Laura’s Winning Ideas

This week I attended a workshop of Sociologists working on Social Network Analysis (SNA) and heard some great ideas for communication analysis in large organizations.

They use a variety of methods (I especially like using email log files, as I’ve had success identifying virtual skills through email traffic review.) to collect data on communication, but the compelling feature is seeing these relationships graphically.

Connections, both too strong and too weak can be identified and targeted for intervention. Silos show up on these drawings. Post-Merger communication can be monitored for signs of success or weakness, showing management ways to integrate new members.

The first two images here are the same firm, shortly after a merger, and then again 1 year later. You can see results from several interventions, intended to knit the firms together more tightly. (Read on …)

My Japanese name is Saruwatari (monkey on a crossing bridge) Itoe (bless with love).
Take your real Japanese name generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey’s Name Generator.

This week, a group I’m in is boosting a blog of one of our members. He posts Jobs in Nigeria and a wide assortment of personal opinion and anecdotes. This link I found on his blog is an interesting diversion. The blog being boosted is “Me, Myself & I”

Jeffry Pfeffer of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business wrote a piece in Business 2.0 last October which I saved to comment on, The Myth of the Disposable Worker.

(I just found it at the bottom of a “when you have a moment” pile on my desk.)

He ralled against advocates of high turnover, the folks who advocate forced ranking and firing the lower 25% each year.

That approach seemed nutty to me when I first heard it, and even nuttier now that I have a couple of friends who’ve worked inside GE, the most famous bastion of Forced Ranking.

In disfunctional organizations, I see high turnover in their proposal teams. One VP bragged to me that these people were disposable and so he didn’t worry about including them in the firm’s development programs, or training.

When this approach is used, the firm will gravitate to the median, not aspire for top performance. (Read on …)

I know Research Engineers who invented several interesting contraptions for energy use and distribution. But they couldn’t get any Utility Companies excited about these fabulous ideas.

What gives?

“You see, when someone shows us a change that might be helpful, that’s just not sufficient to expose ourselves to the risk of change.
A computer server that is 99 percent reliable, means that our customers will suffer without refrigeration, heat, electricity, or air conditioning for 3.65 days each year. And who knows which days?
A distributor that is 99.99 percent reliable means that someone’s repirator will go out 8.79 hours sometime each year. We just don’t take risks like this.”

You would have better results selling new technology to Utility Companies in areas outside their Critical Path. New technologies to read meters, bill customers, locate downed lines would all be welcome. Just don’t get disappointed when your fabulous invention in their critical path doesn’t get the reaction you’d hoped. (Read on …)