed/endured during their teens. And this then manifests itself back on the world when they enter the work world.

Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com joked earlier this week that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. :)

In a similar vein, 21 year old CEO of scvngr.com, a social/location based gaming & gaming platform start-up, who bets the future on game mechanics, stated he has never known a world without social media.

But the Millennials the world over are not the same, though much more similar than the earlier generations, thanks to digital communications that they were born into.

Sharing, at least the water cooler variety, has been a cultural edifice in the west. Not so in India. The age old Hitopadesha's claim that the wealth of knowledge is the only one that grows when spent notwithstanding the equivalent of boomer generation in India abhorred sharing. Especially the bad news. Ditto with the elder Gen X too. The Millennials are much more prone to sharing, may be way too much. Much to the chagrin of the CIOs.

So IT managers used to not hearing upfront about the bad news from their offshore vendors and acclimatized to it might have a pleasant surprise when they start hearing more news of all kinds from the millennials getting into the team lead roles at offshore. Also, brace yourselves for some 'no's and challenges sent back your way. And it is not a bad thing. :)

Add to these the fact that as knowledge workers we are all now arriving at the gates of a post scarcity economy. Information is just a click away. Experience curve (as defined by Boston Consulting Group) tapers off pretty fast too. Collaboration, which can help beat the tapering experience curve, is second nature to the Millennials. Company boundaries can't stop them from reaching out to their networks & communities that extend well beyond those corporate figments of imagination called firewalls.

Sorry to jot down some random thoughts and add to the confusion. But I recommend The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison if you want to discombobulate and look at what the future might hold and how we can be prepared for it.

Of Gurus, Pundits, Mantras and Social CRM

From Darkness to Light.  Source: Flickr

Jacob Morgan, Principal of Chess Media Group who taught me to eat with chop sticks and introduced me to Sushi, has a personal rant about social CRM gurus & guidance out there on CMS Wire. I tried posting a comment but it went into moderation. Don't know when & if it will be approved. Either ways I wanted to share my thoughts and troubles here too.

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Every time someone uses the term Guru I am sure a billion people die a bit.

FWIW:

Guru comes from two words in Sanskrit - Gu & Ru ... quoting from Advayataraka Upanishad 14—18, verse 5

The syllable gu means shadows
The syllable ru, he who disperses them,
Because of the power to disperse darkness
the guru is thus named.

Generally speaking, it is used to refer to a person who guides you, a teacher.

A Pundit OTOH means a learned man, a scholar.

HTH.

As for your points about lofty phrases like “well you can’t be social externally until you are social internally,” or “you have to change your corporate culture first,” or “we need to spend a few months researching and developing a long term strategy before we can do anything”, these are phrases taken out of context. Mere chants of sound bites without understanding the meaning of the 'mantra'.

BTW, 'mantra' comes from Sanskrit root words Man & Tra which loosely translates to 'mind tool'. Though a heavy emphasis is laid on the sounds (vibrations), the meaning is equally important. But again, as with the word Guru, the meaning is lost in translation and people just concentrate on the mindless (& mind numbing) chanting.

The phrases you quote are very god examples of sound bites which have been chanted endlessly without understanding their true meaning/worth.

Go not to the person who merely uses the right sound bites, go to the person who explains you the meaning behind them, paints the complete picture, who can take from the 'here' to the 'there'.

Leading in an increasingly networked world, personal notes

Source: Flickr

There are a lot of books and research studies coming up about leading in the new reality & future. The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel & co, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Ranjay Gulati, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li, The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media by Francois Gossieaux & Ed Moran are a few examples. Thought I would share some of my own thoughts from my experiences, observations, readings & learnings.

Within a traditional organization with hierarchies, many (most?) managers tend to use their positional power to get things done from others rather than influence/motivate/collaborate with them to get the tasks done. Did you just say "What? Collaborate with my subordinates? They better do what is assigned to them.", welcome to the flux! :)

The later becomes more pronounced in matrix organizations where a person could be reporting into multiple people. Matrix organizations were built to break the silos & be able to be more innovative & responsive to the market.

Futurists keep talking about flat organizations - an hierarchy-less anarchy for the traditionalists. Most of the discussions I have come across about a flat organization is built around two loci:

• better collaboration within the organization to be more response & innovative - ever heard the "real time is not fast enough" mantra, its in vogue of late?
• because the millennials cannot be bothered with hierarchy

I do not think we will see the breakdown of hierarchies en masse automagically in the next 5-10 years nor will the silos dissolve away completely, the jingoism & rhetorics of the hyperbole spewers not withstanding. Examples like Zappos will crop up now and then, but we need to understand, realize & accept that some modicum of hierarchy & silos will always be required. Zappos does have a CEO in Tony Hsieh.

Hierarchies & silos feed on expertise and specialization (respectively?), both of which are not stuff we can do away with. At least as long as humans cannot become jack of all trades and master of them too. However the times are a-changing.

The kind of rigid hierarchies & silos we see / have seen in the past two centuries were formed because of the coming of the new mega enterprises that was focused on mass production and mass marketing and pushing merchandise & services on to the consumers at very low costs. Need for innovation and staying ahead of the competition, etc. needed the creation of matrix organizations where specialists & experts from across the organizations came together for the duration of the projects they were entrusted. These teams would disband & regroup with a different set of people & a different set of goals/objectives & time lines.

Project Management became the need of the hour. So we saw general/departmental managers as well as project managers in organizations. These matrix structures are seen in the most feverishly innovating industries like the hi-tech, electronics & software. Or even the pharma industries where they are in an endless pursuit of the discovery of ever new molecules for fighting diseases which we did not even know existed a century ago.

However, the management style of the individuals - the general/departmental manager or the project manager - still belongs, for the most part, to the two categories I stated at the beginning of the post - positional, influential/motivational. Or a combination of the two, which might mean situational leadership qualities.

With the increase in the number of generation Y/millenials/digital natives (as opposed to digital migrants) people in the workforce and the virtualization of the workplace due to trends like work from home or outsourcing & offshoring, etc. the ability to leverage ones positional power diminishes. Positional power decreases as is in a matrix organization, outsourcing diminishes it even further. But enter crowdsourcing or open innovation, the positional power is for all practical purposes zero.

Linus Torvalds holds no positional power in the development of Linux kernel like the product managers at most software product companies like Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle or any of the umpteen other software companies would. Linus influences the development heavily & motivates the developers. He is a god for most aspiring code contributors and many would gladly die on his behalf in the notorious flame wars rampant in the open source communities where fights (debates) erupt around very technical nitty-gritties. But then again, even Linus would have to convince everybody of the technical soundness of his approach/thoughts to muster support.

Take heart, this is not going to be the immediate future for all of you. Generally speaking, the more innovative you are or want to be, the more matrix or flatter your organization is or going to be.

There are a few skills that you could leverage irrespective of whether you are going to end up in a matrix or flat organization:

• Share your knowledge. And not just you, encourage your teams & networks to do so too. Knowledge is the only wealth that grows when you distribute it, both for the provider as well as the receiver. Think about it. Its an age old saying in India, but true nonetheless.
• Resuse. Do not fall into the "not invented here" syndrome or be delusional in thinking you will get more brownie points, from whoever you long to get them, if you are able to build stuff from the ground up. Its inefficient, wastes time and money. Surely you have heard about not having to reinvent the wheel? Well of course we are assuming here that people have been encouraged to share and thus a body of work & knowledge is already available for you to tap into.
• Mentor and reverse mentor. Coach your subordinates or people in your network who are not at the same expertise level as you. It need not be a specialty, which might actually require training not mere coaching. At the same time, be open to newer ideas and ways of working. Learn from the others in your team or network. They might be younger to you or lower in the corporate rungs. But they might still have expertise on some aspect that you might not, say effectively using the social media / social networking sites. Of course it presupposes the fact that you have surrounded yourself with people who have diverse expertise if not specialties as well as different way of looking at things than yours.

Are there any other traits you have found useful, effective or efficient? Please do share with us in the comments. :)

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