“Human beings are social animals. We come together two by two in friendships and marriages; we form families and teams and the larger aggregations of practices, communities, societies, and nations. These groups assemble to achieve distinctive aims and to provide the satisfactions of sociability…Management thinkers, influenced by economists, have been slower to see the importance [...]
Author Archives: John
You Don’t Know What You Think You Know.
Remember the first time you rode a bike without help? When the steadying hand came off the seat or your training wheels were unscrewed and set aside for a future toddler? Remember what you were wearing? For me, it was a tweed suit, with shorts and a cap. And the hand coming off the [...]
Posted in Decision Science 3 Comments
In Pursuit of Coherence – Open Government and Thee
Perhaps the priority for Open Government is to aim for something beyond Openness. While the journalist may see utter value in openness (and I can talk about them right now, since they are busily crashing Wikileak servers); the citizen may not. To my ear, the Open Government elevator speech often takes more than a few [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
On Change, or Why They Hate You.
In a recent listserv conversation, someone asked a very reasonable question: What does the literature say about how change agents are received? This was in the context of knowledge management (KM), and the inquiry stemmed from an honest attempt to understand the hostility experienced from some in the workforce upon being introduced to KM initiatives.
The [...]
Posted in Leadership 3 Comments
Hawk Method of Management
Let’s face it. You cannot truly measure employee output, once you are managing people who are not producing or processing widgets per hour – people we call, erroneously, “knowledge workers.” People who are useful and productive because of the relationships they maintain, the external sources they consult to solve problems, and the imagination they bring [...]
Posted in Leadership 1 Comment
Controlling the Invisible
Recently, I was engaged in a listserv conversation (remember those?) regarding the balance between standards-based enterprises and the need to engage creative talent who may bristle at standard processes. The conversation moved to the question of new processes and standards that respected the nature of complex organizations (rather than early 20th century bureaucracies), and I offered [...]
Posted in Complexity, Complexity and HR, Governance 1 Comment
5 Minutes Regarding U.S. Education
I was privileged recently to present at an “IgniteDC” venue, an interesting format where you provide 20 slides for a five minute talk. The slides are automatically advanced every fifteen seconds. The results can be interesting, occasionally disjointed, and occasionally memorable.
I don’t know where mine landed, frankly, but it led to great conversations [...]
Posted in Education System 6 Comments
How Will The IC Harness Magic?
In reading about innovation, we have many marvelous examples where successful firms incorporated technology by changing their business model. Rather than digitizing paper, they considered the intersection of organizational imperatives and technology and considered how the business may be done differently.
Some firms (and Agencies!) went a bit far. I am still haunted by the story [...]
Posted in National Security 1 Comment
Don’t Connect the Dots, Watch the Noise
Originally appeared in Inside Knowledge Magazine 10 Sep 2008, Vol 12, Issue 1.
On 12 September, 2001, I received an e-mail from the CEO of my company (a federal contracting firm located just outside Washington DC). As F-16s continued their combat air patrols over my neighbourhood, I read, paraphrasing: ‘John, yesterday [9-11] was a failure of knowledge [...]
Posted in Governance, National Security 5 Comments
Shun The frumious Bandersnatch!
Words mean things. One of the more obnoxious statements of the obvious, and yet I find myself saying it more often these days. The more I delve into understanding complexity theory, network science, and struggle to understand cognition and neuroscience, the more frustrated I get when people use terms in ways appear at odds with [...]
Posted in Complexity 1 Comment
