Maybe some day we’ll look back on the role of the manager in our organizations and laugh.

Such a quaint trend. Kind of like having The Clapper in every room of your house, or wearing multiple Swatch watches, or working out to Richard Simmons videos. Each seemed really helpful at the time, but looking back, we kind of wonder what the heck we were thinking.

OK, I’m exaggerating. After all, the manager/employee trend has been going strong for 100 years or more. But are we seeing enormous changes in the role of managers on the horizon? Signs point to yes.

In some of the most forward-thinking businesses and in many projects being run the open source way, the traditional manager/employee relationship, which looks something like the image above, is being replaced with something much less formal and much more flexible.

I think the new model looks more like this:

In the old model, managers are the leaders, employees are the followers. Managers don’t follow, employees rarely lead.

One of my pet peeves is when people use the words manager and leader interchangeably. We all know of managers who are terrible leaders and leaders who are terrible managers. Yet so often managers are given leadership status by default. Does it have to be that way?

In the new model, everyone is a leader and everyone is a follower…of something… but the people who are leading and the people who are following change regularly project by project or task by task.

For example, let’s say our team has been tasked with building a rocket-propelled pogo stick (because the pogo stick was never just a fad, right?).

In our little meritocracy, one of the team members has proven over time that she knows more about rocket propulsion than anyone else. When she schedules a meeting to discuss rocket propulsion techniques, people show up. When she says something will work, it usually does.

In this case, the job actually does require a rocket scientist, so everyone is happy that she is the leader of the rocket propulsion aspect of the project.

Does she get a fancy title like “Senior Director of Rocket Propulsion Technology” or something like that? Not necessary here. She just humbly leads the rocket propulsion activities, and other people follow her lead.

Now this same woman knows absolutely nothing about marketing. Worse than nothing. She couldn’t market a glass of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. But she is still eager to help the team if she can, and really wants to learn more about marketing.

Fortunately, we have a guy who is a marketing guru. Everyone loves him and he has a long history of successfully marketing new types of pogo sticks. He is glad the rocket scientist wants to help on his marketing plan because he knows that having diverse perspectives are the key to getting the best ideas.

He is a humble leader of the marketing efforts, not because of some big fancy title or a box at the top of an org chart, but because people are willing to listen to him and do what he says.

I’m the manager of the project. Which might sound glamorous to you, but it is really just another role, one I was given because the team trusts me to be organized and good at keeping projects on track (did I mention this is a fictional project?).

We have one person leading rocket propulsion, one person leading marketing, one person leading project management, and probably and handful of people leading other tasks, both large and small.

Perhaps there is even one overall project leader who, again, has that role not because it is some sort of glamorous titled position, but because they happen to be very good at getting different parts of the project collaborating and seeing the big picture.

Sound overly idealistic? Wouldn’t ever work in your organization because of the politics or other considerations? You might be right.

For this sort of flexible leadership model to succeed three things need to be in place:

1) a shared sense of purpose where everyone has the same goal and the team goal is more important than individual goals.

2) deep trust between team members and a culture of respect and humility.

3) a leadership culture, not a management culture.

Let me share one example from the open source world that has blown me away. Over the years, The Fedora Project, at least from where I sit, has been a model of a leadership culture.

I’ve watched as one great leader after another, from Michael Johnson, to Cristian Gafton, to Greg Dekoenigsberg, to Max Spevack, to Paul Frields, has finished a successful stint as Fedora Project Leader and then willing passed the baton on to the next leader in line. In fact, Paul just finished his turn as leader a few months back.

Paul’s note announcing the new Fedora Project Leader made me happy. It articulated all three of the points above, showing leadership, humility, and a willingness to do what it takes to serve the project purpose above personal aspirations. I remember Max and Greg expressing similar sentiments as they were ending their terms as project leader.

Here’s an excerpt from Paul’s note:

One of the hallmarks of Fedora leadership is that it’s open to change. The [Fedora Project Leader] is not a semi-benevolent dictator for life, but rather a position to which new people can regularly bring their passion for making Fedora better.  And so, just as previous FPLs announced their readiness to search for the next leader, I did so a few months ago, in the spirit of openness and transparency that’s a hallmark of the Fedora community.

I love Paul’s view of leadership, where it isn’t a right granted for life, but instead a mantle that is earned through skill, hard work, and passion. And one that he was willing to give up in order to make room for a new leader.

Anothing thing I love about The Fedora Project’s leadership model is that the Fedora Project Leader isn’t the only leader around. Fedora is chock full of leaders of all sorts of sub projects and initiatives big and small. Fedora is always training the next generation of leaders, which makes it easy for people like Paul, Greg, and Max to step aside when the time is right.

A last word on managers:

As we look toward the future of management, perhaps we should begin to view the manager function as a craft, much like marketing or rocket science, that certain people lead better than others.

If you believe managers as they exist today serve a necessary function in your organization, by all means, keep them. Just don’t automatically grant the mantle of leadership to every manager, and don’t make every leader take on the roles of management as well.

[This article originally appeared on opensource.com]

Almost exactly two years ago I left Red Hat to start what would become New Kind. I’d been there for four and a half years. It was wonderful and challenging; one of the great adventures of my life.

There are several reasons it was so rewarding:

+ I was working on meaningful work. We were proving that there were new ways to compete while doing ‘good.’ And I could wholeheartedly support the work of the open source movement.

+ I worked with wonderful creative people. The team I was asked to lead was dynamic and passionate, and like me, fairly new to the corporate world. What they lacked in experience was easily surpassed by their determination, commitment to success and willingness to try new things. In some cases we just didn’t know any better. In the face of formidable challenges, they kicked ass over and over again. They never gave up. What they taught me about loyalty and perseverance, they’ll never know.

And then there were the many young, highly creative and talented engineers I met and engaged with—amazing people who took to design thinking with the same passion I have.

+ I was part of a small group competing against the best and brightest minds—not to mention toughest competitors—in the world. When you’re going toe-to-toe with the likes of Microsoft, Sun, Novell and Oracle (and the resources at their command) you better bring your ‘A’ game every day.

But, I suppose, the greatest gift to me was the opportunity to work with the CEO of Red Hat, Matthew Szulik. It was the promise of working with Matthew that lead me to leave my comfortable, if boring, partnership at a local firm to join Red Hat. It was bumpy at times; I knew it would be. But it was always exciting.

I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot. Just recently Matthew stepped down from his role as Chairman of Red Hat. I won’t go on about Matthew, he wouldn’t like that. But I thought about him as I read a recent blog post from my friend Jeffrey Phillips at OVO Innovation.

Jeff writes:

…any CEO or senior executive who wants more innovation should get out of the corner office and go meet with people three, four and five levels down from them, face to face, person to person, to see just how much capability and insight is waiting to be unleashed. Yes, the processes and products that drive today’s revenue have to be run effectively, but believe me these organizations are much more nimble, and much more adaptable, than many executives believe. And the people in those roles have plenty of insights and ideas if we’ll simply unleash them.

This gap between the wants and needs of the executive team, and the capabilities and energy of the “rank and file” means that many executives aren’t doing a good job of maximizing the value of the firm. In fact, while they’ve optimized the easy stuff, they’ve left all the really valuable stuff on the table. This gap is one that can be quickly and easily closed. All the executives need to see is the capability, the nimbleness and the insights that their teams have, and be willing to recognize that the organization is capable of change, and in fact is often ready to change.  Eventually the question will be more about the nimbleness of the executives, because once the innovators are freed up and sponsored, it might be difficult to get the firm to slow down.

Jeff nails it. And it makes me smile when I think about what he’s written here and compare it to my corporate experience. There was no gap between Matthew Szulik and anyone working at Red Hat. He knew just about every employee in the company and routinely walked through the hallways and into cubicles unannounced—we called them ‘drive-bys’—where he pushed and prodded for change and new ideas on a daily basis. It didn’t matter if you were a senior executive or an intern—no one was spared. Because Matthew knew that conformity to the status quo is a sure way to kill innovation and great ideas can come from anywhere.

Matthew believed in the people of Red Hat and pushed them to continually challenge the status quo. In fact, there were complaints that Matthew would never let a ’status quo’ take root. I believe that’s true. He wasn’t always a walk in the park. But what a ride.

Last post, I discussed how governments, especially state and local, should be thinking differently about the ways they engage online with the people they serve.

A quick recap: governments have a relatively indefinite shelf-life; they have powers and likewise responsibilities that come along with being a monopoly; and given people live within and travel across multiple jurisdictions there’s a need and opportunity for reuse of technology and design.

I’m still focused on virtual spaces where there’s a requirement to be official or government run. We know, exemplified beautifully through open data initiatives, the notion that government has to be the central point for everything has changed and will continue to transform. Using and facilitating community or nongovernmental channels is another matter.

So, let’s say you’re just getting into this space. What to do? I’m not in a position to endorse or shun any specific technology or service—that needs to be a broader community discussion and in many cases will be scenario specific.

Instead, here’s a set of guidelines to help you think about your situation.

Develop a consistent identity.

Government can build or tear down its reputation at every interaction, every point of communication, no matter how small it might seem.

Online it’s even more important to design a space to clearly mark who owns, runs, and controls it. That’s our only indication of where we are and at whom to focus our trust or skepticism.

Take two examples.

[Read the rest of this post at opensource.com]

On Wednesday, September 1, opensource.com will be hosting a webcast with Stefan Lindegaard, one of the world’s leading experts on open innovation.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

If you’re a designer who thinks design deserves a ’seat at the table’ you have to love John Seely Brown— a design hero and sherpa for the 21st century.

His book The Power of Pull, co-written with John Hagel III, works off their recurring theme that “management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken.” The sub-title—how small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion—is a great description of the power of design as strategy.

In a recent article they published for the Harvard Business Review, they describe six fundamental shifts in the way we work. In their discussion of one shift in particular—Asia is the new global center of innovation— Brown and Hagel illustrate a fundamental problem that I describe in my post the grasshoppers’ revenge:

the concept of institutional innovation — as yet anyway — is all but invisible to most Western executives.

In a world where it is virtually a given that most organizations must be innovative to compete—where creativity is therefore a strategic imperative—western executives and business leaders are blind to the cultural and structural changes that must occur for their organizations to compete and win.

What we see time and time again is that western business leaders continue to believe wholeheartedly in the systems and processes and structures of their time and tribe—the MBA-driven mantras of the ’80s and ’90s—regardless of new data and research regarding clear changes in the competitive landscape. And, sadly, regardless of the continual dismantling of the U.S. economy and its competitive position.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It is a business bromide that you get what you incent. Our business leaders have been generously rewarded over the past three decades. That may explain why, as Seely and Hagel tell us, they simply can not see that there are alternatives. But, while they have done well for themselves, we are finding that they have not done as well by their customers, long-term shareholders, employees and the communities they serve.

Mark Twain warned us,

“it’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”

Institutional innovation—a business imperative today—is dependent upon creative workforces. If your goal is to incent creativity, then you must see that culture trumps structure. Business leaders who are willing to accept this truth will find a competitive advantage in the 21st century. But, first, they’ll have to be willing to see something that, presently, they can’t even conceive exists.

My friend and business partner Chris Grams wrote a great blog earlier this week on whether or not companies should have vacation policies. We decided long ago at New Kind that we would not have a vacation or sick leave policy. You need or want time off, take it. We support it. We believe it’s important. Go and enjoy. Come back fired up.

But we’ve now gone a step further—we have an official “no-policy policy.” In other words, now it is our policy not to have a policy about personal leave. In fact, we believe a no-policy policy means no policies. About anything. Period.

We believe accountability is balanced with freedom. You have the freedom; be accountable. Don’t screw it up. If we see abuse, we’ll deal with it. We won’t regulate it because we believe regulation is a sign of design failure. We believe, as a community, we can design a better experience.

Included in our Official Policy of No Policies (OPNP) we now have a policy of no performance reviews. Nearly two years ago Samuel Culbert, Professor of Human Resources & Organizational Behavior, UCLA, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the “one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense.” He was right.

Does this mean we don’t believe in performance? Not at all.

Does this mean we don’t believe in measurement? Not that kind of measurement.

What it really means is that we don’t see the competitive value in traditional performance reviews. That’s where research and writings by Professor Culbert and others support our intuition: ”performance reviews pretty much suck.”

We’re not saying there is no value; we’ll concede that there probably is some value. But the value earned compared to the cost simply—the infamous ROI–isn’t sufficient to invest the considerable time and emotional energy such efforts demand. Especially when businesses need to be more innovative to compete. This isn’t simply the matter of comparing the wasted time that could be used to innovate either (but consider the total hours a 1000-person firm wastes on performance reviews annually!), but the damage these reviews wreak on morale, collaboration and teamwork.

Performance reviews cause enormous stress; hardly an objective of an innovative workplace. Creative organizations do better in an environment where play is valued and nurtured. There is nothing playful about these types of regulated management practices, designed to measure by force that which it can not objectively or accurately measure.

Which brings us to the most obvious but unspoken truth about traditional performance reviews— they incent and reward the creation of bullshit. And I’m not using that term frivolously or in a deprecating sense, but in the sense that Harry Frankfurt, philosophy professor emeritus at Princeton, who has analyzed the concept of bullshit “as related to but distinct from lying.” Professor Frankfurt has convinced us; bullshit is a highly destructive force.

And it is a huge business expense. No two ways about it, the ability to create and process bullshit is deeply rewarded in performance reviews and the enforcement of many corporate policies. Political players—operatives—prosper in such environments. But creative workforces abhor bullshit.

At New Kind we prefer no bullshit. No policies. And certainly no performance reviews.

Daniel Pink published an interesting piece over the weekend in The Telegraph about Netflix’s innovative corporate policy of not having a vacation policy.

Meaning, employees don’t have a set number of days they get off each year, but instead can take vacation whenever they want. From the article:

At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they’d like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days. In other words, Netflix’s holiday policy is to have no policy at all.

This may sound like a recipe for disaster to you, but it hasn’t turned out that way for Netflix. In fact, as the rest of article highlights, not having a lot of corporate policies may be a fantastic strategy for engaging 21st century workers.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

We live in a world with some big problems. That’s certain enough. I suppose it has always been true and will always be true. We advance. The blessing and curse of being human. We exchange one set of problems for the next. But we do not succumb. We do not sit still. We progress. In the face of ignorance, opposition, and cynicism, truth still happens.

Truth faces huge obstacles. One of the many lessons I learned in the corporate world was one I’ll call the Law of Ownership. You see, executives believe in accountability. Love it! LOVE IT! And, if I’m an executive, the more I’m ‘accountable’ for, the more I’m rewarded, the bigger my fiefdom, the more control I can exert, the more status I attain, the bigger title, better chance I can get a better job once I’ve totally screwed things up where I am and have to jump ship… you get the idea.

And thus, the Law of Ownership:

“I can’t be accountable for what I don’t own.”

Or, as it plays out “I have to own it if I’m going to solve it.”

We’ll leave aside for future posts the idiotic and insane activities this Law incents and the fact that it is impossible for anyone in a large organization to ‘own’ a problem that reaches across teams or departments, but suffice it to say a corporate executive’s day is filled with drawing boxes of ownership, figuring out strategies and alliances to gather bigger pieces of the organization, and measuring and assigning accountability (this is where I note that accountability conforms to the Laws of Gravity and, like sewage, runs downhill).

The problem is while this approach often works to advance the career of the successful executive, it seldom actually solves any real problem—especially if that problem is large and complex. And, when it does have success, it’s a very expensive process.

So, here’s the good news: by using open source and design thinking principles we can overcome the myth of the Law of Ownership. Indeed, large complex problems can often only be solved when ownership and ego are set aside, when data is shared between all participants and when ideas are determined as valid based on the merit of the idea and not the false hope of ‘reliable’ measurements and personal agendas. And this is where I recommend my favorite business book of all time— The Responsibility Virus by Roger Martin.

That’s why a story in today’s NYTimes blows me away. In it we learn that just seven years ago “a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain.”

I could focus this blog on the miracle of industry, government and academia working together so successfully in the day and time. But I want look at the broader implications of applying open sourcing and design thinking to a large-scale, complex problem:

“No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.”

Wow!

The effort is already “bearing fruit” including a “wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid” and with more than 100 studies under way to “test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.” What’s more similar efforts are using this collaborative model to in the fight against Parkinson’s disease.

Were the researchers cynical when the process began?

“We weren’t sure, frankly, how it would work out having data available to everyone,” he said. “But we felt that the good that could come out of it was overwhelming. And that’s what’s happened.”

— Neil S. Buckholtz, chief of the Dementias of Aging Branch at the National Institute on Aging in Indianapolis.

The results?

“It was unbelievable… It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door”…

Read that again. Then imagine that attitude being adopted by the executive team of your organization.

Think about a public space. Maybe it’s a park, or a public library, but some physical space owned by government. We have different expectations about public spaces, and our freedoms in them, compared to private spaces.

Think about a place where civic happenings go on, where dialogue and delivery of services occur. What comes to mind for me is the (maybe nostalgic) notion of a bustling city hall. People go there to interact with government and each other, and accomplish something. In theory, at least.

Now, imagine this public space is virtual.

Things may be different, depending on what technology the government deploys or what vendor they choose. To gain access to the space, citizens might have to go through a private vendor. The underlying technology might be proprietary software owned by that company, and walled off from eyes other than their own. The government may understand what the space does, but have limited knowledge about how it works, its design, or its integrity. In some cases, the technology may just be a service, without ownership (or control) over the virtual real estate, and without the ability to give assurances to participants.

Citizens can be locked out, data and content locked in. Would you put up with it in the physical world if city hall kept changing addresses, hours, methods of access, physical layout, or in some cases up and disappeared without a note left behind?

Just using the United States as an example, there are 87,525 local governments (National League of Cities 2002 Census of Governments). If you discard special district governments and school districts, that still leaves around 20,000 municipal governments, 16,000 town governments and 3,000 county governments.

In the physical world we have to start from scratch, to some extent, and use materials that obviously can’t be used elsewhere. Why do we resort to that limitation in thinking virtually? The opportunity to find some commonality among how we govern and the virtual infrastructure is huge.

[Read the rest over at opensource.com]

My good friend and business partner, Chris Grams, writes that “formality in business is dying.” He isn’t referring to fashion or manners. Chris is referring to formal business practices such as the heavy emphasis on structure: the arranging of elements rather than content.

Amen, brother. And not a moment too soon.

Peter Drucker, the man who invented management, warned us that business structure must be aligned to business strategy or the business is “doomed to failure.” Essentially a company’s structure is a strategic configuration that will support or hinder the execution of its strategy.

It’s only fair to note that the 20th century’s industrialized business models largely depended on structure to succeed. Industrialization as strategy demands a “machine” model—to use the language of the brilliant business thinker Henry Mintzberg—where employees are little more than cogs to move things along in a predictable and measurable manner.

According to Mintzberg, there are six valid organizational configurations, but for now I’ll focus on just two:

Standardization of work: typical for machine organizations
Mutual adjustment: typical for innovative organizations

Most business leaders today are caught in a paradox: their success to date has generally been the result of building machine organizations where work standardization made sense and drove success— for both the organization and the individual.

But the competitive world has changed. Now these same leaders are challenged with building innovative organizations. While machine organizations succeed by using rigid structure and “standardization of work,” innovative organizations require a different configuration. Mintzberg suggests “mutual adjustment” or, as he puts it, something more akin to “two people having a conversation.”

So how might that look? Well, what do we know about conversations?

1. Conversations are cultural events. They happen where people who trust one another find areas of common interest.

2. It is impossible to command that a conversation take place. All participants have to want to be there. People choose to engage in a conversation.

3. Conversations are fragile. They have to be nurtured and protected. Manipulation, dishonesty, asserting power or assuming control shut down conversations. And once people feel misused or bullied in a conversation, they will stop participating. The chances of re-engaging are exponentially diminished as this behavior is repeated over time.

If innovation is strategic to your organization, then you must understand how to build an innovative organization. What worked building machine organizations does not work when building innovative organizations. When creativity matters, culture trumps structure. Formality is the enemy. Community is the answer. Those who start the conversation first have a true competitive advantage.