THE BUSINESS STRATEGY EMAGAZINE

This is a PDF version of Tempo!. An interactive eBook version is available via Apple's iBookstore at https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ tempo!/id580506736?mt=11&uo=4

Tempo!
Why cities live and companies die The LESS! book project The story behind the picture Perspectives: How to choose a content management system
Henrik Mrtensson
Business Management Consulting www.henrikmartensson.org

ISSUE 1-2012

 2012 by Henrik Mrtensson Articles and article illustrations are copyrighted by their authors except where noted.
i

Editorial
By Henrik Mrtensson
Tap the photo!

A BOUT THE COVER The cover photo was taken by Herminia Dosal, a Mexican photographer.You can read the story behind the picture or listen to Herminia talking about the famous painter Frida Kahlo.

As a business strategist, I like it when one thing can serve more than one purpose. The Tempo! newsletter does that: First, this and the following three issues of the newsletter supports the book LESS!: Essays on Business Transformation. Second, eBooks are the future of book publishing. An interactive eBook is much better than a traditional book for learning. For a management book author, this is a fantastic opportunity. It is possible to integrate text,pictures, audio and video to create management books that are actually useful to readers! The drawback is the learning curve. Producing an eBook is a complex matter. There are a lot of things to learn, and a free newsletter is a great way to start. In this issue of Tempo! you will nd two audio interviews:

Katherine Kirk, talks about how growing up among Australian aborigines gave her experiences and perspectives she uses in her work as a troubleshooter and project leader. Herminia Dosal, the Mexican photographer, talks about the painter Frida Kahlo. This is an excerpt from a much longer interview. There is more to come in future issues. Why Cities Live and Companies Die provides insight into how your company can adapt to become more resilient. Perspectives shows how different perspectives can lead to radically different decisions given the same circumstances. I hope you enjoy reading this issue of Tempo! as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

Why cities live and companies die

By Henrik Mrtensson
Companies have short lifespans. Cities live thousands of years; Cities can survive plagues and nuclear bombs. Companies croak when there is a slight downturn in the economy.; People want to live in large cities, but they want to work in small companies. Why? What is the difference? Why does it matter?

Why cities live and companies die

If we understand why cities are so resilient, can we use that knowledge to build better companies? Companies that are more resilient and better places to work? Physicist Geoffrey West believes so. West has studied cities and found a very simple mathematical relationship between city size and productivity: When a city doubles in size, each person in the city becomes about 15-20% more productive. The astonishing thing is that everything that has to do with the city infrastructure follows the same power law. According to West it holds for wages, supercreative people per capita, and patents per capita. (On the ip side, the power law also holds for crime per capita, and u per capita.) The productivity increase in cities is in stark contrast to what happens in companies. According to an article in the CYBAEA Journal, when a company grows, productivity per employee drops. For comparison, I have plotted the power rules governing city and company productivity in Figure 1. When cities grow larger, productivity per person increases by about 15% each time the city population doubles. In a company, productivity per person drops when the company

A G EOFFREY W EST P RIMER You can nd out more about Geoffrey West and the math of cities and corporations here: TED Talk: The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations Geoffrey West prole page on TED TED Blog post: The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: Q&A with GeoffreyWest Santa Fe Institute Geoffrey West page

which friends to spend time with, or where to work, or whom to vote for.You gure all that out for yourself, based on the knowledge you have about the city. Companies are very different:You are told where to sit, what to work on, whom to work with, when to take a break, and who your boss is.You have comparatively little latitude to exercise your own judgement. What companies are missing is the power of selforganization. Figure 1 Productivity per size increment in cities and corporations. When cities grow larger, productivity per person increases by about 15% each time the city population doubles. In a company, productivity per person drops when the company grows. The fundamental difference: Cities are networks, most companies are hierarchies. grows. The fundamental difference: Cities are networks, most companies are hierarchies. What this graph shows is that a city is much better organized than the average company. But why? Cities are networks. They are to a large extent selforganizing. Nobody tells you where to live, where to shop, Donella Meadows's Scale of System Interventions is another way to look at it. Company leaders usually focus on the low end of the Meadows scale: They set targets like "increase sales by 20%", or "reduce costs by 10%". They make budgets and set project deadlines, which is saying they allocate money and time buffers. Sometimes they make a reorganization, which means they mostly mess around with stock and ow structures. Cities leave most of that to its inhabitants. City planners are concerned with overall system structure, but they mostly let people make their own decisions, and that is what makes cities resilient, productive, and powerful.

The power to shift paradigm to deal with new challenges The paradigm used to design the system The System Goal System structure/self organization System rules Information ow structures Reinforcing feedback loops Balancing feedback loops Delays relative to change rates Stocks and ow structures Buffer sizes Constants, parameters, numbers System

Figure 2 Donella Meadowss scale of system intervention points Why are companies so much more vulnerable to damage than cities? There are several reasons, but most have to do with the way companies split in order to manage growth. Companies divide into functional departments. This causes problems when information or physical material is moved from one department to another. Hand-offs are difcult to manage, and you can have many value streams that interfere with each other. this problem becomes worse the more cost
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Figure 3 Value streams in functional hierarchies vs. value streams in networks. From my book Tempo!
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effective an organization is, because increasing cost effectiveness means reducing the capability to absorb variation in the value streams. Add to that, that if a single node in a functional organization is damaged in some way, it may affect all value streams running through that organization. For example, if the IT department suffers from work overload, you can't do anything but wait until they get to your request. I have worked at companies with waiting times of 918 months for simple requests like setting up a server. On the other hand, in a city, if you can't get the service you want when you want it, you go someplace else. If the grocery shop closest to where I live closes, I won't starve. I just shop my food somewhere else. According to the book Creative Destruction by Richard Foster, the lifespan of large companies is shrinking steadily. In 1938 the lifespan was about 75 years. In 2010 it was about 15 years. It is when you link the productivity gures with company Return On Invested Capital and life expectancy numbers that the results get really scary. According to the 2010 Shift Index

by Deloitte, ROIC has dropped from 6.5% in 1965 to 1.3% in 2010. Steve Denning has pointed out that a study by Richard Foster, using data collected by McKinsey, shows that the life expectancy of companies have been shrinking steadily. In 1938 the life expectancy of an S&P Fortune 500 company was about 75 years. In 2010 it had shrunk to about 15 years. The amazing thing is that we do have plenty of blueprints for building companies that are as resilient as cities, but with rare exceptions, we don't. There are signs that things are looking up though. We may have a phase shift, a rapid transition from the old hierarchies to network based organizations pretty soon.

M ORE ABOUT NETWORKS The Connected Company by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal The Power of Pull: How small moves smartly made can set big things in motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. Superconnect: The Power of Networks and the
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The LESS! book project

By Henrik Mrtensson
The LESS! project was an exceptional experience: Twelve authors working together to write a management book in only six months. This is the story of why and how we did it.

on Bus iness T Dan Be ransfor rgh Joh mation nsson Bjarte B o Peter B gsnes un Steve D ce en Ola Elln ning estam Hkan Fo Brian H rss awkes Maarit Laanti Henrik Mrten sson Karl Sc otland Ari-Pek ka Skar p James Sutton With a for John H eword by agel III
Business M www.hen anagement Con su rikmarte nsson.or lting g

LESS!
Essays

Henrik M

rtensso

less

The LESS! book project

It was Katherine Kirk who came up with the idea! Both Katherine and I were speakers at the LESS 2011 management conference in Stockholm. Katherine had made an exceptional presentation. Her talk was named Kanban and the Importance of Equanimity: Navigating politics and data aversion at the BBC, and it had blown me away completely. At the time, I was (and I still am) collecting interviews with exceptionally gifted managers and leaders for a future book. I talked with Katherine about interviewing her, and she agreed. Katherine has an interesting back story. She grew up in the Australian outback, adopted by an aboriginal tribe. As you can imagine, this gives her a very interesting perspective on Western civilization. As it turns out, this perspective is very useful in her work. It was too good an opportunity to miss. I asked Katherine if I could interview her, and she said yes. One of my standard interview questions is which topic would you really like to see a management book about? This conference, Katherine said. That wasnt quite the answer I had expected, but it made perfect sense. I had wanted to write a collaborative management book for years, and thanks to Katherine it suddenly dawned on me that the LESS conference gave me a perfect opportunity to nd co-authors. I got Katherines permission to use her idea, and then talked to Vasco Duarte, a LESS conference organizer, about it. He and the conference board liked the idea, and gave me the email addresses I needed to contact the other conference speakers. I set up the LESS Author Group at Linkedin, contacted the other authors, and we were off.
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I wrote a set of writing guidelines, and also used my own chapter as a sample chapter. The idea was that each author should write a book chapter on the same theme as their presentation at the conference. When draft chapters began to trickle in, I proceeded to drive the other authors nuts by demanding rewrite after rewrite, never being satised with diagrams and other illustrations, and by insisting that each author must provide a high resolution portrait, to be put at the beginning of each chapter. The reatrait son for beginning each chapter with a porwas that I wanted readers to be able to meet the eyes of the author before reading. We LESS! authors are asking our readers to do a lot: To think very deeply about how they do business, and how their organizations work, to learn things that are new and different from what they are used to. This requires a lot of trust, and it is easier to trust someone whose face you can see.

Figure 4 Katherine Kirk came up with the idea of a book based on the LESS 2011 conference while I interviewed her for another book.

Audio Clip 1 Katherine Kirk: How growing up with an Australian aboriginal tribe gives a different perspective.

Audio Clip 2 Katherine Kirk: Seeing patterns is about survival.

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Failures that result in learning should be rewarded.

R UNNING

THE

LESS!

PROJECT :

A LL

OF US

ARE SMARTER THAN ANY ONE OF US

The organization must be a network.

Failures are opportunities to learn and improve.

There is no need for elaborate hierarchies of control and authority.

Failures are the result of factors outside the control or understanding of the worker.

There are fundamental assumptions about how the world works that underlie everything we do. Business is no exception. Our assumptions shape our behavior. In business, our assumptions shape how we structure organizations, how we distribute power in the organization, strategies, tactics, and culture. In 1960 Douglas McGregor formulated a model for the basic assumptions underlying almost all business organizations. The model is called Theory X. A consequence of Theory X assumptions is that organizations must be hierarchical, that workers must have limited authority and be closely supervised, and that you need to punish failure. As you can imagine, Theory X assumptions are not conducive to happiness at work. McGregor also formulated a different set of assumptions, Theory Y. According to Theory Y, under the right conditions, people are capable of taking responsibility. They are eager to learn, creative, and enjoy working. Theory Y assumptions are conducive to happiness at work. McGregor also showed that Theory Y organizations can be vastly more effective than Theory X organizations. They are
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Workers must be encouraged to communicate laterally and vertically (No organizational silos.)

There is no need for elaborate control structures.

Under the right conditions, most workers will do their best at work.

Workers should have a say in decisions that affect them.

Workers should have great latitude regarding how to accomplish missions.

Most work involves many process steps performed by different people.

Work satisfaction is strong motivation to do well.

Workers have rst-hand information about their working conditions.

Workers are responsible decision makers.

Workers are motivated by intrinsic rewards.

Managers are responsible for creating a work climate where workers can do well.

Workers are ambitious under the right conditions.

Workers can excercise selfcontrol.

Workers are creative under the right conditions.

Workers are self-motivated under the right conditions.

Workers enjoy their work under the right conditions.

Managers, by denition, are responsible for the organization as a system.

Figure 5 Theory Y The assumptions underlying Theory Y lead to network organization, individual responsibility, and rapid learning.

much better at adapting to changing business conditions. They are also much more innovative, and capable of driving change. To top it off, they are also more fun to work in than Theory X organizations. Because X organization are so common, setting one up, or maintaining it, does not require much thought. There are difcult problems, yes, but the problems are fairly well dened. If you want to set up a Theory Y organization, you do not have as many role models to learn from, so you have to think a bit more. For the LESS! project we did of course want a Theory Y based organization. That way, we could produce a better book, and do it cheaper and faster, while having more fun. Plus, using an X type organization to produce a book based on Theory Y premises would have been embarrassing. There are of course major differences between The LESS! Author Group, which was formed for the express purpose of writing the LESS! book, and a Theory Y based business organization like Gore & Associates, Semco, or the Virgin Group. Nevertheless, the basic ideas are the same. To begin with, no one ordered anyone to participate in the project. I simply wrote a brief, outlining the project goal, and the basic rules for how to get the work done. Then, I
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Gallery 1 Meet the LESS! Authors Bjarte Bogsnes is the chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table Europe, the author of Implementing Beyond Budgeting, and VP of Performance Management Development at Statoil. 1 of 12

pitched the project to the authors. The act of pitching the project serves as a nice selection mechanism. If the project is worthwhile, people will want to do it. If it isnt, they just wont commit. The LESS! Author Group is a group of highly skilled experts, but there is also a wide range of skills. The authors have diverse backgrounds, belong to different social groupings, are from different countries with different cultures and different languages. When a group this diverse decides that something is worth working on, they are very likely to be right. This is a classic Wisdom of the Crowds mechanism. The idea is that all of us are smarter than any one of us. I wanted to make it as easy as possible to contribute, and to collaborate, so I set up a LESS Author Group on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not a very good collaboration platform, but everyone had accounts there, which made it easy to join. If I did it all over again, I might pick Google+ or Facebook instead. Both Facebook and Google+ makes it easier to share pictures and other les. Figure 6 How the LESS! project team used online services. The LinkedIn group was open to all conference speakers, so they could have a look around and decide for themselves if
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LinkedIn

Box

Lulu

Files (Drafts, pictures) Many to many messaging Prototype and nal printed books, PDF and ePub les

they should join the project or not. I tried to make it very clear that it was OK to join later on, and that it was also OK to drop out. The assumptions were that everyone in the project would do their best, but also that they had limited time and attention to spend on the LESS! project. I also set up a Box account for uploading large les, like preview versions of the LESS! book. I chose Box because Box allows les to be downloaded by people who do not have Box accounts. I did not want to force anyone to create a new account to be able to participate in the project. Recently, DropBox has added similar capabilities. Google Drive also allows sharing with people without Google accounts. The next time I coordinate a project like this, the choice of services might be different. Note that a Theory X organization would be likely to have rules preventing a project team from deciding to use Internet services in this manner. The decision would be taken higher up, not when the need arises, but when someone at the top gets around to doing it. It would also be impossible to adapt to changing circumstances. In a Theory Y organization, teams would retain this level of freedom regardless of the size of the organization. For example, Business Network International has more than 140,000

members, but if you suggested to the core management team that they should tell their members which services to use while working on BNI related matters, they would think you are a bit funny in the head. (And rightly so. Core management has more important things to do.)

V ALUE

STREAMS : CO - EXISTING RATHER

THAN COMPETING

Assuming that each author has a life outside of work, and at least one, maybe two or three, projects at work, the LESS! project would have to co-exist with 25-50 other value streams. The Theory X way would have been to compete for capacity, and try to push everyone to commit as much time as possible to the LESS! project. That would not have worked. People would simply have quit. Even if it had worked, the results would have been bad. Several other value streams might have been congested, people would have been unhappy, and in the end, the book would have suffered. This is what routinely happens in Theory X organizations. In such organizations, sub-optimization is a way of life, and few people think about it. Its just the way things are. It would be quite ridiculous for me to schedule the other authors, when:
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The chapter is here

We need to move the chapter to this position Difcult topics require more readable text.

Difculty of topic

The acceptable for publishing area is here

Easy topics can be understood even if the text is a little less readable Readability
Figure 7 Using pictures to communicate. In the LESS! project, we used simple pictures to communicate effectively. Text is an efcient way to communicate when everyone starts out with roughly the same idea. It does not work nearly as well when communicating new or unfamiliar ideas. Combine text and pictures, and youll get much better results.

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they know more about their workload than I do at least some of them know more about efcient scheduling than I do the greatest source of delay is likely to be unknown at the time of planning, and is likely to be outside the control of the team members Instead, I asked the authors to tell me when they were likely to be ready. We actually did have a deadline at rst, but we whizzed past that at a point when there were still plenty of white pages to ll in the book. It is worth pointing out that despite blowing a deadline, the LESS! project was extremely fast. A book project like this, run by a traditional publishing company, could easily take one to two years from inception to publication. We did it in about six months. If we had been a book publishing company, working according to the principles and ideas in LESS!, we could easily have optimized the process, bringing the lead time down to a single month.
Reading ease

25

50

75

100

Gallery 2 Use concrete measures The Flesch-Kincaid readability index made discussing rewrites and improvements much easier.

P REDICTIVE

VS . ADAPTIVE PLANNING

A problem with that approach is that a schedule, even if accurate, would not help us increase the Return On Investment of the project. Adaptive planning, on the other hand, would help us decide what to do under different circumstances.
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Traditional planning is designed to be predictive: Estimate how long various tasks will take, and use that information to make a plan that is little more than a schedule.

We set up a buddy editing system where authors could partner up to proofread each others rst drafts. Duarte Vasco, a LESS conference organizer, also worked tirelessly as an editor. This left me free to focus on second drafts. It did of course help that we had some very good writers on the project. More than one author submitted a rst draft that had nal draft quality. This is quite a feat. Working with top people paid off big time in terms of quality. I believe it is a general truth that you get much better payoff by going for high quality than you get by going for low production cost. It was certainly true for the LESS! project.

Figure 8 The rst thing you see when starting on a chapter is a picture of the author and a short biography. For example, it was easy to gure out that the main project bottleneck was likely to be me. In addition to writing a chapter of my own, I would also edit each chapter at least twice, coordinate the efforts of the other authors, do the internal layout, design the cover, set up the print-on-demand project at Lulu, manage communications with 3rd parties, and build the book support website. This is not as much work as it sounds, but it is still enough to delay the project quite a bit. However, we could alleviate the problem:

W HEN

DEADLINES DON T MAKE SENSE

Deadlines make sense when you need to coordinate your activities with other activities. In our case, we did not compete against any rival publisher. Nor did we need to coordinate internal project resources. Thus, deadlines made little sense, and we made little use of them. Instead of having a xed deadline, we had threshold parameters. For example, I knew the book had to be at least 120 pages. Less than that, and the book would lose reader appeal. I also knew that management books start to lose readers when they go over 200 pages, so that was the upper limit. That gave me, as the project coordinator and acceptable range to work with.
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I worked out scenarios for the edge cases of the range, so I knew what to do if there were to few chapter submissions, or too many. There were plenty of variables I could play with to stay within the mission parameters. For example, I could change the book layout and the page size to adjust the page count. Gallery 2 contains a simple breakdown of variables affecting page count. Of course, changing the format to reduce the page count does not make logical sense. The word count remains the same. However, buying decisions are rarely entirely logical. LESS! was designed using the Cialdini inuence model as a guide. The payoff is that LESS! is physically way more attractive and enticing than most other management books. (There will be an article about the design of LESS! in a future issue of the Tempo! newsletter.) I also used automated Flesch-Kincaid readability testing to identify problem spots. One advantage of that approach is that you get a common frame of reference for readability. Automated readability testing is far from perfect, but it is a very useful tool.

In the beginning of the project, my concern was to get enough high quality content. When we hit the 120 page mark we had enough content for publication, so the burden shifted to the authors. They had to keep up or their material would get left out. Of course, this left a strong possibility that very good material would fall by the wayside. This eMagazine was intended to solve that problem. The Tempo! magazine also made it possible to publish interesting material that for one reason or another could not be published in the book. For example, in this issue we publish audio clips with excerpts from the interview with Katherine Kirk, which provided the igniting spark for the LESS! project. As it turned out, most delays we had came from external dependencies, so we never got a problem with material coming in to late to make it in the book. Now that we know what kind of delays that may crop up under various circumstances, they are easy to mitigate or eliminate in future projects.

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The story behind the picture

By Henrik Mrtensson
Most business people, whether entrepreneurs with a brand new startup or seasoned C-level executives, underestimate the value of a good photograph. This is the story of a good photograph, of the value it brought, and of Herminia Dosal, the photographer who took it.

The story behind the picture

The obvious value of a photograph lies in how you use it. For example, I use the rst photo in Gallery 3 on my business card. The value is obvious: The purpose of my business card is to help the receiver remember who I am, and what I do. A portrait makes me easier to remember. Considering that whether I am remembered or not, can make the difference between getting a business contract or not, there is no question that there is value in the portrait right there. I also use the photo on the Internet, as a prole photo on various networking sites. My company website is in for a bit of refurbishing. When that happens, Ill use this photo, and one or two others from the same photo session. These are obvious uses for anyone who is an entrepreneur or in a position to represent a company or other organization. With a bit of creativity, you can use a good photograph to create more value. A lot more value. If you ick through Gallery 3 (Go ahead! Try it if you havent already.) you will nd an example: When I worked on the layout for the LESS! book, I had the idea that the rst thing a reader should see, before reading an essay, was the face and the eyes of the author. I believe that is important. In the book we write about new ideas, necessary ideas, and we ask you to do a lot: We ask you to trust us. Trust us enough to closely examine ideas everyone else take for granted. Trust us enough to go against the herd, to think for yourself, and reshape your beliefs about how the world works. That is a lot to ask. I believe you and other people we ask to do that have a right to see the people who are asking. Hence, there is a lot of value in that photograph, for you, for me, for everyone who will benet if you decide to read LESS!, examine your beliefs, and act.

T HE

REAL STORY BEHIND THE PICTURE

Most of the value in the photograph is not in how I can use it, but in what it represents. I could use another photograph, but what it represents is uniquely tied to this one. To show

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you what the photograph represents, I must tell you the real story behind the picture. I met the Mexican photographer Herminia Dosal for the rst time a couple of years ago, when she was visiting Sweden. I was a member of Business Network International (BNI) at the time, and Herminia was a guest at one of our business meetings. Since I live in Sweden, I was a member of a Swedish BNI chapter. BNI business meetings are conducted according to a rigorously followed agenda. Part of the procedure is that members get 60 seconds to present themselves. Guests get only 30 seconds. The only time I have seen the 30 second rule broken at a BNI meeting, was when Herminia held her presentation. Her presentation was a lot longer than that, and she held her audience captured throughout. Sometimes you got to break the rules, and that presentation was one of those occasions. Herminia used a PowerPoint presentation to show her photographs, but she did much more than that. She showed the difference between what she, as an expert photographer with more than 30 years of experience can do, and what an amateur photographer does.

Gallery 3 This is the picture the story is about. Flick to the following pictures to see how it helps create value.

Herminia did this by showing two versions of several portraits. First, she showed a good looking photograph. Then she showed a second photograph of the same person, where she had brought all her skill to bear. Everyone could
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see the difference. Side by side, two photographs, a good one and a great one. Herminia made it very easy to see the value of her services as a photographer. I was deeply impressed, partly with her skill as a photographer, but also with her ability to market her skill. There was a very valuable lesson there. A lesson I have done my best to take to heart. Herminia and I talked a bit after the meeting. It was an enjoyable conversation, but at the time, nothing more came out of it. Fast forward to the autumn of 2011. I sat working in a caf in Halmstad, a city on the Swedish West Coast. The rain was pouring down outside. The sky was dark grey, and the rain showed no sign of letting up. I took a break from working and checked my mailbox. Herminia had sent me an email, inviting me to a vernissage at ArtPhotoCollection, an art photo gallery in Gothenburg. I accepted of course. I went to Gothenburg for the vernissage, and it was great. Herminia is active in a Design Thinking group in Mexico, and I am interested in photography, so we did have a lot to talk

Gallery 4 Herminia Dosal and I having coffee at the Gothenburgh city library. I learned a lot by talking to her. It got me thinking about the photographs I take. In the other pictures in this gallery, you can see how talking to Herminia affected my own style as a photographer.

about. We decided to meet and talk at a a caf in the Gothenburg city library a couple of days later. When we met at the caf, we had a blast. Towards the end, Herminia asked me if she could take my photograph, and I of
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course agreed. I had one condition though, that I should do something in return. That is when we hit on the idea of me telling the story behind the picture, to show the value of a good photograph. So, now you know, I wrote this article because I promised a friend. A couple of days later, we had the photo session. As you already have seen, it turned out very well. We did a bit more than just a photo shoot. we also had a long talk about about a range of subjects from Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, and management, to art and child rearing, . And, we recorded it, just in case we might nd a use for it later. We did! I have included parts of the talk in this issue of Tempo!. As an entrepreneur, I am keenly aware that everything I can do to hone my presentation skills is a great help. I like to use my own photos in my presentations as much as possible. Herminia certainly helped me do that.

Audio Clip 3 Herminia Dosal talks about Frida Kahlo.

C ONTACT H ERMINIA D OSAL

email: studio@herminiadosal.com phone, mexico: +(5255) 5659-4657 web site: www.herminiadosal.com
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Perspectives
By Henrik Mrtensson

This is a sample chapter from the forthcoming book Perspectives. Perspectives focuses on the ultimate power in management and leadership: The power of having and using multiple paradigms.

Perspectives
Choosing a content management system
I changed my mind because of the the design of the Content Management System I used to find information! From Perspectives, by Henrik Mrtensson

The decision to buy a content management system crops up only rarely, but you have to live with the decision every working day. The decision had better be a good one. Everything anyone does in your organization that involves using the content management system will be affected by that buying decision. Brace yourself, because this time we will use four different perspectives: Taylorism Strategy The Cialdini decision model Network science Depending on which perspective you use to make the buying decision, the decisions will be quite different. Different perspectives may lead to the same buying decision, but for entirely different reasons.

In the Introduction we had a look at two different ideas about how disease spreads, the Miasma idea and Germ Theory. The shift in opinion from the Miasma idea to the Germ Theory caused a small change in the behavior of doctors. Doctors started washing their hands before examining a patient. This small change made a very large difference in the mortality rate of patients. We can have a look at the Germ and Miasma ideas from other perspectives, and gain a completely different kind of insight: We can gure out what kind of information management system your organization should invest in.

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T AYLORISM
Information structure must reect the needs of the organization. The organization is divided into a hierarchy of functional units. Each unit needs information pertinent to the function it performs. Providing more information than necessary would slow the work down, reducing cost effectiveness. It would also increase the risk of information leakage, both within the organization, and to entities outside the organization. If the organization is large, it is quite natural that different functional units have their own content management systems. The most cost effective solution is if all documents are written using the same type of word processor, and stored in the content management system for easy retrieval.

The Reduce Internal Friction principle tells us that retrieving pieces of related information must be as quick and easy as possible. It is impossible to predict when and where a specic piece of information becomes useful. Therefore, information must be easily accessible by default. Information access is restricted only when there is a danger of information damaging the organization as a whole. The organization must be structured to make as good use of information as possible. This is especially important if information changes rapidly. It is natural to have a common access point for information. Each piece of information must have live links to other pieces of relevant information. Information in the system must be easy to update for anyone with pertinent information.

Strategy
Information structure must reect the needs of the organization. Two basic strategic principles immediately stand out as useful guides: The Interaction/Isolation principle tells us that the value of information increases when different pieces of information interact. That is, the links between different pieces of information is what makes information useful.

T HE C IALDINI

DECISION MODEL

Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University is a leading expert on human decision models. According to Cialdini, humans tend to simplify decisions, especially stressful decisions, according to a set of simple rules1:
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Reciprocity - People tend to return a favor. Commitment - If people commit to an idea or goal, orally or in writing, they are much more likely to follow through with their commitment. Social proof - People will look at what other people are doing, and do the same thing. Authority - People will tend to obey authority gures, even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts, or have grave personal doubts. Liking - People are more easily persuaded by people they like. People tend to like people who are physically attractive, or who have views like their own. Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will increase the perceived value of an item. For example, natural diamonds are perceived as more valuable than synthetic diamonds. Buying a content management decision is a complex problem, just look at all the features they have, and how many different systems there are! It is impossible to evaluate them by reading feature lists, or listening to long and complicated sales presentations, which probably arent accurate anyway. Lets do something simpler:

Reciprocity - If we owe a sales person a favor, buy from her if possible. Commitment - We have already invested in ofce software from a certain vendor. It stands to reason that their content management system is the best t with their word processor, their spreadsheet program, their project management program, and their diagram drawing program, so lets buy that. Social proof - Buy the system everyone else buys. Even if it goes wrong, you can hardly be blamed for it. Authority - Look at the market leaders. Buy what they have. Didnt the CTO mention that system anyway? Liking - Sarah is denitely the nicest sales person Ive met. Easy to talk to. Beautiful too. If I buy from her, I have a reason to keep in touch Scarcity - Yes, it is pricey, but that has to be because it is good. Dont even talk to me about an open source system. If they are giving it away for free, it must suck. Because Cialdinis decision rules are hardwired into our brains, we can save considerable time and energy using them. It should be mentioned that the reason we have these rules built into our brains is evolutionary pressure: They
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have worked very well most of the time throughout human history. However, we have had Content Management Systems for a comparatively very short time. The Cialdinis decision rules have been built into the human brain for at least 50,000 years. Rules that kept us alive on the African savannah may not be the optimal rules for making buying decisions. The Cialdini decision model teaches us caution! We cant trust our gut feeling, because the parts of our brain ruling our guts knows nothing about Content Management Systems. Nor does it understand knowledge work.

N ETWORK

SCIENCE

Information structure must reect the needs of the organization. The body of information owned by an organization can be viewed as a network of information. A piece of information can be considered a node in the network. To a large extent, how useful a piece of information is, depends on how well connected it is to other pieces of information. This is know as node centrality. The centrality of a network node can be evaluated along three dimensions: Degree - The number of connections a node has to other nodes. For a document, this would be the number of references to and from other documents. A document

Betweenness indicates the degree to which a node participates in transactions between other nodes. In the gure, node E is an intermediary in six different transaction paths. None of the other nodes are intermediaries in transactions, and have a betweenness of zero. with a high degree is potentially very inuential in the network. Closeness - A measure of how easy it is for a node to connect with other nodes. The easier it is to connect with a node, the more inuential the node is in the network. Betweenness - Indicates the degree to which a node forms a bridge between other nodes. For example, a document containing references to many other
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documents would have a higher betweenness than a document containing references to only a few. On the Internet, Google is probably the node with the highest betweenness rating in the world. A piece of information is more valuable the higher it scores in degree, closeness, and betweenness. A body of information, such as the information owned by a company, is more valuable the higher the scores of the pieces of information in it. Looking at the problem of buying a Content Management System from a network science perspective, we can tell quite a lot about how we want the system to work: Degree - We want a piece of information, such as a document, to contain as many references to other relevant pieces of information as possible. How many references we put in a document depends a great deal on how easy it is to nd those other pieces of information. Therefore, the degree of one document will be higher if other documents in the system score high in degree, closeness, and betweenness. Closeness - Imagine pointing to a reference with a pointer.Your computer immediately shows what the reference points to in a small window. This makes it easy

to decide whether to jump to the referenced document or not. This is an example of closeness.You may have noticed Facebook uses this type of links. As an example of greater distance: Imagine reading a document reference in a word processor document. To see if the referenced document is interesting you must copy the reference, switch from viewing the document to accessing the search function of the Content Management System, paste the reference into a search eld, then choose from a list of search results, click on the link you chose, and wait until the chosen document opens in your word processor. We obviously want as high closeness as possible. Betweenness - If many documents we read have a high degree of betweenness, nding and accessing related information is comparatively easy. If a single node, such as a search engine, is the sole gatekeeper to many nodes, we will have to visit the gatekeeper node time and time again in order to traverse the information network. Having a single gatekeeper node also introduces a single point of failure: If the search engine returns the wrong results, too many results, or to few, the usefulness of the entire information system will be reduced. We want many nodes with a high degree of betweenness.
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We can conclude that we want a Content Management System that supports documents with active hyperlinks. It must be easy for whomever has the information to update a document. Because the system is likely to contain many pieces of information, a search system is necessary, but searching or hierarchical structures must not be the sole means of linking information.

Most business organizations buy the wrong kind of Content Management System! The reason for buying the wrong kind of system is simple: The organization wants to store and access the wrong kind of documents: Documents with low scores in Degree, Closeness, and Betweenness. Can this really be true? It is for you to decide whether you believe Network Science is applicable. For example, if you believe a single book can tell you all you ever need to know about management, then, clearly, you do not need that book to contain references to other books. If you believe a single source document will tell you all you need to know to develop a software system, then you do not need to make it easy to access any related information. Put in the light of other perspectives, such ideas may seem ridiculous, but the fact is they are the dominant beliefs. We all know it isnt true, but most of us try to behave as if it were. What would a really good Content Management System look like? I will tell you one about an experience I had while writing this book.
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I MPLICATIONS
Most Content Management Systems bought today store traditional documents: Word processor documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. These documents do not have active hyperlinks to other documents in the system. It is actually easier to create a hyperlink to a web page on the Internet than to another document in the same system. Thus, Degree, the potential for having a powerful system is low. Traversing the system from one document to another involves searching or traversing a document hierarchy, thus Closeness is also low. Finally, Betweenness is low, simply because the potential (Degree) isnt there. Three of the four perspectives chosen, the strategy perspective, the Cialdini decision model, and the Network Science perspective, all point to the same conclusion:

When I wrote the Introduction, I wanted to introduce the idea that by looking at an issue from different perspectives, we can make better decisions than if we have only a single perspective. My original intent was to compare the Germ Theory with the idea that witchcraft causes disease. The idea of witchcraft is very old, and there are still corners of the world where witchcraft is a crime punishable by death. As you know, if you read the introduction, I ended up comparing the Germ Theory with a much more direct competitor instead, the Miasma idea. Making the Germ/Miasma comparison enabled me to use a very simple and easily understandable example of a difference in behavior: a doctor washing or not washing hands before examining a patient. It also enabled me to point out why the Miasma idea was pretty much a dead end. Airing out hospital rooms was just about the only thing that could be done for patients. The Germ Theory, on the other hand, lead to vaccines, sterilization of surgical instruments, and a host of other things that help patients survive and get well. Why did I make the change from Germ/Witchcraft to Germ/Miasma? Because of information I got while making background research. I knew of the Miasma idea before, but it wasnt at the top of my mind.

I changed my mind because of the the design of the Content Management System I used to nd information! I used several articles about 19th century medicine as source material when I wrote the introduction. If this information was in the knowledge base of a typical business organization, the articles would be stored in MS Word or Adobe PDF format, and the information about Germ Theory would be linked like this:

That is, there would be no active hyperlinks at all. There might be a hierarchical structure for storing the documents. There would almost certainly be some sort of search func32

tion. A document might include a list of related articles, but these would be textual references, not active links. With a system like this, I would most likely have done what I originally set out to do, and looked up the following:

I did my research for the introduction using Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a very large Content Management System, but it is quite different from the systems dominating the world of business. In Wikipedia, documents are HTML pages, and the information in the Germ Theory related articles was linked using active hyperlinks, like this:

I would not even look at the other articles, because the effort involved in doing so would be too great. From a tayloristic perspective this is a good thing, because you should always do what you originally set out to do, with as few distractions as possible. First you make the plan, then you execute the plan. Cialdinis decision model indicates you are likely to choose this type of Content Management System, not because of the way it handles information, but because lots of other business organizations have chosen this type of system. In other words, what the Cialdini model teaches us is that the decision is likely to be made for the wrong reasons. The Germ Theory article I started with has active hyperlinks
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to all the other articles I used except the Filippo Pacchini article. However, two other articles, the Miasma Theory article and the Robert Koch article have links to Filippo Pacchini. This means I was quite likely to see the Paccini reference once I started researching. Five articles link to the Miasma Theory article, so I would probably have found it even if I had missed the reference in the Germ Theory article. I am of course showing only a small portion of the Wikipedia information network. For example, according to a Google search I made, Wikipedia has 848 articles referencing Germ Theory. Many of these have hyperlinks to the Germ Theory article. That means you have a lot of different ways to nd the Germ Theory information. If it is important to be able to relate different pieces of information to each other, then a Wikipedia type Content Management System is much more valuable than the systems most companies are buying and using today. Here is a picture showing my research path:

Note that the very act of researching Germ Theory, gave me three things: The information I needed to make a substantial improvement to the introduction The idea of writing about choosing and buying a Content Management System
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An example to use in this chapter This was not planned. Rather, it is an example of serendipity, fortuitous circumstance. Of course you can stack the odds of good things happening in your favor. In the case of information management, whether the chips are stacked in your favor or not, depends a lot on which kind of Content Management System you use.

Are there other perspectives that would be of use when making the decision to buy a Content Management System? Which ones? I have referred to the Miasma idea and Germ Theory, even though the Wikipedia article I mined for information about Miasma is named Miasma Theory. Why is the idea that germs cause disease a theory, while the idea that poisonous gas cause disease is not a theory? Is the difference important? Why?

F URTHER

THINKING

Modern strategic thinking is heavily inuenced by Network Science. Thus, conclusions drawn using strategic principles can be expected to match conclusions drawn using network analysis to a large degree. Is this a good thing or a bad thing when using these perspectives to make decisions? This chapter discussed Content Management Systems from the point of view of information retrieval. If the discussion had been about creating information, and updating existing information, would this reveal other important aspects of information management? What would those aspects be?

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Tempo!
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