Absent Praise and Abortive Clarity

I've just finished reading Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. I must have been reading this book on and off for about 5 years. Each time I've moved houses it gets packed away in a box somewhere and I don't get back to it for months. I'm notorious for taking years to read books anyway and at this time can count no less than 12 bookmarks within even the small selection of my books that currently have a place on my shelves.

My discontinuous wander through Dawkins' fascinating book has probably furthered the effect on my thinking it has had even beyond the considerable influence of its brilliance. I thoroughly enjoy Dawkins' written style. I don't know the nature of his friendship with Douglas Adams; though I could speculate upon the qualities that drew them together. But even without such speculation their friendship seems to just feel right considered only on the strength of the pleasure of reading their written works.

Enough of this absent praise! What I'd really like to acknowledge are two important contributions Dawkins' books have made on my theory of organisation. Dawkins argues in The Blind Watchmaker that the 'unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin' is the only theory capable of 'explaining the existence of organized complexity'. However, even when I first started reading the book all those years ago it was organisational complexity I was reading it as an explanation of.

This is because I'd already read The Selfish Gene... Hold on; I've just added another book to my shelves such that there are now 13 books with bookmarks on my shelves. So I should say that I was reading The Blind Watchmaker with organisational complexity in mind because I had already read half of The Selfish Gene.

Reading The Selfish Gene I became fascinated with the idea of evolutionary stable states. The concept that there were states that a complex evolving system could take which were more stable than others. A simple concept I must admit; but one which to my mind automatically implied the possibility of states which would promote run away change in a particular direction (a concept actually explored in The Blind Watchmaker under 'Explosions and Spirals').

Actually, it's a little difficult to explain how this relates to my theory of organisations. I hope one day to get my thoughts more in order. It's something to do with organizations rewarding poor quality management... The other contribution is something to do with the environment in which publicly owned firms exist and the effect this has on how they are managed. Oh I'm too sleepy.

The day I woke up and didn't hate marketing

It's interesting. As a youngster I was like the characters in Dilbert. Always complaining that the marketing department was selling things that the engineers didn't know how to build.

As I get older that concerns me less and less. Some of my greatest frustrations come from the lack of a mature, diverse set of service offerings to deliver.

In a sense, it doesn't matter if there is nothing behind the service offerings to back them up. It doesn't matter if the organisation doesn't know how half of them are going to be delivered.

I know how to deliver. I know how to implement. I know how to manage. I have enough experience in the IT industry now to be genuinely confident. I'll link the service offerings to the delivery capabilities I have access to and make all those grandiose service offerings a reality. That's my job.

When I see a mature, well-organised set of service offerings like those presented by Unisys (just a random example) I see it as a thing of beauty. I don't cynically wish it were actually true that they had a fully-developed delivery architecture behind them. I just start wondering how I could deliver them.

Well, of course it is!

ZDNet today reported on a study that found that IT moral was at an all-time low. It suggests the reasons are primarily 'continuing lack of job growth' but that doesn't sound like a reason to me. It sounds more like a symptom of an industry gone mad.

Apparently the report says that 'fewer employees, fewer dollars for projects, and the perception that there is not need to focus on retention' will also not help productively in the industry. I can't agree more with the first two – particularly in software development where they are basically the same thing – because being able to use fewer employees and allocate fewer dollars to projects is a sign of increased productivity not a cause.

I don't think the IT industry is engaging in particularly challenging projects. Sure the Internet makes the results of some projects more visible to customers and commentators; and the consulting industry does keep coming up with new names for the same stuff – but the industry is still engineering software, integrating systems, and building infrastructure.

So if the projects aren't any more challenging why should they still be allocated the same number of dollars? And the reason is that the IT industry isn't becoming more productive – it's becoming less productive.

Now some notes on why;

* there are too many non-IT people in the industry; people without the aptitude for the industry who a simply looking for the 2o percent higher wages the report also speaks of

* the IT industry suffers from the strange perception that having certain skills means that you are incapable of having other skills; for example if you are a 'techie' you can't manage

* combining those two points, it's the non-IT people who are managing the industry. This is justified specifically because they DON'T have knowledge of IT; not based on any particular skills that they DO have

* therefore management of the IT industry is performed out of context. so it's dominated by the types of management Mintzberg refers to in 'Managers Not MBAs' (which is, incidentally the type of management that MWT does without)

Back Links

I'm proud that a reference to ManageWithoutThem has made it into the world of business education:

Johnson C. Smith University
Business Administration - Management (Subject Guide)
http://archives.jcsu.edu/library/busmanag.htm

I'm not mad

Well, other people agree with me:

Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism
by Martin Parker

Nice review here.

Finally, The Big Picture

Check out new article in the Articles section called 'Finally, The Big Picture'.