The Hindu Business Line : How to escape collective stupidity

A COMPANY may be filled with geniuses, but if it can't harness its collective brain power, it will likely veer towards organisational incapacity. That is a piece of commonsense wisdom on the back cover of The Power of Minds at Work by Karl Albrecht, a book about `organisational intelligence in action', all `seven dimensions' of it. The blurb expounds Albrecht's Law: "Intelligent people, when assembled into an organisation, will tend toward collective stupidity." If that is a bit harsh, the author explains: "With employees working in separate silos, each department protecting its turf and not knowing what the others are doing, collective brain power gets wasted, compromising the mission of the enterprise." Read on:

Putting ten people into a room to make an important decision doesn't always get you a decision that's ten times better than one person could make. In fact, sometimes the decision is worse than one made by a single intelligent person. `Get-my-way' behaviour can often displace the nobler processes of intelligent discourse, listening, and reasoning together.

With the unrelenting pace of the transition of modern organisations from thing-cultures to think-cultures, the need for people who can think clearly will only increase. With the utter failure of most of our public schools to equip our young citizens with effective thinking skills, our business organisations are becoming the educators of last resort.

All employee saboteurs and wreckers have two things in common: a sense of alienation and an unwillingness to take responsibility for creating value. When these people control the customer interface, we're in trouble.

Some jobs are so narrowly designed and over-controlled that employees cannot possibly deploy the wealth of practical knowledge, life experience, and common sense they bring to the job. Too many managers and quality practitioners fail to grasp that the real competitive knowhow of an organisation is implicit — in the collective understanding of its people — not explicit in a room full of manuals.

Rapid growth can often impair collective intelligence. When an organisation goes into a fast growth pattern, either through natural expansion of its business operation or by acquisition, or both, things tend to get confused. In many cases a syndrome of `permanent confusion' sets in, with people bumping into one another, working at cross purposes, and often failing into conflict because they haven't succeeded in sorting out the organisational processes and rationalising the developing systems.

Put your mind to work.

Go cross

ABODES, dwellings and spaces; antiquity, art and treasures of human civilisation; attires and garbs; capitals and countries; games we play; gourmet galore; of implements, tools and weapons; and so on. These are not the topics in a book on anthropology, but in The Ultimate Book of Crosswords, by Neeru Das and Saikat Das. Try a few:

Indian game, of stealing sticks and tag (8) is kabbaddi. Used in billiards (3) is cue. Rolling feet (7) is skating.

Phrased played repeatedly (4) is riff. A slow piece (5) is dumka. An instrumental tune, bagpipe composition (4) port.

The main river of Burma (9) is Irrawaddy. That which makes the seas so (4) is salt. A peak in Kirgiztan (6) is Pobedy.

Xero, Latin for dry (4) is arid. Edible leaves for silk worms (8) is mulberry. Hot, wet type (10, 4) is equatorial type.

The true origin of a word (6) is etymon. Other than first person (8) is indirect. Period (3) is age. Word uttered by a single effort, of the voice (8) is syllable.

Pack it in your vacation bag.

Champy's cross

EVEN if you don't take at face value what Michael Dell of Dell says, that James Champy's book is the first one to describe what companies must do to leverage the real power of information technology, you may yet find some interesting stuff in X-Engineering the Corporation, or how to reinvent your business in the digital age. X is `cross'; X-engineering is the art and science of using technology-enabled processes to connect businesses with other businesses and companies with their customers. X-engineering is reengineering squared: "A vastly expanded new version". More:

There are at least seven universal value propositions: customisation, innovation, price, quality, service, speed, and variety. These propositions often determine how you are perceived by your customers, and they can define your basis of competition.

What is the essence of a company? Some have claimed that a business is its bottomline. Others have argued that a company is its customers, or its marketing power, or its products, or its people. Today what best defines a business is its processes, all the things a company does to create and sell its goods and services.

Responding to customer pull promises enormous efficiency gains for the automakers. Ford alone will save $1 billion a year in inventory just by cutting the delivery time to dealers in half, and the industry estimate is that building to customer order could save an average $2,400 per car.

Follow the money. Knowing the real costs of operating can provide you with great insight as to where process improvement opportunities might lie. But don't stop at your own costs. Look at your customers' total landed costs for your product and services.

Know what your customers are going through. The French philosopher Simone Weil used to tell her students that when meeting a person they should not ask, "How are you today?" but rather "What are you going through today?" Weill argued that it was the more authentic question.

If you are going through hell, better go through Champy.

(Books courtesy: Fountainhead, Chennai. E-mail: fhbooks@satyam.net.in)

Tailpiece

"How many runs are they scoring in an over?"

"What are you talking? They're being run over!"

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

D. Murali

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