All Posts in Organizational Effectiveness

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

If you blow enough smoke, you’ll convince a lot of people there’s a fire somewhere.

Last year, Bob Metcalfe and other pundits predicted the imminent collapse of the Internet. I, on the other hand, courageously predicted its non-collapse, and even more courageously endorsed the free-market economic model on which it is based.

The collapse contingent cites big outages last year, especially at Netcom and AOL, as evidence of the coming collapse. Their recommendation: throw a big party for the Internet’s inventors, thank them, shake their hands, and send them home so professionals can take over the job, replacing the current “anarchy” with modern central administration.

Here’s where I get lost. Netcom and AOL are private corporations operating centrally planned and administered networks. Both suffered big, noisy, noticeable outages. So to save the Internet from collapse, we want to centrally plan and administer it?

What am I missing? Most Americans think communism collapsed because big, centrally planned and managed economies don’t work. Most Americans are right. The Internet’s stability comes from its decentralized model. Rules are established centrally and kept simple – hence “Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and “Simple Mail Transport Protocol” (SMTP) – while implementation of the rules is decentralized.

(One other problem with the proposed solution: there are no other professionals to call in. Only the Internet’s designers and implementers have experience in designing, building and running a successful, global network that links millions of independent computers. Who else are you gonna call?)

Despite all this enjoyable gloating, I give Dr. Metcalfe a lot of credit for sticking his neck way out, and for making a self-preventing prophesy. When disaster fails to strike, very few people give credit to those who sounded the alarm. I wonder how much of last year’s investment in Internet capacity resulted from the publicity attending Bob’s predictions.

Any lessons for you in all this? Ya, you betcha, as we say in Minnesota. The Internet’s successful use of centralized rule-making and decentralized implementation, far from being anarchic, gives you a wonderful model for organizational design.

Awhile back one of my readers sent me Sahakian’s Rules (Corporate Partnering Institute, Skokie, IL, 1995). It’s worth buying. One entry: “In ancient times, in order to manage large masses of people in the battlefield, Commanders used gongs, banners and horns. If a plan of battle was not simple enough to communicate with gongs, banners, or horns, it was a bad battle plan.”

Manage your organization like the Internet, or like a Commander on an ancient battlefield: with simple, easily communicated rules, not close, central supervision.

One other useful lesson: when you manage, ignore currently fashionable theories, especially those that demonize some group that Isn’t You. The idea that current Internet management doesn’t hack it anymore comes from one such notion that I call the BIG/GAS theory (for “Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid”).

Yes, you can certainly find waste in government. Some comes from its sheer size, more comes from having lawyers (most of Congress) designing work processes, and much of the rest is unavoidable. (The military, for example, is staffed to conduct wars. When there’s no war, it’s over-staffed. Big deal.)

While government isn’t as good as it could be, the Internet’s history proves that BIG/GAS is just … vapor. In the 1960s visionaries in the academic and defense community created it. It’s been an international reality for decades.

In the 1980s the Graphic Communications Association (where, coincidentally, I worked for a few years) began creating the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Commercial publishers ignored it; the defense community embraced it as part of its Computer Aided Logistics System (CALS). Early in this decade, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (the international particle physics laboratory) adapted SGML to invented the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

And business finally caught on three years ago. BIG/GAS indeed.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Those who extol the virtues of small business often say that big businesses hold meetings to plan how they’re going to hold meetings.

Pretty funny stuff, huh?

I thought so too, until I attended eight half-day training sessions on group process dynamics and interaction management several years ago.

There’s some logic in doing this. In most big companies, employees attend a gaggle o’ meetings every week, so making meetings more productive pays off. When managers learn the basics – have an agenda; review old action items at the beginning and new ones at the end; look for non-contributors to conversations and actively seek their ideas – meetings will be more productive.

Running a meeting is as much a part of the manager’s basic toolkit as is a saw for a carpenter.

You can make your meetings even more productive if you follow the guidelines in this column. Warning: what follows requires sophisticated mathematics, and isn’t for the faint of heart.

Step 1: Cut the average number of meetings in half.

Here’s how you got into this mess. At some critical point it became difficult to call meetings because everyone’s schedule had become clogged with other meetings. What’s the logical response? Establish a standing meeting, so everyone will reserve time in advance on their calendars. The consequence: having too many meetings leads to more meetings.

Here’s what else happens: everyone spends so much time in meetings that they have too little time to get work done at their desks. The result: meetings become working sessions, not review sessions, leading to a need for … yet more meetings.

Then a pernicious effect sets in: Employees, and especially managers, lose the habit of time management. Instead, their appointment calendar manages them, and they go from meeting to meeting until the week has ended. Free time actually becomes a psychological threat.

Break this logjam. Encourage everyone to say “No.” It isn’t all that hard. Once you have 20 hours of meetings on your calendar, make appointments with yourself for the rest. Say, “Sorry, I’m tied up the rest of this week. How else we can handle this?” Or, “You don’t need me. I trust you to do the right thing.”

Now you can convert meeting work to individual work. Brainstorming sessions are a prime candidate, since psychologists have proven they rarely work anyway. Substitute a process where individuals develop ideas independently and e-mail them to a central “idea facilitator” who organizes them, eliminates duplicates, and publishes a consolidated list for independent review and evaluation, prior to a meeting to finalize solutions.

Step 2: Cut average meeting size in half.

This is simple. The bigger the group, the slower the progress. Two is best – you can bounce ideas off each other without having to wait your turn too much. Up to seven is okay. Ten is the maximum for anything other than a presenter/audience format.

So why do we have big meetings? Lack of trust. I won’t buy into any result unless I personally had a hand in its creation. All constituencies must be represented in the process or they won’t accept the conclusions.

Design each team to have the smallest number of participants possible while still containing the expertise needed to get the job done. Everyone else? Put them on a “Steering Committee” that meets monthly, or even quarterly, to review and comment.

These two simple steps – cutting both the number of meetings and their attendance – are simply stated. Achieving them will take commitment, vigilance, and strong leadership.

The benefit is awesome. In some companies, managers spend more than thirty hours each week in meetings. The program described in this column would cut that to less than ten. That’s twenty additional hours per week per manager of real work.

You could spend ten of them procrastinating and still be way ahead.

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