The Next Organization

TED Talk - Create New Creatures

I got the link from a colleague for a talk in TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, though the scope is getting wider every year. The conference aims at bringing people together to share their special ideas. This is the most impressive one I found, creating new creatures. A good one to stretch our imagination.

Web 2.0 Summit 2007 - High Order Bit Presentation from Morgan Stanley

Web 2.0 Summit is often a very important event to discuss new developments and trends in the area. One of the most interesting sessions of the event this year is the presentation from Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley. The presentation addresses technology trends in general and is very interesting, except that it cites quite a few Cisco's info (which is a clever company, but still biased, though).

The slides and video however was not included in the official site. I found them so included here.

New natural language searches - in search of knowledge, not information

Most of people I talked to was very happy with the information they got from Google Search. Natural language searches on the other hand try to synthesize information and give a more definitive answer. I tried AskJeeve and found out that I most of the time, it gave me information similar in type with Google. A few exceptions are for simple definitive questions, e.g. "how is weather in Rome in December" comparison below.

Recently, Powerset and TrueKnowledge launched beta service with promise to give people more power to get the correct answer to what they want. Barney Pell, Powerset's CEO pointed out that to a keyword-based search engine, "book for children", "book by children", and "book about children" are all equivalent to "book children".

According to TechCrunch, "Powerset is both indexing the web and working to convert natural language queries into database-understandable queries. True Knowledge is only tackling half the problem - the conversion of queries. They are not indexing the web. Instead, True Knowledge is grabbing data from structured databases, like, for example, the CIA Factbook."

From descriptions, both services are quite interesting. I tried to register for both Powerset and TrueKnowledge, but haven't got any invitation, yet. It will be quite challenging, though, to change the short form of queries that people got used to. The new generation's preference, short attention due to information overload and the trend for mobile device searches will probably prefers the keyword search.

Below is a short video about features and architecture of TrueKnowledge. I particular love the fact that it gives the answer immediately and cites facts leading to the conclusion.

Interesting Web 2.0 Slides from Ed Yourdon

The slides are very informative and surprisingly comprehensive.

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Balancing control and trust in fast-growing entrepreneurial companies

Fast-growing entrepreneurial companies often face a daunting task of maintaining autonomy while continuously improving the structure and controlling mechanism. As business environment in and out side company is normally not clearly defined, a rigid structure and control system will limit the future of company. The answer is a good balance between a flexible control system that emphasizes cohesion and deliberate plan to grow trust.

Nothing is like being a part of a fast-growing entrepreneurial company, exciting, ambitious and still chaotic. Growing out the first period, there is a strong sense of satisfaction with empowerment, without which, the company would not be this successful. Many people, especially management still remember the days when everyone knows everyone else, did everything and still worked as one.

However, the company has changed with many new generations of people joining, management simply don't have visibility into everything anymore. Management team is challenged by the enormous amount of works and has to rely on trust to give autonomy to units. Without autonomy, the company runs the risk of limiting its future, or even slowing down and doom. Trust is difficult when there are many new people, and when most of the management are working in new capacity than they had been doing before.

On the other hand, management starts to be under pressure from new stakeholders to reduce the risk of losing control of the organization, which they are fully responsible for. Growing the company through the initial days, management often has fear that employing too much control will destroy "the magic" and hamper the growth. In other words, management often finds it difficult to make a compromise between trust and control. In fact, management has no choice, though, but combine these two seemingly contrary measures of reducing risks while managing a bigger complexity.

This post presents a set of recommendations to strike this balance. The measures pointed out below are applicable to the whole company or its autonomous unit. It is still worthwhile to note that application should varies with situation of the company/unit. If most of the people identify themselves well with company, there should be less control necessary. If people have low commitment and there are high potential gains from deviant behavior, control is more important.

The measures proposed included a flexible and lean control system with deliberate trust growing plan. In addition, coordination, negotiation and monitoring are important to reduce the drawbacks of control and to avoid too much interference that harms trust building efforts.

Flexible Control System

Traditionally, companies immediately establish the formal structure with effort to define tasks, authorities and information flows. An issue with clearly-defined structure is silo thinking that reduces collaboration.  A thorough exercise like this requires a lot of effort and a large part may not valid for long in a changing environment like in fast-growing entrepreneurial companies, anyway.

Managerial cybernetic sheds new light into the concept for structure, that is a better fit for entrepreneurial company. It is stable relations that allow people and other resources to operate together as a totality define structure. The organisation's structure is thus viewed as a network of stable 'real life' on-going communications, or organisational processes, and not as static formal reporting relations. Objects, such as communication devices or information systems, thus constitute an organisation’s structure.

Fast-growing entrepreneurial companies should focus on understanding, establishing and modifying these stable communication relationships, which happens directly by conversations or indirectly through coordinate actions as an outcome of sharing a context or culture, among its units and roles.

In addition, these companies should spend time together with their units to define and agree on the coherence boundaries. These are guidelines to make sure identity of the company, company's operational direction and synergy with other units of the same company are taken into consideration in unit's decision and operations.

Fast-growing entrepreneurial companies also need to tune their incentive system. The system should encourage collaboration, tight compensation to level of support (e.g. service quality) to other parts of organization, or support achievement of whole organization.

Leadership development and training are effective measures, though less often thought of as mechanisms to ensure compliance and coherence. These help enhance management community, create sense of direction and involve key members from unit management to development of strategy and policies.

Finally, these companies should also facilitate sharing with new generations by reviewing resource allocation agreement more often, recognizing contribution and seniority but emphasizing growth of the company or unit as a whole.

Coordination, Negotiation and Monitoring