Those Fast Company jokers .. tossing the "socialism" word around less cautiously than they might.
Interestingly for the new post-crisis era which perforce will be upon us, it seems more and more people are questioning standard business logic and much of the expert advice that has been ladled out over the past decade or two, including organizational structure and management processes and dynamics. What of all the money spent on major consulting firms regarding strategies, development of flexible cultures, effective use of talent, and so on ?
Fast Company’s cover article this month is titled "How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers Is Turning The Tech Giant Socialist".
I think we will see more and more of this kind of discourse over the next several years as organisational design continues to feel the impact of the spread of social computing as a way to discover, provide and use information, business intelligence, talent and knowledge. "We" instead of "me" is often (in North America particularly) seen as code for "socialist", and in the case of social computing in the enterprise, has been a central element in the resistance of decision-makers to share information, status and power.
But here’s how Chambers and Cisco are looking at things these days …
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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers Is Turning The Tech Giant Socialist
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He has been taking Cisco through a massive, radical, often bumpy reorganization. The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. "In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us," he explains. "All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there."
Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos — not to mention a new financial incentive system — encourage executives to work together like never before. Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.
The bumpy part — and the eye-opener — is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success. What used to be "me" is now "we." The goal is to get more products to market faster, and Chambers crows at the results. "The boards and councils have been able to innovate with tremendous speed. Fifteen minutes and one week to get a [business] plan that used to take six months!" As storm clouds form for the rest of the business community, he says, "We’re going to gain market share." Rain? What rain?
Cisco, Chambers argues, is the best possible model for how a large, global business can operate: as a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically, unfettered by a central command.
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Power to the people — and profits to the company — is a bold tech promise we’ve heard before. If Chambers can pull it off, if he can prove that his model drives innovation at a market-beating pace, he will replace his pal Jack Welch as the most influential leadership guru of the modern era.
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Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chambers’s office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers.
Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company’s rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. "We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know," he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes — all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program.
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I’ve been aware of Cisco’s path for some time now. I ran across this mention of a June 2007 keynote speech at Cisco’s 2007 Technology Solutions Day wherein the speaker, Adam Radford (one of Cisco’s Senior Architects) mentioned the creation of "wirearchies" as a strategic issue (about half-way down the list of key bullet points).
This was furthered reinforced several months later by Information Age journalist Beverley Head who interviewed Radford and then synthesised her interview notes with key points she had extracted from an earlier interview with me regarding the concept of wirearchy and its implications for an organisation.
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He believes some clue as to the slow progress comes from the corporate perspective that encouraging blogs and wikis increases the risk profile of the enterprise. "There’s a lot of struggle at the executive level about why you need to adopt Web 2.0. Where is the ROI?"
Radford believes the return on investment comes from the increased collaboration Web 2.0 permits: mass collaboration where business collaborates with customers online (he points to online banking as an early example of how that changes the relationship between corporation and customer); external collaboration with other enterprises in order to deliver products and services (which Radford acknowledges raises significant issues regarding corporate transparency and trust); and finally, internal collaboration where business groups are not siloed into say HR, marketing, product development – but work in a more cohesive and collaborative manner.
He says that Cisco itself has been going through a transformation, moving away from a command and control structure to one of leadership and collaboration. This aligns with the theories of Jon Husband, a UK-based consultant who describes himself as a techno-anthropologist.
Husband believes that in a collaborative and connected age, traditional hierarchies will be replaced by what he calls wirearchies. His working definition of wirearchy is "a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, credibility, trust and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology".
"More colloquially, it’s becoming conventional wisdom everywhere these days that customers and users have more power because of the ubiquitous and rapid access to information
and their ability to retrieve, create and share useful information."Think of the phrase "knowledge Is power" which is almost universally accepted, and then think of the effects of much wider and more rapid decentralised distribution and use. The printing press changed society and governance over a couple of hundred years. Will the Web do the same thing? Seems so, to date, but on a faster schedule."
So are today’s businesses ready for the shift? He accepts that there is inertia associated with existing industrial era management.
But, he asserts: "Wirearchies will grow if and as organisations want, or decide, to become more responsive, seek more and more frequent innovation through finding ways to access and enable the talent, creativity, responsibility and wisdom of knowledge workers, especially as more and more IT and Web-savvy workers move into the workplace.
"This is, of course, starting to happen because of demographics, the growth and spread of the Web and easy-to-use Web services, widgets and more flexible IT platforms."
However, even after management inertia is overcome, existing IT infrastructure can prove another barrier to Web 2.0: "Many medium and large organisations have big investments in large, integrated ERP systems, such as SAP. Letting go of these, or changing their role in the organisation’s operations will be difficult for them.
"Like most organisational changes involving people, I think the main champions will need to be line mangers and dedicated professionals who see it is a better way to do things — those things and types of work that lend themselves to, or require, real collaboration," according to Husband.
Adam Radford, meanwhile, believes that "architects and architecture are the catalysts for (Web) 2.0 because we are moving away from transactions to interactions with the customer".
He warns, though, that the temptation to overdose the customer-corporate interaction with technology should be avoided. "This is not an extreme pendulum. It should not be totally technology-based or totally people-based – the answer is balance."
He is optimistic that technologies such as tele-presence will in the future provide the bridging experience between human interaction and technical connection.
"Technology delivers collaboration – collaboration is not technology," he warned, admitting that the tools and technologies needed to underpin collaborative opportunities remain fragmented, tossing up yet another challenge for the IT groups charged with providing the infrastructure to enable collaboration.
Even so, "my view of the future is that it is the architecture that facilitates change. Banks talk about being in charge of an aircraft carrier which is slow to move and to turn. They want to be more like a canoe – to be agile.
"As large organisations recognise the threat they are changing and changing dynamically, constructing solutions on the fly."
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Needless to say, I will watch Cisco’s progress with real interest.
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Tags: Cisco, Fast Company, John Chambers, wirearchy
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