We’re waiting on the proofs for The Cognitive Enterprise (Bob Lewis and Scott Lee, Meghan-Kiffer Press). It should be available in a week or two. To whet your appetite, here are some excerpts from the Introduction:
People, process, technology.
When running a business we have to think in these terms, or so we’re told by those who tell us such things. We’ve said such things ourselves.
But while they say “people” first, most often these business experts actually put process in first place. Technology comes in second, playing an important supporting role.
People, when they finally make an appearance … mostly represent irritating contributors to organizational change resistance. Something that must be overcome.
It’s really PROCESS, Technology, people.
While dehumanizing, this perspective worked pretty well for the industrial age of business …
Organizations “designed by geniuses to be run by idiots” was pretty much the game plan for the industrial age. Instead of operating through practices that were as smart as the smartest practitioner, businesses operated according to processes designed with a focus on simplification and standardization. These aren’t bad things in themselves, but they’re unfortunate in how they encourage employees to disengage their brains when they enter the building.
Businesses built to this model — call it the “industrial model” — are anything but cognitive. They’re nothing like an entity that pays attention to the world around it, evaluates itself and its changing situation, and continually adapts …
Even companies that aren’t in the Industrial business of creating lots of identical copies of things have, to their detriment, adopted practices designed for companies that are, because that’s “best practice” — a phrase that should, in your loyal authors’ opinion, be taken out and shot …
For more and more businesses, the industrial perspective and the hidden assumptions it rests on are obsolete. A constellation of forces are making them an impediment to success …
Before we get to that, there’s one hidden assumption that has to go by the wayside immediately. It’s the assumption that businesses are just like people only bigger …
They aren’t. Nor are they merely the sum of the individual human beings who work in and for them, any more than you are merely the sum of your intestines, spleen, brain, and so on …
Human beings are more than their component parts. Businesses are, too. They’re an artificial life form, created by human beings but non-human in their anatomy, physiology, and behavior. Among the differences, two stand out:
- Humans are presumptively moral. Businesses are demonstrably amoral. We rightly assume most of the people around us, most of the time, aren’t going to behave in ways that are excessively nasty … the systems set up to enforce [our laws] are scaled to the assumption that people who violate them are the exception.
Businesses, in contrast, have as the bedrock principle of their moral code their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders …
- Human beings think before making decisions. Businesses, in contrast, aren’t intrinsically cognitive entities …
The closest equivalents to human-style thinking businesses have are the governance mechanisms that in principle make some business decision-making independent of the foibles of the individual human beings involved.
But governance is often window-dressing, with actual decision-making the result of horse-trading among the human beings who are supposed to be acting in the corporation’s best interests. It’s also commonly slow and cumbersome, unsurprising given that the fundamental building block of most governance is the committee …
But enough of that … our goal isn’t to bore you to death. It’s to provide practical guidance on making an organization behave more like an intelligent, purposeful organism and less like a directionless ecosystem.
Consider the difference between an organism and an ecosystem and it will be clear. Organisms act as a whole. As entities they make decisions, whether they’re as simple as an amoeba or as complex as Homo sapiens.
Ecosystems are just as complex as organisms … more … but don’t act with purpose … any “decision” an ecosystem makes is the accidental direction set through the “invisible hand” of all the plants and critters that live in it.
Most large enterprises are more like ecosystems than organisms, hence the old phrase, “It’s a jungle out there” …
A cognitive enterprise is one that acts more like an organism — one where business decisions are about the success of the business in its environment.
The point and purpose of this book is … to make the business, if not truly cognitive in the sense of being an entity capable of human-style thinking, at least an entity that mimics it in rudimentary but useful ways.
That’s what this book is about: How the hidden assumptions that led to the wholesale dehumanization of large enterprises are less and less valid, what the new circumstances are that are supplanting them, and what to do about it all.
* * *
Sorry. I know book excerpts don’t make for the best reading. But my wife and I took a road trip this weekend and I didn’t have time to write a real column.
Bob, looking forward to reading these ideas!!????
“Businesses, in contrast, have as the bedrock principle of their moral code their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.”
That, of course is part of the problem. Businesses should have as their bedrock principle to provide goods and/or services that people want and find useful. If they do that, they have a good chance of rewarding their shareholders.
You’ll like the chapter on finance, mission, and business model.
I couldn’t figure out how to comment on the ManagementSpeak itself, so I’ll put my thoughts here.
I have alternate translations for “I have too much on my plate to take a sick day.”
* “I am not only a martyr, but a martyr of the most miserable sort.”
* “Misery loves company; so if I have to suffer this miserable cold then I would love to spread it and the misery to the rest of the office.”
* “Since I am sick and miserable anyway, might as well be sick and miserable at the office, where I can pretend that I am working.”
* “What is this thing you call ‘telecommuting?’ Sounds like a communist plot.”
For future ManagementSpeak items, if you have some common PHB sayings that need translating, you could post them and ask for suggested translations. Maybe like a contest (“You’ll win a free subscription to KJR!”), or post all the accurate and amusing translations 🙂
I’m looking forward to whatever else you have to say on this topic.
I will disagree with you, a bit, on the organism/ecosystem thought, which I think is a good one. My second opinion is that a vertebrate organism can also be accurately viewed as an ecosystem, but one where its component systems have 2 things that systems of systems like the process priority systems you write about, don’t have:
1. A “Stop” button (or deconstructor, in programmer language).
2. Internal access to that Stop button.
So, its internal systems can, generally, only directly strive for perpetuation, whether that perpetuation is dysfunctional or not. So, external “push-back” is the only thing that significantly changes it, it seems to me. Not a trivial human problem, but an important one to take on.