Managing the Creative Class, a How To Manual for Managerial Morons

The dirty secret of capitalism is that its mantra is freedom but everywhere it subordinates creativity to power and manages living beings in cubicles as if they were slaves or serfs. We call that Wealth Bondage. Weber called it the Iron Cage of bureaucracy. Now, as corporate capitalism in the US implodes, surviving only on bailouts and fraud, the thoughtful among the Managerial Class are asking how we might better manage, control, and enslave the creative class. Gary Hamel: Too many companies are managing employees for qualities like obedience, diligence and intellect, easily outsourced skills. My sense is that it is way too late, Gary. The creative class don't need you to manage them. They need you to shut up, back off, and do something more useful, like grow tomatoes.

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[twitter.com/ddenizen]

This applies even more to the non-profit world, where often you have someone who could get two to five times the salary in the for-profit world, but they are there for the work and the possibility of what might be accomplished. All they need is some twenty-something grant manager micro-managing their work. They are already giving as much as half the program budget in forgone salary and the granting organizations have the nerve to suggest that they know more about how to get the most value out of the grantee. The program managers need to trust the grantees and their processes, to support them not to impose them.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Actually, the more interesting question is what is the purpose or role of "managers" in post-hierarchic organizational structures. This is where I put on my "process archtect" hat (http://wiki.flowplace.org/wagn/Gerry+ProcessArchitect) and point to how the leaders of an open source project lead by holding the vision, by their communication through the code commits, email lists and social software tools that the core team uses to coordinate their work, they produce collaboratively what Jean-François calls a holoptic field. This is an informational space where the participants can be aware of each others actions, intentions as it emerges as a shared vision.

We point to the small group functioning as a unit as you have with a sports team or even a surgical team. We call this the original collective intelligence where a small team (limited by human cognitive capacities) who can see each other in the same physical space have a natural kind of holopticism. The challenge is how to scale this up to global organizations. That's where the tools we want to build and experiment come in.

[Phil Cubeta]

Ninja Turtles? As opposed to the Manager and Minions?

[Jon Husband]

the leaders of an open source project lead by holding the vision, by their communication through the code commits, email lists and social software tools that the core team uses to coordinate their work, they produce collaboratively what Jean-François calls a holoptic field. This is an informational space where the participants can be aware of each others actions, intentions as it emerges as a shared vision.

Fancy words for participative work design ?

[Phil Cubeta]

A darn nice fancy description. Jon, you are working in or towards "participative work design" as a management discipline? Close to "core teams" drawn from the various silos?

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

More like the tribal leadership linked in this tweet: http://bit.ly/2KN44f I can't identify any concrete distinctions that helps with this, but I think there is a qualitative difference between just having a bag of things, and forming an emergent whole. It is the difference between a system being alive and dead.

Today on the radio, I think it was Deepak Chopra talking about health saying that we are a process, not a structure, meaning that we are a dynamic systems with dynamic qualities that are not expressed by any possible static system. Or from reading a little bit of John Dewey talking about the Greek concern of "self-movement", the action of the soul while a modern sensibility makes a clockwork of the world and a mystery of all interiority (mind, spirit, soul).

To try to capture it in an OD cliche is to do violence to dialog, don't you think? You haven't really become that cynical, have you, Jon, and not in a healthy sense of Diogenes and the Cynics of old.

[Phil Cubeta]

You have lived it, Gerry. Good to hear you expound it.