The Plugged-In Manager E-Book

Terri L Griffith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 270

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A game-changing approach to management Too often discussions of management practice focus exclusively on managing people and organizational issues. Rarely, however, do they incorporate a discussion about technology or address all three dimensions in a balanced way. When they do, the result is game changing. In our hypercompetitive environment, those managers who are outstanding at being plugged into their people, technology, and organizational processes simultaneously excel at coming up with effective business solutions. The Plugged-In Manager makes the case that being plugged-in--the ability to see choices across each of an organization's dimensions of people, technology, and organizational processes and then to mix them together into new and powerful organizational strategies, structures, and practices--may be the most important capability a manager can develop to succeed in the 21st century. Step by step Griffith shows you how to acquire this ability. * Shows what it takes for business managers to succeed as technology and organizations become more and more complex * Profiles exceptional leaders and organizations who are plugged-in, such as Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com * Offers a fresh look at management issues Filled with compelling case studies and drawing on first-hand interviews, The Plugged-In Manager highlights this often neglected managerial capability and the costs of only focusing on one dimension rather than all three.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for The Plugged-In Manager

Title page

Copyright page

FOREWORD

Dedication

chapter ONE: Plugging In to the Twenty-First Century

Why Plug In Now?

Plugged-In Management for All

What’s Ahead

chapter TWO: Why You Need Plugged-In Management

Changing Technology, Organizations, and People

Why We Must Plug In Now

Systemic Changes Demand Plugged-In Management

Eugene Lee’s First Ninety Days at Socialtext

Part ONE: The Three Practices of the Plugged-In Manager

chapter THREE: First Practice: Stop-Look-Listen

Assessing the Environment

Providence Regional Medical Center

The Value of Systematically Assessing the Environment

chapter FOUR: Second Practice: Mixing

Negotiating a Basic Mix

Working with More Complexity

BUILDER

Southwest Airlines Makes a Change

How Mixing Can Support, or Ensnare, Your Customers

Next Steps

chapter FIVE: Third Practice: Sharing

Don’t Let the Words Get in Your Way

Nucor: Hire the Right People, Then Let Them Learn

Get in Tune

Shine a Light on Plugged-In Activities

Teach Some Basics, Then Get Out of the Way

Don’t Hide Your Plugged-In Practice

How Can I Help Others Plug In?

What About a Formal Training Program?

Part TWO: Learning to Plug In

chapter SIX: Assess Your Ability to Plug In

How Plugged In Are You?

How You Compare

Quick and Dirty

chapter SEVEN: Plugging In Through Practice

Amazon’s Kindle eBook Reader

Nucor: Extreme Plugged-In Management at All Levels

A Plugged-In Response to Adversity: Nucor and the Vulcraft Flood

Nucor Steel: Transportation Recovery Through Plugged-In Management

Microsoft’s Excel for the Mac Project

eContact at Cisco

How Did You Do?

chapter EIGHT: The Layers of Plugged-In Management

The Brainstorm Story

Plugging In as a Life Skill

Become Wise in the Ways of Plugging In

Not Your Grandmother’s World

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Index

Download CD/DVD content

Praise for The Plugged-In Manager

“The Plugged-In Manager succinctly addresses the people, process, and organizational issues often overlooked in the rush to adopt emerging technologies like social media. A must-read, it helps you harness the power of collaborative technologies for more successful business, customer, and partner interactions.”

—Laura Ramos, vice president, industry marketing, Xerox Document Outsourcing Services US; and B2B marketing blogger

“This book is a great reference for innovation managers in companies of all sizes. Through numerous case studies, Terri Griffith shows how mixing technology, processes, and people can create a sustainable environment for growth and innovation.”

—Ben Shahshahani, vice president, Yahoo! Labs

“The Plugged-In Manager is the result of Terri Griffith’s twenty-five-year love for, and deep experience with, technology and organizations. Her experience and commitment—coupled with insights that come from steel companies to sport venues—produce clear guidance for everyone, whether working on their own or inside a big firm.”

—Andrew Hargadon, professor and founding director, UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship; and author, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate

“This book is an up-to-the-minute guide to the evolving fundamentals of management in our tech-savvy and largely web-based lifestyles. Instead of ignoring the impact of information technology on managing teams, Terri helps her readers leverage it and become more impactful—and relevant—business leaders.”

—Mark Weiner, senior vice president, worldwide marketing, Virtela; and faculty, Santa Clara University

Copyright © 2012 by Terri L. Griffith. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Griffith, Terri.

The plugged-in manager : get in tune with your people, technology, and organization to thrive / Terri L. Griffith. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-90355-1 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-11254-0 (ebk); 978-1-118-11255-7 (ebk); 978-1-118-11256-4 (ebk)

 1. Organizational effectiveness. 2. Management—Social aspects. 3. Information technology—Management. 4. Technological innovations—Management. I. Title.

HD58.9.G755 2012

658—dc23

2011029318

FOREWORD

Terri Griffith has written an important and timely book. We live in increasingly challenging times, in which performance pressure mounts irresistibly and continually, without any end in sight. The disruptions that play out with increasing frequency and severity around us call into question our most basic assumptions about what is required for business and personal success.

In this kind of environment, there is a natural and understandable desire for quick and simple answers that can relieve the pressure and stress and give us a sense of security. Terri resists this pressure. A key message in her book is that there are no silver bullets to help us, even though we may desperately want to believe that there are. Perhaps even more bravely, she asserts that there are not even recipes—simple and consistent instructions with ingredients in precise proportions that can be followed in all situations.

The complex systems we live and work in do not afford us the simplicity of recipes designed to apply the same formula in all contexts. To make progress, we must first understand that context matters and that the approaches we take need to be tailored and adapted to the specific context. This leads to an emphasis on a key practice for plugged-in managers: They must be prepared to stop, look, and listen, developing a deep awareness of context.

There is another message that Terri consistently emphasizes throughout the book. Even once we have developed a deep awareness of our current context and engaged in the hard work required to develop an approach tailored to that context, our work as plugged-in managers has just begun. In an increasingly fluid world, context evolves rapidly. That means not only that our management approaches must be tailored to our context, but also that our approaches need to flexibly and continually adapt to our changing context. This leads to Terri’s emphasis on listening—constantly observing how our management approaches are performing, and learning from that experience to evolve our approaches in ways that drive sustained performance improvement. We live in a dynamic world, and our approach to that world needs to become equally dynamic.

To put it in my own words, we are moving from a world of stocks to one of flows. In the past, business success hinged on acquiring a powerful set of proprietary knowledge stocks, aggressively protecting those knowledge stocks, and then as efficiently as possible extracting the value from those knowledge stocks and delivering it to the marketplace. This was the world of precisely and tightly specified (and standardized) business processes that sought to remove friction and maximize efficiency. Although those business processes might occasionally need to be reconfigured in infrequent gales of business process redesign, the key goal was to enhance predictability and eliminate exceptions.

But with the accelerating pace of change, we face a fundamental challenge. Whatever knowledge stocks we may have, they are depreciating at an accelerating rate. In this environment, business success increasingly depends on our ability to participate effectively in a broader range of knowledge flows so that we can refresh our knowledge stocks more rapidly. The plugged-in manager is one who learns to harness knowledge flows in ways that create growing economic value over time, rather than clinging to existing knowledge stocks and squeezing them ever more vigorously in a vain effort to extract the next increment of value.

This is a fundamental shift, something that I call “the big shift” that challenges our most basic assumptions about business and work. Companies unable to navigate this shift will fall by the wayside, while others, including companies not yet formed today, will master the new practices required to succeed in a more challenging environment and create enormous wealth in the process.

For those companies, Terri’s book will be an essential navigation guide. The Plugged-In Manager does not offer a precise course to follow, but it does offer essential insight regarding the ingredients required for business success.

Terri appropriately emphasizes the need to blend together three elements—people, technology, and organizational processes—as we design our management approaches. None of these on its own will provide us with the answers we need. Nor can we focus on each element in isolation. These elements work together as a complex and evolving system. The real power comes from integrating and blending these three elements so that each element works to reinforce and amplify the power of the other elements.

In a world increasingly entranced with technology, this is a powerful antidote to the claims of technology evangelists who attribute miraculous powers to their favorite new technologies. The truth that Terri’s book drives home is that technology in isolation is useless and perhaps even dangerous. Only by integrating technology effectively into a specific social and business context can we release its latent power. By staying focused on the people and organizational processes that must be supported by the technology, we can develop a more realistic appreciation of its possibilities. In doing this, we can avoid becoming carried away by the latest technology fad and stay focused on the real capability of the technology. As Terri points out, often the answer may be to forgo a new technology altogether and focus instead on how to more effectively deploy existing technology to support the people and processes of the firm.

The real power of Terri’s book, however, is that she goes beyond a discussion of the three elements required to develop an integrated and effective management approach. Her real focus is on three management practices that the plugged-in manager must develop in order to effectively integrate new systems. The three elements—which are stop-look-listen, mixing, and sharing—constitute a powerful way to develop a more dynamic approach to management and guard against the constant threat of complacency; that is, of believing that one has finally come up with a system that will have no further need of change.

The feedback loop of stop-look-listen, with its emphasis on the importance of experimentation and after action reviews, is particularly important to thriving in our dynamic world. Deep awareness of one’s context and how it is continually changing, combined with constant reassessment of business initiatives, is essential to coping with accelerating change.

As Terri points out, it is the integration of these three practices that contains the real power. On the one hand, these approaches enhance a vision of possibilities, revealing new horizons that may not even have been visible before. On the other hand, these approaches help to develop a wisdom about capabilities and limitations that helps guide managers along pragmatic pathways to nurture potential and possibilities.

Managers can pursue these plugged-in practices at any level in an organization. But the real opportunity is to harness layered approaches to plugged-in management, wherein each level of an organization amplifies and reinforces the plugged-in management approaches pursued in other layers. Rather than becoming an obstacle to such initiatives, the organization becomes a platform to stimulate and reward such initiatives at all levels.

Terri is appropriately skeptical about the role of training in developing plugged-in managers. Although some basic frameworks and examples are important to bring these practices to life, there is no substitute for actual engagement in the practices. As soon as you finish this book, the best thing you can do is to find some context in which you can begin to apply these practices and tailor your approach to your specific needs. Learning by doing and working with others is the only way that these practices will come alive and their true value become apparent.

John Hagel III

Coauthor, The Power of Pull

To my parents, Kay and Neil Griffith, lifelong teachers.

chapter ONE

Plugging In to the Twenty-First Century

Imagine this: You are an executive at an online retailing company. A mid-level customer service representative at your company has begun tracking and responding to customer comments on Facebook and Twitter without clearing his actions with management. The response from customers has been great, and you’ve even gotten some popular press coverage. But this isn’t a sanctioned activity. What will you do?

1. Contact the service rep and ask him to stop until you’ve had a chance to clear this approach with company security and marketing.

2. Contact the service rep and congratulate him on the great idea. Let other executives know about the service represen­tative’s success.