Endless Knots

Marissa Mayer, we need to talk: This genie is way out of the bottle

Dear Marissa,

Apparently, I'm not the only one who has a word or two to say to you. Tom Ashbrook (On Point, "Yahoos Ban on Working From Home") is holding forth with some savvy guests even as I type; Maureen Dowd has a biting op-ed in yesterday's NY Times ("Get Off Of Your Cloud"); and the bloggers have gone wild. Not to mention that I've received numerous emails including this one from a client: "Wish you could write a counter to this and have it published.  This does not help the cause..."*

I regret that I've had to make you a category here but with so much emotion swirling around the HR edict ordering all-hands on the Yahoo! deck, let's begin with some facts:

1. As a computer scientist, you might want to look at real data. There is little evidence to support the notion that people need to be face-to-face to collaborate OR innovate. Yes, there are moments to come together but not perpetually. Professor Tom Allen set the lie to this idea 35 years ago with his ground-breaking research for Digital Equipment Corporation. Simply, if people are more than 50 meters (150 feet) apart, the "probability that two people will communicate [at least once a week] as a function of distance separating them" plummets. Here's the chart:

2. "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" With two business school professors, we researched 54 high-performing teams in 26 companies across 15 industries and the resounding conclusion from the data was "yes, indeed." Here's the quick summary from the Harvard Business Review where the study was published as "Best Practices:"

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.

The conclusion for Yahoo!: unless you're doing very simplistic projects, i.e. routine processing chores, stocking shelves, and the like, you're staffing your teams incorrectly. If you're looking for innovation, you need diversity, the subject of many studies before and after ours.There is no way that you have that diversity in toto within driving distance of your Silicon Valley. It's 2013, not 1950, the year the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak in the US.

3. Which leads right into this point. As per the title of this post, the genie is waaaay out of the bottle. Do you actually believe that people today work in intact teams? When you force everyone to co-locate, you're most likely not bringing in the people who actually work together. Do you have contractors? Partners in other companies? Suppliers? Vendors? Developers in India/China/Philippines/Singapore? Do your sales people spend their time in the office? (If your answer to this one is yes, perhaps we've pinpointed a big part of your problem.)

Unless Yahoo! has completely turned its back on development trends that are, say, as old as the Internet itself, team members are scattered around the globe. Yahoo! should do a study of where its team members are situated. We can place a pretty confident bet that they're not all in proximity of Yahoo! HQ.

And that's just the start of what's wrong with this 20th century edict.

4. Let's talk about culture for a moment, one of the big points of the "YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION--DO NOT FORWARD" HR memo that All Things D's Kara Swisher had up within moments, it seems, and which has been published everywhere.

Forcing people into the office hardly builds loyalty. It's abundantly clear that Yahoo! is attempting a massive and quick turnaround of its culture. The insults about the workforce, as reflected in posts around the web, are legion. The parking lot is only half-full at 9:30 AM. Stopping right there, in some companies, this is regarded as a virtue, meaning that carpooling and the like are working, cutting down on carbon emissions. (For more on this, take a look at the pioneering climate initiative at Unilever, which has coupled aggressive carbon reduction gains with new ways of working initiatives, both increasing productivity and innovation and reducing travel miles.)

There are equally numerous reports on the new Google-esque perks at Yahoo! -- better food, dry cleaning services, nicer digs, for example. What builds culture is commitment, positive reinforcement, and challenging work. If you think people aren't coming into the office because they don't like the food, I strongly recommend that you commission a study on this.

Likewise, do you have evidence that people don't collaborate? That people truly are slacking off at home? Data in study after study indicates that people are more productive when they are able to get up, do whatever morning things they have to do at home (tend to kids/parents/animals/themselves) and then get right to work, saving needless hours on the highway. Hello? Aren't we talking about a bit of traffic on 101?

A most startling stat on this, "The hard truth about telecommuting," from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review last June by Mary Noonan and Jennifer Glass and excerpted in the Dec 26 Scientific American: telecommuters on average work 5-7 hours longer per week.

5. 24/7. After ordering people back to their cubbies, are you also prohibiting them from working at home? Consider what you're saying in the-now-much-quoted HR memo to Yahoos: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. Some of the best decisions and insights comes from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and important impromptu meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together." OK, Yahoos. Turn off your phones at home; don't check your mail first thing in the morning (or last at night); and absolutely do not call from your cars. That applies to you, too, Marissa. Are you referring to your "speed and quality" when communicating from, as reported, your 14-day maternity leave?

6. I nearly can't bring myself to comment on this last point for which the young mother-CEO has been excoriated from GMT-12 to GMT+12. A few of your quotes are enraging to other parents, as you've heard. Just this one will follow you for life: "The baby's been easy. The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be." I had "easy" babies too but I found it best to keep that under my hat. Most babies are not and it's quite hurtful to other women to rub it in, i.e. stuff a rag in that comment forevermore. And it's irking your coworkers that you have permission to build a nursery next to your office (even if you paid for it). When are you building sidecars for all the other new moms?

Meanwhile, Marissa, please invite in, say, 40 or 400 or 4000 of the mothers, not to mention the fathers, in your company and listen to what it's like to get through a day. I'm watching a software executive who's your age with major responsibilities, as she is juggling young kids, big corporate decisions, a lot of travel, and being a good family member while her husband, although he doesn't travel as much, is also running on fumes as he works very long hours, cooks, and tells endless stories to the kids. And they can afford help.

There is something profoundly unglued, unrealistic, and uncompassionate in your new approach. Virtual Teams work -- I know. I wrote the book. Maybe you should read it.

--Jessica Lipnack, CEO, consultant, writer, mother, grandmother, and unsolicited advice-giver

 

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpu

*For the record, I posted the news as soon as it reached me last Friday.

A Nobel or "Milner" for Organizational Innovation?

"Cosmic Inflation" by Don Dixon

Best I know, no one awards a prize for breakthroughs in organizational thinking, never mind practice. I can't even remember an author receiving one of the literary crowns (authors don't receive money, remember, the largest bag of bucks being the Nobel for literature -- $1.1M-ish awarded to a mere 100 or so folks in all of the world's existence) to any book about business ideas. Wait. I'm a little uninformed and thinking way too narrowly. A serious foray into search reveals this award from Financial Times and Goldman Sachs, which appears to have been cashing out to business book authors (about $50K, not bad) since 2005.

But a quick skim of awardees indicates their works are predictably, given the grantors, about Wall Street, where of course the way the companies and people they write about are organized is not the point. What they're organized for, obviously, makes quite a good story (follow the money)... which suggests this question: Who's going to get the big advance for the book on what these companies' organizational structures might have to do with why they succeed and fail? Ah-hem.

Why is this on my mind? My personal newswire for interesting stuff around organizations, Tom Stewart, whose feed on Facebook often catches my attention, does so again. Today he posts about the new no-strings (so to speak)-attached-prize in physics -- a cool $3M, awarded to each of nine (9!) physicists working on cosmic "inflation," which arguably could also be given to someone on Wall Street. The awarder is one Yuri Milner, a physicist-turned-social-media entrepreneur (he's no dope). Need I tell you that part of his $12B fortune comes from his early investment in Facebook, where, naturally, I saw Tom's post about this prize?

Here's, in part, how Nature reports it (though they missed the string-theory twist):

“The intention was to say that science is as important as shares trading on Wall Street,” Milner told Nature. The prize money comes with no strings attached, although Milner hopes that the theorists will contribute to a new lecture series for the public. Milner also plans to create an annual $100,000 New Horizons prize for young researchers and an ad hoc version of the Fundamental Physics Prize that can be won at any time “in exceptional cases”, the website says. According to the rules of the prizes, anyone can be nominated, and future prizewinners will be selected by a committee of all previous ones.

So here's my message to the next Sloan/Insead/Said grad in management who figured out how to make something of him/herself. Start a prize for "quantum organizational breakthroughs." Even call it that and it will sound scientific so people will think it's important. There's a lot of it going around these days.

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

The origin of good ideas -- again

Summer Turner, Director of  Organizational Development & Communication at Omgeo, has "turner-ed" me on to this excellent Steven Johnson video, taken from his book, Where Good Ideas Come From. With apologies to Mr. Johnson for a horrid over-simplification, he says what we know as group-lover cliches: two heads (if not more) are better than one, that ideas take a while to germinate (he does a nice riff on Tim Berners-Lee's 10-year gestation of the web), and that "the great driver in technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity." But he says it so well and with great examples.

We too have said this in a few of our books, even constructed a slide about it (see below) about a dozen years ago with clients at Shell Oil, that relates connectivity to the evolution of organizations. We've come a long way since smoke signals and tin cans. Technology innovation aside, connectivity even allows us to "innovate" -- invent, I guess you'd say, new organizations.

Great stuff, Steven. That your middle name is the same as my grandmother's makes me think that we're, how do you say, connected. Check out his website here.

 

 

 

 

"The Republic of Letters:" The Electronic Enlightenment Project

Thanks to Tom Stewart, who in turn thanks John Hagel for this network discovery: 18th-century social network of ideas, carried out through letters, and now on YouTube, having been mapped by Stanford's "Mapping the Republic of Letters" study. Assistant French Professor Dan Edelstein, principal investigator, describes how ideas spread via letters. Voltaire, for example, wrote 15,000. Cynthia Haven reports:

Edelstein, principal investigator for "Mapping the Republic of Letters" with history Professor Paula Findlen, has mapped thousands of letters that were exchanged during the period of the Enlightenment to uncover hidden truths about the "Republic of Letters."   The latter is "a shorthand that scholars use to refer to writers and philosophers and clergymen and other early modern intellectuals who corresponded across Europe and even across the world," said Edelstein.

...According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others."

"We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters."

Bitt(s) and bytes: "Faster Slow Food"

The NY Times Magazine devoted its whole issue to food yesterday (October 11, 2009), in which Mark Bittman does a superb job ("Faster Slow Food") of explaining how IT can transform the online food shopping experience into something truly intelligent.

First he takes apart the obsession with high-end equipment and gadgets. What do we really need for cooking? A fridge and a stove. Not a $20,000 stove either. Oh, hot water too. Other than that, we really don't need any of the rest to make good (slow) food. Sorry, microwave cookers. He finds the must-have appliance irrelevant except for reheating leftovers and making popcorn, which, remarkably, we were able to do for quite a long time before it became the "it."  Dishwashers are nice, he says, (no kidding), as are slow cookers (yes! I've been learning their benefits of late), pressure cookers (never have liked them), and food processors (reminder to self: replace--you've waited so long to reorder the mixing bowl that the model is no longer made). But none of these is indispensable.

Just try cooking on a boat and you'll soon learn how little you need to make good food. My father-in-law, who achieved the (un)record(ed) for slowest circumnavigation of the globe in a 31.5-foot sailboat--12 years--built his own refrigerator from an air conditioner compressor and cooked on a two-burner propane-gas fired gimble stove (it rocks with the waves). Granted, he was hardly a cook (potatoes and rice might be dinner and I'm not saying this for effect) but I cooked on the boat and did just fine.

Back to Bitt. His ultimate point in this article is how smart online food shopping really can be. IT could, and apparently in some places already is able to, remember what you like (I always want avocados, and, sadly, they're never going to be local in Boston), issue alerts when items you want are available (seasonable vegetables--I do love broccoli), in his words:

You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle. You might even, I suppose, be able to ask the store to limit the amount of impulse purchases that you make — forget that second pint of Ben & Jerry’s or those Cheez-Its you have trouble resisting.

So now for a bit of first-hand experience: since I've been spending so much time in NYC, where it's not that easy to shop for quantities unless you have a micro-portable U-Haul that is not a real vehicle (let me know when you find one), I've used Fresh Direct, which remembers your lists, allows you to shop for certain categories (organic, etc), tells you what's fresh now (apples, duh), and links to recipes. Works pretty well, though we did receive one rotten half turkey. For the next shopping, I repeated the menus I'd just cooked (they were well received) and thus repeated the memorized order, eliminating a few things that we didn't need. Food arrived smack dab in the two-hour time frame indicated, packed well in appropriate boxes, fridge things here, non-perishables there, and with the help of two-year-old Ben, was able to shelve everything pretty quickly (though a fair number of M&Ms were consumed as bribes, I mean treats, along the way).

My experience aside, IT innovators should listen to Bittman. Never mind that he has great restaurant recommendations, which is how I first became a fan, after following his advice to eat at Vijay's in Vancouver. So much to like about Bittman. Need I mention that he blogs?

GeekDoctor: Leading by clicking around

I'm doing a webcast on virtual leadership in a couple of weeks for eighty people, all situated virtually and all around the world. The link between the executive sponsoring the event and me  will be via Cisco's Telepresence -- though for everyone else, thank heavens, I won't be in high def.

In preparing for the webcast, I asked a few questions of one of my virtual leadership role models (scroll down for some great pics taken the same day this one was), John Halamka, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose answers I thought others would enjoy seeing:

Q: You're on the move constantly. How do you maintain strong relationships with your direct reports?

*I live by Blackberry, laptop and conferencing technologies (Webex, iChat, Telepresence)

Q: What do you find most difficult as a "virtual" leader?

*Managing communications while constantly traveling is challenging.   My goal is to reduce the hours spent in airports through more virtual work

Q. What do you find to be easier when you're virtual?

*I eliminate many hassles - Parking, traffic, airport security lines, delayed flights, and lack of places to recharge my devices

Q. In terms of your reporting to your boss, how has your non-face-to-face presence affected your relationship?

*Paul [Levy, BIDMC's CEO] is just as virtual to me - we live in the world of social networking and web connectivity

Q. What advice on maintaining virtual connections with customers do you have for others who are very tech-savvy but whose customers may be less so?

*It's a journey. Start by eliminating as many face to face meetings as you can and set a goal of less travel/less in person meetings each year.

A little history on the Computer History Museum (and MassNet, RIP)

A comment today on another post by Harry Stevens prompts this post. Harry asks whether I've ever visited The Computer Museum in Boston and if so whether they would be interested in the donation of a server with his ground-breaking software, Participate, on it.

Long before most reading here were even thinking about email (or for that matter computers), Harry Stevens had developed Participate, computer conferencing software described below. Visionary and its basic design still underlies most really good discussion software.

Alas, The Computer Museum in Boston exists no more, having closed in 1996 (what does that say about our history), its collection now belonging to The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (i.e. Silicon Valley), which opened in its current location in 2002. Watch what's coming there: next year they're opening an exhibit called "Computer History: The First 2000 Years." Bold. I also will refrain from commenting on the endless rivalry between Silicon Valley and Boston's MIT/Route 128 cultures, evidenced by the museum ending up in "their" vicinity rather than ours. Harrumph.

Why am I writing this post really? Because for a few years before and after 1995, a group of us, including Jeff Stamps and me, volunteered to create a new initiative here in Boston that would engender the kind of collaborative culture that, for all its cutthroat competitiveness has characterized Silicon Valley: "MassNet: Collaboration for the Commonwealth," which leaves but this small trace on an MIT server.

On a cold January day in 1995, MassNet brought together 250 representatives of each of the area's major sectors--from business, education, the denominations, foundations, healthcare, government...you name it, they were there. Among the event's sponsors was The Computer Museum, then housed next to Boston's incomparable Children's Museum right along Fort Point Channel, which provided the space for the event. (John Marchiony was then executive director of the museum--forever thanks, John).

When not talking about collaboration and how to forge strong links across the notoriously non-collaborative sectors in the area, participants wandered around looking at the first 1000 years of computer history. It was a beautiful space to hold this event and the cast of presenters and participants was stellar.

Among those who spoke: Congressman Ed Markey, an early visionary about telecommunications, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard Business School prof and author who has written often about collaboration, Peter Drucker, yes, *the* Peter Drucker, who participated via videoconference from his home in Southern California, Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivack, late of Twine, Harry Saal, then CEO of Smart Valley, an initiative in Silicon Valley to wire the area (the digital divide was then the major topic among computer aficiandoes), Charlotte Kahn, who leads the Boston Indicators Project at the The Boston Foundation (and was my high school classmate), and others, including, need I say, moi. David Straus, founder of Interaction Associates, led the band of facilitators who conducted the breakout groups.

I could go on with all who participated and how ambitious our agenda was. Like so many great ideas, MassNet ran its course then died, having left a lot of people educated about the value of collaboration.

One last bit of personal history: Jeff's and my book, The Age of the Network, had its launch that night, also at The Computer Museum, where our publisher, Darryl Landvater of Oliver Wight, and our editor, Jim Childs, now publisher at Time Inc., hosted a book party

So, thanks, Harry, for giving me the opening to write about MassNet and...try The Computer History Museum. If they're not interested in a server loaded with Participate, they should be.

Webcom-Montreal 2009 - Wed, May 13, 2009 - 6th Intl Conference

What are you doing next Wed? Come to Montreal for Webcom 2009, where the themes are "Digital Identity, Innovation and Economic Development." I'm not entirely sure what digital identity is so I won't be talking about that but I will be holding forth in two sessions: "Leading Innovation When People Are Far Apart" and "The Digital Organization Chart: How to Encourage Transparency Across the Whole Enterprise."

Here's a little "facebook" of all the speakers.

What's extremely cool about this conference is that the afternoon keynotes are free and open to the public.

And there's a party that night. Thanks, organizers, for inviting me. I'll report back in after the event.

The algorithm for happiness=3:1

I'm not kidding and where of all places did I discover it? The Sun, no less.

Those of you familiar with the magazine know that finding extraordinary pieces there is no surprise. But the April issue, with "The Science of Happiness," Angela Winter's interview with psychologist Barbara Frederickson, is surprising, not just because of the general idea--that there is a science to the upward turning corners of the mouth--but also because of Frederickson's "collaboration with business consultant Marcial Losada," to which I will return shortly but first a bit more on Frederickson's work.

Her new book is Positivity. Think less of the made-up-ness sound of the word (even if it is in the dictionary) and more of words like chemoreceptivity and hyposensitivity, in other words, science-y. The Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina, Frederickson has been asking why people have positive emotions for a long time. From the interview:

Positive emotions tell us not just what the body needs but what we need mentally and emotionally and what our future selves might need. They help us broaden our minds and our outlook and build our resources down the road. I call it the "broaden and build" effect.

So there's a lot to consider and I haven't read the book or anything else by her but...I was stopped when I came across the reference to Frederickson's work with Losada. Turns out that Losada, whose work I am not familiar with, specializes in high-performing teams. In his observations of sixty business teams, he found that:

...high-performing teams had about a six-to-one ratio of positive to negative statements, whereas the low-performing teams had ratios of less than one to one, meaning that more than half of what was said was negative. People on the high-performing teams had an even balance between asking questions and advocating for their own points of view, and also an equal measure of focusing outward and focusing within the group. The low-performing teams had asked almost no questions and almost never focused outside the group. They exhibited a self-absorbed advocacy: nobody was listening to each other--they were all just waiting to talk.

Apparently, mathematical modeling is Losada's hobby and working with nothing more than "a laptop on his dining-room table and loads of data from past observations of business teams...[he] wrote algebraic equations reflecting how each stream--the questioning, the positivity, and the outward-inward focus--related to the others."

What did he find? That his equations matched the Lorenz system, the bit of chaos theory that explains nothing less than the "butterfly effect"--you know, flap wings here, global economic meltdown there. In other words, positivity creates positivity (more complex than that as we're ultimately talking complexity theory here) and I want you to buy, nay, subscribe to The Sun (the ad-free, 35-year-old monthly, with nearly 70,000 subscribers).

But I can't get away with that, can I, say the complex systems theorists reading here. I quote Frederickson again:

Underneath the dynamics for the high-performing teams was what physicists call a "complex chaotic attractor," which produces unpredictable or novel outcomes. So high-performing teams produced novel creative results. Underneath the structure of low-performing teams was a "fixed-point attractor" that caused the teams to spiral down to a dead end. There were also medium-performing teams, which showed some creativity, and at times it looked as if a complex chaotic attractor was trying to emerge, but then a moment of intense negativity would occur, and they'd never bounce back. What's interesting is that the negativity always arose within the realm of self-absorbed advocacy and not asking any questions...

...Using the Lorenz equations we were able to algebraically predict that a ratio of three positive events to one negative event should be the tipping point where things become chaotic--in a good sense--and a medium-performing team becomes a high-performing one.

I'm so absorbed in looking at the article, typing sections here, then looking back (it's not online yet) that I risk just going on and on. You get the point. Teams, you must look in and out. Say/think/perform three positive things for every negative one.

What a simple formula for coaxing high-performance out of our teams.