All Posts in Career Management

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

No, no, no. I wasn’t talking about Social Security and credit card numbers. It’s all the stuff companies claim is uniquely valuable, that has never occurred to competitors, and that would never occur to them unless and until someone sent them a PowerPoint deck.

Last week’s KJR made the case that most businesses have become so permeable that it’s a fact, not a problem, which means they have to deal with it, not solve it.

And further, that the best way to deal with permeability is to take advantage of it as a better path to profitability than trying to build ever-higher and thicker walls around the enterprise.

As all software testers know, good test plans include a plentiful portion of edge cases, so it isn’t surprising some correspondents expressed concern that KJR might take the position that corporations should relax their controls on information whose compromise could result in, for example, identity theft.

These edge cases are good tests, only not of the overall principle. Customer identification and privacy information? Protect it to the best of your ability. Short-term plans where whoever gets to market first wins big? Protect those to the best of your ability, too.

The process you use for purchase-order/invoice reconciliation, or, as Jimmy John’s notoriously seems to think needs protecting, for making a ham and cheese sandwich?

Uh … no.

As pointed out last week, many business theorists and leaders, for several decades now, have considered employees to be fungible commodities, to be traded into and out of the pool of available talent without compunction or regret.

But when they’re traded, they take their knowledge with them — an apparently unintended consequence of this employment philosophy.

Shared knowledge is at the heart of the Cognitive Enterprise. One consequence of replacing a long-term employee who has a vast fund of institutional knowledge is …

Well, it depends. If the employee’s replacement is quite a lot less experienced, or if there is no replacement, the enterprise’s total shared-knowledge account will have been diminished.

If, on the other hand, the business replaces the departing employee with one who has just as large a fund of institutional knowledge, or larger, only it’s a fund accumulated in different institutions, then the enterprise’s shared-knowledge account will increase.

It’s permeability in action, even without any electronic knowledge sharing. Imagine the company chart of accounts had a way to track shared knowledge. Think its executives might make different staffing decisions?

It would be an intriguing exercise in finance, figuring out how to tote up all of the valuable knowledge held in an organization. The trickiest part wouldn’t be how to put a number on it. Not that this would be easy, understand, but given how many non-disclosure agreements claim that revealing any of it would cause irreparable harm, you’d think someone would know how big a number “irreparable” is, at least approximately.

Not to keep you in suspense, here’s what would be the trickiest part: In a cognitive enterprise, knowledge is widely shared — it’s what the whole organization knows that counts, not just what an individual who works there knows.

Which gets to one of my own trade secrets, which I’m allowed to share with you because it was knowledge I had that preceded my joining Dell Services: No matter what the challenge or issue, there are employees who know all about it and what to do about it. Their problem, and one of my best ways of earning my keep as a consultant, is that until my team and I show up, nobody has any interest in what they have to say.

To be fair, after my teams and I show up and do listen to them, putting it all together into a nice, coherent narrative and plan, very often client leadership doesn’t want to hear it from us, either. It is, I guess, cognition prevention at the highest levels of leadership.

This is also why embracing permeability is a safe knowledge management tactic: If your company’s stuff makes it into, for example, a LinkedIn discussion forum where the employees of other companies read all about it, you have little to worry about.

The odds are long nobody will listen to them after your employees have made them smarter. If you’re smart, you won’t duplicate that mistake.

So stop trying to protect your own IP and learn from all those other folks who are sharing theirs.

Once more thing. If you think this week’s KJR is worth sharing, please do so. Just make sure to respect the copyright notice at the bottom when you do.

Comments

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

He was a screamer.

Every so often I run across one of these — someone who gets ahead by throwing public tantrums. Strangely, some companies do little or nothing to discourage this behavior. Why? On the rare occasion I’m in a position to ask, I’m told the screamer gets results or some such nonsense: Any results I’ve seen in these circumstances happen in spite of the outbursts, not because of them.

If you disagree, a question: Given a choice, would the best talent in your industry work in an environment like this? And the best talent always has a choice.

Screamers display their temper to intimidate. It’s a way to get their own way, which is, I strongly suspect, their definition of “good.”

And those on the receiving end don’t even have to be intimidated for the outbursts to be effective. They’re unpleasant, and most of us, most of the time, are willing to make concessions to avoid unpleasantness.

Anyway, screamers are merely the tip of the culture-of-fear iceberg. There was, for example, this response to a standard question I ask everyone I interview during the information-gathering phase of any organizational effectiveness assessment … always, by the way, with a promise of confidentiality:

Congratulations! You’re now in charge of the whole company. It’s just for one day, though, so you only get to make one change. My question: What would that one change be?

In most organizations the answers are about reducing the height and impact of organizational siloes, adding more staff because the workload exceeds current capacity, fixing a bespoke interface tangle … that sort of thing.

When I asked this question in a fear-driven enterprise, one respondent answered, “You’ll have to ask my manager. This is above my pay grade.” His answer should have been, “I’d get the company to buy me a spine.”

Then he complained to his manager about my having asked him such an inappropriate question. It created quite a ruckus.

There is, to be sure, more than one kind of culture of fear. Perhaps the most pernicious is the kind of fear that stomps out initiative. Dig into what drives this sort of culture and you’ll find the fear goes all the way to the top, with members of the executive suite more concerned about what might go wrong than about what might go right — who pay more attention to risk than to opportunity.

You have, for example, undoubtedly run across the phrase “analysis paralysis.” It’s unfortunately catchy, because it obscures what’s really going on. What’s paralyzing the organization aren’t the endless analyses. It’s what’s driving decision-makers to ask for them: Fear that their decision might not lead to wealth and glory and nothing but wealth and glory.

“So far we’ve asked how male customers who are 6′ 2″ or taller, between the ages of 21 and 40, and are in committed relationships will respond to this, but we haven’t looked at the impact of incipient male pattern baldness. Go back and run the numbers.”

Even worse, and even more prevalent, are those companies that make decisions based solely on measurable financial return on investment. They’re worse because they’ve carefully organized their priorities so as to avoid investing in competitive advantage: If every project has to pay off, right now, competitive advantage isn’t even a subject.

To illustrate the point: You’ve read about the Internet of Things (IoT). You conclude it’s real, and that it’s important: If your company adds intelligence to its products they’ll be more attractive than what’s currently available in the marketplace. The same is true of your competitors, and whoever gets there first wins.

But the company can’t just add smarts to the products themselves. IoT requires significant enhancements to the IT infrastructure as a prerequisite. Now’s the time to invest.

What’s the ROI? None. Beefing up the infrastructure is foundational. It’s the smart products that will drive ROI.

And even there, competitors will also pursue IoT-driven opportunities. So the most likely outcome is that the actual business benefit will be remaining even with the marketplace.

Sometimes, expending enormous effort so as to maintain your position is a difficult and valuable achievement, even though there’s no way to measure the value, only the difficulty. But a fear-driven enterprise will never make the effort. The result: It will fall even further behind.

The financial squeeze that results will have only one possible and inevitable effect:

Future decisions will be driven by even more fear.

Comments