Business Quests in the Information Age

In memoriam - Jef Raskin (1943-2005)

Jef Raskin, the creator or the Macintosh and the man in quest of high-quality design in user interfaces, passed aways on February 26th. I read his book "The Humane Interface", which offers fresh views and great insights into the design of software interfaces. Great piece of work. My admiration for Raskin is HUGE because he had this original way of his to look at interface design in a critical manner, offering alternatives that could just make everyone happier with software. So I just wanted to thank and pay tribute to this extraordinary creator today. In admiring memory.

Still valid, especially in infotech

"A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem." - Albert Einstein

The legacy of bureaucracy

Bureaucracy assumes that the people factor can be eliminated from the organizational equation, that people will simply do as told in procedure documents, that rules will apply by virtue of simply being written down somewhere, that the threat of punishment and promise of reward will be enough to convince each individual to set aside common sense and apply bureaucratic wisdom... In reality though... People are people and cannot be forced to behave as machines. A machine-person lacks Harmony in my opinion and Life will always make them pay the price of lack of Harmony in some shape or form. But again, that is just my opinion, not a universal truth.
Harmony is one of my quests in business. Actually I find information and communication technologies, the Internet in particular, to be extremely harmonious. And please note that for me harmony does not mean purity, perfection or "excellence".  Imperfection can be very harmonious. I won't go into that here, if you don't mind...

The information age brings tools and methods that make it possible for human activities to be managed in a productive, efficient and controlled manner without the major overhead of bureaucratic practices. These tools and methods enable the creation of agile organizations that are able to engage in collaborative projects and activities to produce more value than bureaucracies. And I don't think the question is large vs. small companies, because a large company can be operated as a portfolio of small businesses as GE or 3M tend to show. Of course, to be successful with such a model a large company will have to focus on its edges, invest in its customer-facing people and give more power to the field than to headquarters or at least force headquarters people to spend a sizable proportion of their time in field contexts.

I believe in agile organizations which:

• put a premium on talent, flexibility and autonomy, managing their human potential as a strategic asset and investing heavily in the development of their carefully selected people
   
• strive for balance and harmony in their development: sales and engineering, long term and short term initiatives, tactical and strategic aspects...
   
• manage their set of internal and external rules to meet the specific requirements of each stage of their growth
• nurture their relations and ties to the "outside world" and relay market impulses to all relevant people inside the organisation
• consciously move from one stage of development to the next in an inclusive process that makes use of all of the existing components of the organisation and brings them to their next stage of existence
• have fun doing what they are doing, thus transforming each second of their lives into a moment of art and creation
   

And, yes it is a promise, I will write a piece about the importance of harmony in business.

In praise of art & creation

I took a few days off to visit a few friends in Vienne, France and in Switzerland. Now is this a beautiful country! We put on our snowshoes and spent a good part of last Saturday wandering in a stunning snow-covered landscape one hour drive from Lausanne. It felt good and I strongly recommend it to anyone who needs to breathe some fresh air and take a good break from a hectic modern life. It's a good form of "deceleration" for me.

Well, to tell you the truth this was not a "complete" break for me, as I did a bit of work visiting my favourite blogs and adding some content on this blog. I actually spent enough time blogging for my good friend Arnaud Du Jardin to sketch me as I am intently blogging. Many thanks to you Arnaud, not only for your lovely creation, but also because you made me realise that art and creation can really be everywhere in our everyday lives. I am in bewildered awe every single time I am lucky enough to discover a piece of creation that moves me. This one does, not because I happen to be the subject, but rather because it came as a complete surprise in the middle of a beautiful Sunday afternoon and made me realise each second of Life can be art and creation.

I certainly believe there is an aesthetic dimension to my professional activity, seeking Harmony in the production of my deliverables for my customers. Actually working in IT / tech projects I like it when methods and approaches are humane rather than procedural and robotic. That is probably one of the reasons why I endorsed the agile manifesto. And because I believe that the information age is simply the last nail in the coffin of bureaucratic organization of human activities, I chose to devote time (therefore life-energy) to developing and refining tools for organizational design modelled after living organisms. In a sense, that is also what I mean when I say that it is people that make the world go round (or not). This too is a manifestation of Harmony for me.

Edge of Chaos

Last year I bought and read "Surfing the Edge of Chaos" for a paper I was writing. I am currently reading it again as part of personal research on organisational design for the information age. I strongly recommend it if you are interested in a fresh way of looking at companies and business.

This book made me realise why organigrams, workflows, procedures and working instructions are sometimes so difficult to really implement in a company. I personally believe that the more a company makes use of information processing devices, the more it allows its people to interact in novel ways that often do not fit in traditional organizational molds. I even remember one of my employers in the business of payment cards (a priceless experience...) who used to distribute hard copies of the company's organigram once a month. These documents where no sooner printed than they were out of date and on top of that they did not reflect the real dynamics of decision making (or decision non-making sometimes). On decisions, you can read another piece I published earlier.

So for a professional manager, I guess one of the questions to be examined is "how do I organize that part of the business for which I am in charge so as to fully leverage dynamic interactions within my teams and with the rest of the company in accomplishing my business objectives?" And this is where it may be useful to think of a company not as a set of boxes or matrix-structures or silos, but perhaps as a set of agents that operate following certain rules and who interact in various ways to assemble as project teams or temporary workgroups and disband once the mission is accomplished.

On decisions

Making a decision is often a difficult exercise. I personally found it easier to decide in business contexts than in personal matters. Perhaps it is so because it is easier for me to have "detached involvement", as Jagdish Parikh puts it, in business rather than in my personal life. Sometimes in the past I felt unable to decide because the availability of all options and possibilities was more important to me than the execution of a decision. Sometimes marvelling before the potential of all the possible courses of action was more rewarding than chosing one path... Perhaps it was the sheer fact of eliminating all other possibilities but the one selected that caused me to feel ill at ease. Anyhow, I sometimes delayed decisions so much that I eventually lost the window of opportunity and therefore decisions were forced on me by other people or by situations. My conclusions and my lessons are that:

1. it is impossible not to decide;
2. if I don't make my decision, then a decision will make me;
3. a course of action imposed by situations or other people is less good for me than a course of action I have selected, even if my choice turns out to be wrong.

Well, these are just my lessons, not a universal truth. I just felt like sharing that with you today.

Is Skype great or what?

I just LOVE Skype. I started using their service late 2003 or early 2004, I can't recall.

Their ability to make things easy and straightforward is one of their biggest strengths. No nonsense. And when Skype became capable of handling calls on legacy telephony services, I was stunned with their design of the software: they were able to make full use of my existing experience and user education with a phone!

I know this may sound naive, but still I wanted to praise those guys for their excellent design. Small "details" were clearly thought through and everything works smoothly, including when I am calling a service provider who greets me with an IVR system. Great work! Design is great at Skype and marketing communication is as great: I just love their counters on their web site with numbers of downloads and minutes served.

Skype is stunning. Praise to their people for their accomplishment. Yet another indication that it's all about talent!

People make the world go round (or not)

Of daring ideas

"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game." - Goethe

Teaching is similar to specifying

Over the past couple of weeks I spent some time training a student-trainee who is about to graduate in marketing. She is going to work with Alter Eco, a software service company I support, in the field of marketing and sales. So, providing some training was an important first step for her to be able to be part of the team in a productive manner. That is how I came to think about the many similarities between teaching a subject to someone and building functional specs in the context of a development project.

When I want to teach something to somebody, there are several steps I have to go through, which are essentially the same as those I have to execute when discussing functional and non-functional requirements of a business with a delivery team:

1. command -  my own understanding of the subject must be crystal clear or at least I have to be disciplined enough to say "I don't know and I will look for answers" when I don't know instead of making erroneous assumptions;
2. see the world with the learner's eyes - I must put myself back in the situation I was in when the subject matter was fresh knowledge and I had to apply it step by step, because otherwise I will just omit things that are essential and now seem so obvious they shoudl not even be mentionned;
3. use the learner's language - when presenting the topic, I must use words and images that have meaning for the people I am working with;
4. seek feedback - it is necessary to check on a regular basis that the message is clear and to invite comments and questions. When a question is interesting I must seize the opportunity it represents to provide information as it is requested because that's when attention is at its peak. That is even if answering the question totally changes my game plan for the training session;
5. use metaphors and stories - metaphors and real-life stories are just great tools. That is one of the reasons why I like so much the principles of the Agile Manifesto;
6. involve the audience - each time a logical unit of the training has been delivered and discussed, it is great to invite the audience to sum-up the points that where presented;
7. focus on exchange - as a general rule, training is about exchange not about a monologue... which alos has the benefit of keeping everyone alert. So I kind of like situations where the "learner" ends up teaching stuff to the "trainer" or helps him / her see new connections between ideas and topics. Which is another reason why agile methods make so much sense.

So, I guess that poor training skills could be one of the reasons why there have been horror stories at times with bespoke development projects: somebody who is a functional expert in a given field for which a software tool needs to be built is not necessarily very good at presenting his activity... Then the question becomes: can a good "student" / "learner" / "investigator" / "analyst" ensure decent specifications are built by asking "the right" questions? I personally think so, but by now you must know I am a fan of questioning, a "questioning agent" if you will... Which explains the logo :-)

Of wisdom, philosophy and greatness

"Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children" - Khalil Gibran