dispatches from the new world of work

Connections

Darci Riesenhuber of Tom Peters Company submitted this blog entry.

I just attended a WIT (Women in Technology) event where my friend, David Nour (www.nourgroup.com) spoke about his trademark concept, Relationship Economics. He told a story about introducing two colleagues to each other. One, a lawyer who'd been with a large firm for five years, had never met his colleague who'd worked at the same firm for nearly 10 years, until David introduced them to each other! (Obviously a very large firm.) But, think about it ... how much knowledge is wasted, talent goes unrecognized, best practices aren't shared in an environment where colleagues don't spend enough time out of their 5'x5' spaces to connect with their own peers. Then suddenly I'm struck by the irony ... I'm at an event whose target audience is people in the technology sector ... listening to how communication between individuals is broken. People don't know how to establish, nurture, and leverage relationships. So, I ask you ... with so much "connectivity" how can we not be connected?

Darci Riesenhuber posted this on 09/19/05.

Comments

Since a lot of what I do in my work is sometimes called "knowledge management", I'll chime in with a couple of points.

1) I think it's about ten times more difficult to retro-fit a collaborative environment on top of an organization that's outgrown its ability to collaborate & share knowledge fluidly than it is to have good methods that the organization has invested in and cultivated from its origins as an entrepreneurial seed. Not impossible, just much more expensive.
I think most management teams start by worrying about the problem, then move on to seeing how difficult it is to address post-growth, then throw up their hands at how hard it is, and come to rest at the idea that it's impossible and always was, so why bother.
The diseconomies of scale are a relentless gravitational field we can resist, but only if we don't lose our focus on resistance as an important objective.

2) You were at a technology conference, and technology tends to be a little worse than the average industry because tech attracts a lot more engineer (introverted) personality types, and has more than its share of poorly-socialised people and of individuals with both talent and Asperger's disorder. In short, a larger than average share of contributors who don't see this as a problem but as a virtue.
I bet if you were as a social workers' or p.r. agents' conference, it would have been less pronounced.

Posted by jeff angus at September 19, 2005 1:25 PM

Congratulations Darci! Good point Jeff. I agree that the technology sector would be more focused than other industries on product efficiencies than effective communication. There certainly are strides being made in the personalization of technology, but it wouldn't hurt the techies to step out of their silicon box more often and look into each others eyes, those windows to the most complex technology available today!

Posted by Tom O'Leary at September 20, 2005 8:18 AM

Networks are social, business, and technological. Social and business networks have not been faciliated by technology. Technology facilitates itself. Even social software is something that few non-techies use. Then, you have to ask, how social is it? And, who designed it? Techies designed it, so how social could social softare really be?

Posted by David Locke at September 25, 2005 2:16 PM