Evolutionary Provocateur

While external forces are raising sea levels, mass collaboration and social networks of performance are changing how executives perform their role. But what does this all mean to the executive who defines their effectiveness by their ability to control, command and direct? Rod Collins, former Chief Operating Officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield, feels that executives are at a tipping point where to maintain any kind of agility requires replacing command and control with facilitating, enabling and supporting performance. But what does this mean to the average executive? What are the consequences of holding onto control? The image of trying to direct performance while standing in front of a fire hose comes to mind. The benefit of making the change, while messy and uncomfortable at first, gets better with practice says Rod. Besides, you sleep better at night.

If you want to find performance in an organization., follow the joy! That's the starting point for Dawna Jones' discussion with Nick Zeniuk, a former Ford executive who now best known for his work on organizational performance and learning. Nick argues that traditional management structures – which are all about control – are now redundant because the way that things really get done is via informal, self-organizing social networks - the antithesis of the sort of hierarchical order beloved by old-school managers. So the role of the "new manager" must be far more to listen, understand and tap the power of these network rather than seek to impose structure on them.

With four generations in the workplace there are very different views about the source of knowledge particularly as it relates to experience. Generally the belief is the more experience you have the more knowledge you can contribute. Paying attention to this is important given the exodus of senior managers and the need to ensure knowledge transfer. Yet the whole assessment of age and experience related knowledge ignores what we know about tacit or innate knowledge which is unique to all; it is not time dependent. Tacit knowledge is considered to be THE most important competitive asset of the marketplace yet mention it and most people say: What? Tacit knowledge is innate, natural know-how that is grounded in the knowledge one has gained from experience with life. In the quest for performance overly mechanistic business cultures have devised all sorts of systems and processes to ‘manage’ performance which ignores or inhibits the process of natural collaboration. Secondly, many people perform according