September
2002 - Small worlds
Given the choice, would you prefer
to catch the 7.15 train to Paddington every morning
for another day at the office or work in a Broadway
musical? This is the sort of option that may become
increasingly familiar if large employers continue
to invest their management systems with increasingly
sophisticated controls and processes.
According to a US-based group
of academics, the Broadway musical is a perfect
example of what psychologist Stanley Milgram called
a " small world ". Milgram famously
used a chain letter in a 1967 experiment designed
to discover how people were connected to each
other. He sent packages to 160 randomly chosen
addresses in Kansas and Nebraska. Each package
contained the name and address of a stockbroker
in Boston.
But the recipients, instead of
sending the package straight on, were asked to
send it to afriend or acquaintance they believed
might get it closer to the stockbroker. Each link
in the chain was asked to add his or her name
to the envelope. When the packages arrived Milgram
found that most had taken between five or six
steps, hence the idea of "six degrees of
separation", which became the title of a
play by John Gaure.
The story was related in Malcolm
Gladwell's best-selling Tipping Point, which looks
at the phenomena that create a momentum towards
mass popularity. But Albert-Laszlo Barabasi* says
the six degrees idea was first suggested by the
Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story
published in the 1920s. Now the theory has appeared
again, in a study by researchers at Kellogg School
of Management and Department of Sociology, Northwestern
University, Illinois**.
The Kellogg study looked at the
way career opportunities have emerged historically
in the Broadway musical industry. Working through
the names in production team and cast lists from
the industry's inception in 1892, the researchers
found that very quickly a distinct network of
contacts emerged, from which the musicals would
draw the core of their talent. The networks emerged
around well connected individuals, described in
the study as "hubs", who maintained
connections with scores of actors, writers and
producers. These networks enabled the musicals
to flourish in their own " small world ",
without the paraphernalia of a formal organisation.
The more I read about management
development in large organisations today, the
more I wonder whether small worlds of interconnected
professionals may offer a more attractive alternative
to the soulless and growing obsession with performance
measurement.
This week, lulled by the soft-sounding
title, I opened a book called Quest for Balance,
the Human Element in Performance Management Systems***.
Inside were pages of boxes, tables, diagrams and
acronyms constructed around case studies. It is
the kind of book publishers like to describe as
a business tool: an instruction manual for those
attempting to implement Robert Kaplan's and David
Norton's Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The idea is
to identify crucial areas of the business - customer
satisfaction, for example - that are described
as critical success factors (CSFs) and measure
them. In the case of customer satisfaction, you
could canvass customers, count repeat purchases
or work out the time it takes to deal with complaints.
These measures are described as key performance
indicators (KPIs).
It appears that these systems
can produce measurable improvements in organisational
productivity. I am sure they do. It makes a lot
of sense to concentrate on the features of a business
that create value. But what of the people engaged
in carrying out the measurements and the people
expected to respond? If systemisation removes
the discretionary powers of managers, we may begin
to ask why we should have managers at all.
When systems and controls are
able to measure such critical areas of performance
there is no reason why front line employees should
not manage themselves and adjust their work habits
accordingly. Surely anything that creates more
efficient and effective organisations should be
a cause for celebration. But I fear the long-term
consequences of this kind of organisation.
Isn't performance management
simply a way to control the work of managers?
How will people respond to such controls? If you
stifle individual initiative, character, discrimination
and style, you remove qualities critical to job
satisfaction, leaving a mechanical process. How
many managers will turn their backs on such systems
in the belief that there has to be a better way
of living your work?
Pursuit of efficiency improvements
has always underpinned the development of management
and the organisation of work. Adam Smith was intrigued
by the division of labour in a pin factory. One
workman, he noticed, would find it hard to make
one pin a day but a group of 10 workmen, dividing
the task into separate and distinct jobs, could
between them make 48,000 pins in a day. Later
Frederick Taylor, the founder of work study, believed
that his scientific management had discovered
the "one best way" of working.
So manufacturing was reduced
to its bare bones, in which a repeated action
such as the clockwise turn of a screw became a
job in itself. Craftsmanship, artisanship, individuality
- even humanity - were abandoned in the search
for ever more efficient production. Re-engineering
and perform-ance management continue this tradition.
All these improvements are finding "better
ways" of doing things for the organisation.
But what about personal fulfilment, the stuff
that feeds our soul and spirit?
Small worlds of networked professionals
may not offer the security and potential for advancement
in traditional salaried employment but they may
offer far more precious alternatives, such as
a sense of purpose, freedom of choice and the
potential to exercise greater degrees of personal
judgment. Systems can go so far in making things
- but people make music, and that's entertainment.
*Linked, The New Science
of Networks , by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Perseus,
$26 **Emergence: Tipping Points, Small Worlds
and the Structure of Career Opportunity in the
Broadway Musical Industry, by Brian Uzzi, Jarrett
Spiro & Dimitri Delis, North-western University,
Evanston (mailto:Uzzi@northwestern.edu)
***Quest for Balance, the Human Element in Performance
Management Systems, by Andre de Waal, John Wiley
and Sons, $49.95.
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