Daily Archives: March 7, 2003
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Gareth Morgan on Metaphors in Management: The Pros and Cons
Much of management thinking in the late 1990s is being dominated by two broad types of metaphor. The first urges us to embrace images of flux and transformation. One perspective here encourages us to jump into the melee of hyper-competition by beating, outsmarting and upending our competition before they beat us. Another encourages us to move our organizations toward “edge of chaos” situations and see the transformations that emerge.
A second broad type of metaphor is encouraging us to become corporate bankers by levering and developing intellectual capital to meet the demands of a knowledge economy. Great metaphors with great insights. But, hopelessly flawed unless you see that they are just metaphors. The challenge is to take the creative insights and lever them for all their worth. But avoid the weaknesses and limitations, or they will come back to haunt you.
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Learning is Social
An interesting story from Xerox
What Thomas heard from the trenches, in fact, did little to elevate her estimation of the training department’s role in the learning process at Xerox. She was astonished to learn just how removed from the sphere of real work was the prolonged methodology for developing training classes, a process that unfolded along these lines: First came a flyover visit to determine training requirements. Those requirements were handed off to designers back in Leesburg, who designed a curriculum. Months later, training-delivery specialists parachuted onto the scene armed with a detailed script.
But these scripts were next to useless, according to the workers. They complained to Thomas that they heard way too much about tasks they never or seldom performed, and way too little about some of the most crucial aspects of the job. Moreover, there was never an opportunity to practice what they were taught until three or four weeks of classroom training ground to a blessed halt. By the time workers were actually back on the job, they’d forgotten most of what they’d been told. To learn billing and credit procedures, for instance, trainees endured 11 weeks of nonstop classroom lectures before taking their first customer call.
Worst of all, none of the talking heads had ever set foot in a customer service setting. “They tell us how work gets done based on what someone else has told them,” the workers told Thomas. “When we finally get back to the job, co-workers have to explain to us how things really get done.”
This common phenomenon has been discussed for years in training circles, but always with the problem attributed to “change resistance” by bullheaded workers and supervisors. As far as Thomas was concerned, the workers’ complaints signaled a defect in the training, not in the trainees or their peers.
Over the initial objections of the training department (some trainers assigned to the ICS project later became staunch advocates of the new approach), IRLS recommendations were put into place. Not only did the ICS workers prove themselves adept at teaching their jobs to each other, by their own accounts they were exhilarated by the challenge of doing something new and different. “It was the best sort of team-building I’d ever seen,” says Rick Hawkins, who came to the ICS project from account administration. “It forced us to rely on each other daily.” In learning new skills for the ICS pilot, Hawkins estimates he spent no more than eight hours away from the job, listening to co-workers in an informal classroom setting; the rest he picked up while on the work floor.
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As the Rs 400-crore Indian consulting market (industry estimates) starts booming (it is showing a growth of 50% per annum), the two sides have begun competing fiercely. On one side are big IT companies like IBM, Cambridge Technology Partners, Citicorp Information Technology Industries Ltd and TCS. On the other are management consultants like McKinsey & Co, PwC, Andersen Consulting, Ernst & Young and KPMG, who are making IT an integral part of their business. Management consultants are also beginning to reorient themselves. With clients asking them to implement what they preach, consultancies are building formidable IT expertise. PwC is transforming itself almost into an IT company. Some 700 people of its 1,000-strong staff are engaged in IT-related activities. About 500 alone are ERP consultants. Business is growing rapidly too. Total revenues increased by about 45% in the last three years, but in IT-related areas the revenues increased by almost 80%. In fact, by the year 2001, PwC expects two-thirds of its revenues to come from e-business consulting. Others are following suit. For Ernst & Young, 60% of work comes from IT-related areas. Cisco has taken 19% in KPMG after the latter was involved in its e-business consulting. As for Andersen Consulting, 80 of the 200-strong workforce in India work on technology-related areas. And it is now increasingly focusing on e-commerce and convergence technologies like m-commerce related projects as its major thrust and growth area.
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Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – outline
Kuhn was the chap who said that Scientific thought passes through paradigm shifts which are brought about by people who are either young in age or new to the field or both.
Basically, the established paradigms that exist in the minds of the scientists do not enable them to look at data that differ from their paradigms!!
