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Showing posts from July, 2023

IT#12 The Evil of Management by Fear: Prey or Predator?

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  #KnowledgeEconomy #DiscoveryEconomy #ITManagement #Management #SocialNetworkEffects #Neurophysiology This article talks about why so popular in the past methods of controlling workers by fear is bad not just ethically but for the company performance and productivity as well as bringing the lasting cultural and financial damage to the company working in the Knowledge Economy. Management by fear is not new to the Human civilization. Treatment of slaves, medieval peasants, factory workers was normally based on fear. And it worked! Well, occasional cases of treating all those differently sometimes brought much more impressive results. For example, in the Ancient Rome some family slaves pretended to be their own owners and died for them, when the latter ones hit a proscription list. Villages in Russia have prospered and brought much higher income to the owners when they treated peasants well. Still these were exceptions, and in the majority of cases people were managed by fear. We all (wi

IT#9 Tom Sawyer Inc. and Why Hierarchical Management Does Not Work in the Knowledge Economy

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#KnowledgeEconomy #DiscoveryEconomy #ITManagement #Management #SocialNetworkEffects This article talks about why classic 20 th Century hierarchical management does not work in the Knowledge Economy, specifically, because of its inability to pass sufficient information without a significant distortion. Massive hierarchical management is a relatively new thing for humanity. If you think about it, all medieval and even ancient hierarchies were relatively limited in size. Really large hierarchical social systems came into our life in the 19 th Century with large armies and large industrial entities, such as factories. In this sense, hierarchical management is a child of the industrial age. And we inherited it from the Industrial Age. The only problem  is that  we are not in the Industrial Age anymore. We, or at least a lot of us, are in the Knowledge Economy now. And this is unfortunate. You see, any management system exists to coordinate efforts of a lot of people.  Otherwise, why do we

IT#4 Brain, glia cells and the difference between an industrial and knowledge worker

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  #KnowledgeEconomy #DiscoveryEconomy #ITManagement #Management #Neurophysiology This article explains the difference between an industrial and knowledge worker, based on human anatomy and neurophysiology, and how it impacts knowledge organizations management. In 60-x of the 20th Century the father of the American Corporate management Peter F. Drucker noticed that there are new workers, with whom the old methods of the industrial age management, don't' work. He called them “knowledge workers” 1 . Now we usually call them engineers. Despite such an insight from management gurus, all the labor legislation comes from the 19 th or early 20 th century and represents the norms established for the Industrial Age. And many companies try to apply the Industrial Age practices when managing knowledge workers. Let's see why this is a big mistake that costs money, bad attrition and failing projects. To begin with, what do you think is the biggest difference between the Industrial econ