Listics

Click on the Hugh Macleod card above to be instantly transported to “The Hughtrain Manifesto.” I found this serious piece of work as a link off Hugh’s equally brilliant “Guide to Creativity,” which I found because I was reading Joi Ito’s blog, which I linked to out of the mamamusings bloglines link that I found after I clicked on the Eliz Lawley link at David Weinberger’s blog, and the beat goes on.

Incipient RageBoyism, the compulsive acquisition of vast numbers of books, is upon me. From “Moral Mazes” and “Who Really Matters,” it seemed important to dig a little deeper into the organizational potential for change. Hence my Amazon order this morning: Malone’s “The Future of Work;” and Malone et al., “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century.”

I remember when I used to “go to work.” Recently the phrase has crept back into my active vocabulary due to my good fortune in working on a long term contract at a desk at my customer’s location. William Dietrich observes,

The ancient Greeks knew all about work. Their word for it was ponos, which meant not just toil but suffering. And pain. Work was for slaves. The role of free men, according to the thinkers, was to avoid work as much as possible so they’d have time for war, philosophy and art.

Them were the days.

Nowadays, everybody works, even Bill Gates, richest man in the world. We’re supposed to (Protestant Work Ethic), most of us have to (Money) and in theory we want to (Personal Fulfillment, or Meaning).

This month I’m building an awareness of the structural conditions that bound my work. Where do I fit in an organization, and why? Since the dim light of pre-history (back into the sixties), we have spoken of imbuing our systems with “goodness.” What constitutes “goodness” in an organization by my lights? What does a good organization look like? What does it deliver and how does it deliver?

I don’t know if I’ll find my way past the intersection of quarterly financial goals and corporate values this month, but I hope so. The American b-school emphasis on short term returns at the expense of foundational values seems to be one of the toxic conditions of business culture that poisons the larger culture that contains the corporate model. Is there imperical evidence for that? I dunno. We’ll see what turns up.

I’m reading two books right now in an effort to keep up my end of the bidness conversation: “Who really Matters,” by Art Kleiner, and “Moral Mazes - The World of Corporate Managers,” by Robert Jackall.

I’m a consultant and a serial contractor. Kleiner’s “core group theory” rings ever so true to me. Perhaps the advantage of finding this material in print is that the books legitimize discussion of some awkward truths. The customer doesn’t come first, no matter what the corporate rhetoric tells you. If the customer is lucky she comes second to a strong CEO who mandates the subtle lie that she comes first. Then there’s the matter of these subtle - and not so subtle - lies. Jackall begins with an examination of the bracketing of personal values in a bureaucratic context. He quotes a corporate vice president thusly: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.” And while this may be a great unspoken truth, it’s not possible to acknowledge it as true simply because the acknowledgement would be unrespectable; hence the bracketing of morals between home and workplace and compromised behavior in the latter.

So, as I said, the value of the books I’m reading is to legitimize discussion of these otherwise unspeakable truths. There’s a lot here for a project manager who is faced with the spaghetti code of Byzantine corporate cultures and practices.