I’m reading through a series of blogs on the Harvard Business Review and a European conference site about the Drucker Forum that will happen in Vienna later this week. Steve Denning wrote back in May about how The Internet Is Finally Forcing Management to Care About People. Denning’s position is summed up pretty well by the title of the article, namely that digital transformation will help drive humanist management.
Overall, Denning starts with a lament that all the humanist ways of thinking about management over the last 40 years have pretty much led nowhere because rewarding CEOs for shareholder value creates an impetus for command-and-control management over humanism. In Denning’s view, the shift of power from seller to buyer, from producer to consumer, will create pressure to create “new and better ways to delight customers”, beyond just price and volume. He also sees the digital transformation in the workplace, as it “shreds vertical supply chains”, and forces the businesses into the world of virtual meeting places and horizontal management rather than vertical command-and-control structures. With those premises in mind, he argues:
While armies of dispirited bureaucrats, driven by command-and-control, simply can’t get this job done, the enabling management practices and metrics of humanistic management are well suited to it. When the goal is the inherently inspiring goal of delighting customers, managers don’t need to make employees do their job. With managers and workers sharing the same goal—delighting customers—the humanistic management practices of trust and collaboration become not only possible but necessary.
I’m not as optimistic as Denning. Command and control structures do not simply exist because it was backed by a focus on the bottom line. Command and control, generally, is a direct result of the complexity of organizations and attempts by individuals to force order on apparent chaos, to bring their internal environment to heel. Government is a perfect example — many Departments are fully seized with their “clients”, partly because there is no profit metric to measure. It’s all about the client. Yet command and control, and bureaucracies in general, are rampant throughout these organizations.
In addition, Denning argues that “Education systems must support greater entrepreneurial skills and life-long learning to prepare people for the new world of work” while “Greater support must be provided for individuals to start their own businesses.”. In some ways, these are in direct opposition to each other — one, a service provided by the state; the second, a DIY mentality for business.
He also feels that the argument for treating customers with respect is already won. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite. If Amazon’s business model has taught people anything, it is that ruthless dehumanizing of the client is incredibly profitable. Sure, they make fast delivery to “meet their needs”, but their customers are not being “respected”, just ruthlessly served because it’s profitable, particularly if you can increase volume and decrease purchase friction.
Early this past week, I came across a series of blogs on the Harvard Business Review about the Drucker Forum that will happen in Vienna later this week. HBR and some European sites are hosting guest blogs by many of the major speakers to the forum, a mini-preview of some of the issues on their mind. Each one has been awesome so far, at least in terms of my interests…management, technology, human interactivity, etc. Not surprising since the theme of this year’s forum is Claiming Our Humanity — Managing in the Digital Age. So, I thought I would take a peek at some of the blogs in a bit more depth.
The first one out of the gate was Richard Straub, who back in April wrote Managing in an Age of Winner-Take-All. The post is well-written, including allusions to computers and digital connectivity augmenting brain-led human development as much as mechanical improvements augmented brawn-led development. I’m a little more skeptical when, despite the commitment to Drucker’s management work, Straub describes the modern organization and management practices as constituting a “social technology” construct, but I don’t dispute it’s transformative nature.
With the new technology comes a lot of disruption, and while Straub sees companies like Apple, Amazon, etc. all running towards “winner-take-all”, I’m not sold on those outcomes. I think they will reap whirlwind profits, but even Apple’s music dominance is giving way to newer players like Spotify. I do however agree that old-style management theory isn’t going to work in business management that is dealing with hard-core changes:
Consider management actions such as cutting jobs and investment as a response to currency fluctuations and the resulting accounting impact of those cuts on earnings per share (EPS). These types of cuts are applauded as canny, even heroic, by stock markets — despite their damage to the longer-term value-creating capacity of the enterprise. Share buybacks are preferred to investment in innovation, entrepreneurship, and value creation. And internal innovation often obsessively targets cost cutting instead of the search for new ways to delight customers or to enable employees and partners.
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The digital revolution — the “mother of all technology developments”— marks a fork in the road. One path invites us to depart from industrial-age management practices and mindsets and use the power of information-age technology to augment humanity’s role and importance in business. The other tempts us to apply the new abundance of data and expertise in creating software routines to automate the old logic of organizations, effectively hard-wiring the most dysfunctional rules managers relied on in the past.
Despite my misgivings about Straub’s constructs, I can’t disagree with his conclusions — too often, the new discussion is about “big data” or “new data” or just plain “more data”, but not whether that data tells us anything. Similarly with tools, we opt in organizations for automation without first evaluating whether the current business model that we’re automating is the one we want tomorrow, or if the tool will just anchor us to the past even further, rigidly planting our feet in cement while the world changes around us.
Where Straub leaves me behind is in the belief that private sector managers are, as Drucker put it, “society’s main leadership group”. I think they are one force, but perhaps because I am a government person first and foremost, I don’t look to the private sector to lead me anywhere I likely want to go.
But as a first blog in a series of posts on managing in the digital age, it does raise provocative questions.
As I mentioned in a previous post (My interest in psychology…), I developed a stronger interest in psychology over time — high school, my tadpole years, losing my parents, my relations with my siblings, becoming an aspiring writer, getting married and having a son. Which was a long way around to say that I have wanted to take an introduction to psychology for some time. And given my past experiences, and a desire to access solid curated content, probably a university course, but not necessarily.
I don’t need it for a degree, I don’t even care if I get a credit for it. Then I found out about free MOOCs — massive open online courses. I don’t care about the massive part, I just need someone professional to have curated some content for me to access and work my way through. Open is great, partly as it usually equates to free. Online limits the time commitment required, and allows me to timeshift it easily. I’ve considered EdX, TheGreatCourses, and Coursera, among others, and I started taking one MOOC earlier this year (Understanding Video Games), just to get my feet wet.
Then I saw an article about my grad school alma mater, Carleton University, offering an introduction to psych course as a MOOC. Sounded good. So I contacted the prof, had a brief exchange, and ended up discussing the future of the course as well as the choice of textbooks. The existing program at the time was using the 3rd Canadian edition of a text that is up to the 9th edition in the U.S. I could see that the 4th Canadian edition had been released and I was curious which version he recommended During the exchange, he mentioned they were revamping and updating the course content to match the 4th edition, with a hope too to come up with a cheaper online version of a textbook. I decided to wait to finish my previous MOOC, and look into the Carleton MOOC come the fall. In the end, I haven’t finished the old one yet, but the new one has started, so I’m doing both.
Getting started on the new course
The new semester started, and I went looking for the course. It was much easier to locate this time (back in the Spring, there were about six clicks to get to the course, now it was just two). Much better site signage and user interface. Which augured well for a good experience. Registering, however, was a different kettle of fish. There were four links that were active — two different courses (Part I and Part II of an intro to psych) plus two different offerings (a previous and ongoing version plus a new version). All four links would allow me to see the description, but all four said “You are unable to enrol in this class”. This lasted about 4 weeks, and I had basically decided to focus on the other MOOC course but got distracted with other things in my life, so when I went to go back to the other one, I thought, “Oh, what the heck, try Carleton again first.” This time it went swimmingly. The system is set up well, all the links were active, I could enrol and did, I was good to go.
There are three main components to the course. First and foremost is the textbook. I ordered it through an Amazon affiliate, and it took 10 days for the book to arrive from B.C. Not superfast, but appeared initially cheaper. Textbooks aren’t cheap, and full price was listed at $140; the affiliate had it for $120. And since there are not many used versions available of the 4th edition, I went with new and online, opting for the convenience of having it delivered instead of having to go find it at the campus store. Apparently I should have waited. The professor had negotiated with the publisher for a loose-leaf binder version plus etext version for $95, which probably would have been more efficient than lugging around the hardcover textbook, but I’ll suffer through. My wife is going to University of Ottawa, and as the text is used in lots of intro courses at various universities, she probably could have picked it up there for me too, so online ordering was more convenient, but I had other avenues I just didn’t pursue. But I digress. I have a textbook, the course is free, my internet is already paid for, on with the course.
The course outline follows the textbook chapter by chapter so while the prof jokes in the lecture materials that it is up to the student to use whatever they want (including Harry Potter texts if they prefer), it is definitely recommended to use the same text that the course follows. Cost wasn’t a factor for me, so I am using the officially recommended text.
The second component is the video lectures. Some people say that video lectures make or break MOOCs. Either the professor is engaging or it’s a giant snoozefest. That is in fact the model that the Great Courses company relies upon — finding great professors who are passionate about their material and recording their lectures (and selling them for profit, obviously). I’d love to know if MOOCs has bolstered or hindered The Great Courses business model, but I assume they’ll adapt their own materials to some sort of online option too. The professor set up a “Chapter 00” to explain how the course will work, give some basics about what the course is about, and generally give people a safe sample chapter to experiment with so they see how it all works before the content starts in Chapter 01. The intent for the course is that you read the textbook to get a feel for the material, and then watch the videos.
The intro to MOOC (Chapter 00) was interesting, and the slides referenced in the videos are available for download / printing. Mostly the videos were pretty well done, engaging, and the transitions between slides and videos were pretty solid. This is way better than the video-lectures you see in university-TV courses, these are direct one-on-“one” lectures to you. Kind of like a documentary, or a newscaster speaking directly to you, not someone lecturing at a roomful of other people and you’re just watching.
You might think that since Chapter 00 is just an intro to the course, there wouldn’t be much to review on substance, and you would be right. There was a general overview of how the two courses (Part I and Part II) use the same textbook and divide at chapter 8 of the text (i.e. 1-8 is Part I, 9-16 is Part II), and how they work well together. It wasn’t perfect, but it was solid. Seems petty to even mention but I suspect all MOOCs have some administrative/logistical challenges. For instance, some of the video links said they were 12 minutes long, but the actual video was only 8 minutes long (likely a change from the original video that was there). Secondly, some of the slides shown in the videos were not exactly the same slides as in the download copy — not contradictory, just editing differences showing a version control problem. Nothing substantive, just might confuse some people who are anal-retentive types or nervous taking courses for the first time. Thirdly, and this is more related to the next section, some of the links regarding quizzes were not exactly where the video said they would be on the menu, and another option seemed to be missing altogether. Again, not huge, and I flagged them for the prof just for quality control improvements in the future.
The third part of the course is the evaluation process. There are self-quizzes as you go through the course materials. Each week covers one chapter in the textbook and has multiple smaller videos that go with that, labelled “a” to “g” for example. In between each video is a self-quiz. These are for self-evaluation, just need to complete them. At the end of the videos i.e. the end of each week, there is a chapter quiz — these count towards a grade, are time-limited, represent a pool of questions from which you randomly do 10, and you have two attempts at it if you want (your score is average of the two attempts). Five points for each quiz, etc. This is a bit different from most MOOCs, as most are just for your own benefit. You can get an online certificate saying you completed the course, but you don’t get a university “credit” for it. There are some exceptions (for example, the video game course I’m doing is also taught as a regular university course, and people can register in it normally and do it as part of their semester, with set time limits etc.). This one is also a bit different too. You still do it at your own pace, but once you’ve done 20% of the course and if you pass the first few quizzes, you can transfer to the “full” credit version of the course and pay tuition, etc. It’s the same course, but you get a university credit for it.
One of the benefits they suggest is that this is a great way to get your feet wet “trying out” university. I think it is more accurate to say this is a great way to try out “online self-paced university”, but in-class university and regular distance university are quite different from this version. Still, it’s an interesting option.
There is an optional fourth element for this course, as there is for most MOOCs — an online forum. In it, they encourage people to network, socialize online, share their experiences, etc. For some, I can see the attraction of this; for me, I’m looking for curated content, not a discussion group to debate issues. Plus, one of the complaints often of MOOC participants is that the schedule is messed up — people start the course in January for example, and make a comment in week 2 on one of the readings (say, January 15th). Then someone else comes along, starting in June, and sees the comment and replies to it in their week 2 (say June 15th). So the first person gets an email saying, “Hey, someone replied to your comment” leaving them to wonder, “WTF? What comment? Huh? I finished that course 3 months ago?”. The idea works well if you can get a cohort that moves through it together at essentially the same pace and with similar start and finish dates. Other than that, people who are on week 8 don’t really care what happened way back in week 2. They’ve moved on.
As an aside, there was an interesting “addendum” for the week. Credits. They posted five videos that served as “credits” for the course — with five other sets of people (the Dean, another prof, some techies, a student, etc) all talking about the course, how it worked, wishing people well, etc. Two were just formal (the Dean, another prof) and could be easily skipped. One was highly amusing as two profs (I think they were profs) did a small series of stand-up skits about how much trouble they have helping out (i.e. sample — “Turn on the computer — okay….do you come here often?”). Cheesy, but not completely lame, humour. Well-done, engaging, and completely irrelevant — I have no idea who they were, what they have to do with the course, why they were doing credits, nada. I presume they helped the prof with reviewing the content perhaps. But there’s no way to know, it’s just them being friendly, and mildly amusing. The best of the batch was one by a student talking about tips on how to stay motivated, keep to a schedule, get the most out of the course, etc. Useful advice, likely watched by almost no one taking the course. After the Dean said “thank you, good luck” for 2 minutes, they likely would assume “nothing I need here and skip the rest of the page”. The last one with the student isn’t even identified as HAVING TIPS, which would increase its viewership.
Why mention all this? Because part of what I’m doing is evaluating the medium and how it engages me or not. Maybe that will be of interest, perhaps not. But every “chapter” review or week’s coverage will also cover that’s week “medium” too, not just the content.
Way back in the dark ages of high school, I took a course that was an introduction to psychology and sociology. I don’t remember what it was called, and I seem to think it was supposed to be one or the other, but ended up being done as a combination when enrolment was low. I don’t remember that much from the course. It was okay, semi-interesting, but it didn’t compel me to want to do a degree in it or anything. Later, when I had electives available in university, it didn’t make my list. Mind you, that was some 30 years ago, when I think they still lobotomized people to let their demons out, so probably not all that useful to me even if I had taken it. 🙂
But as I got older and went through difficult periods in my life, or even just large periods of change and self-reflection, I started to think more and more about how the brain works, how personalities develop, how people misuse their brain to trick themselves into ways of thinking that are not optimal, efficient or even helpful. Self-sabotaging behaviour that your brain either hides or actively encourages vs. ways it helps itself heal. Some moments in my life stand out.
First and foremost was my change in “who I was” going from high school to university to law school to working stiff, through my “tadpole years” of self-reflection and change, and who I became. What pieces were engrained, immutable, part of my bedrock personality and how did they become so? Nature vs. nurture, on a micro-level.
Second, there was the loss of my parents. Similarities in experience yet vast differences too. Was it my age? Change in my support network? Had I just grown more?
Third, the elements of family. I was the youngest of six kids. I discount most of the pop psych about birth order, mostly because I think psych is about individuals, not statistics about groups, but I find one area intriguing. Growing up, I didn’t know my one brother very well. He moved out of the house when I was 5 or 6, and I didn’t interact with him a lot in the next 20 years. It wasn’t like we didn’t see each other, but we were never “close”. In fact, of my five siblings, I would say he was the farthest away in relations. Yet, when we reconnected when I was 30 and he was 40, we experienced a natural bond we had never felt before. It happened over dinner one night — a dinner that almost didn’t happen. He was in town for work, and it wasn’t like “Oh, obviously we’ll do this or that together.” It was more like, “Hey, so, he’s in town. We should probably see each other. Maybe dinner or something?”. Very tentative, like, we *should* do something, shouldn’t we? Wouldn’t most siblings see each other if they were in town? Yeah, we agreed on dinner. And part of the night was like we were finishing each other’s sentences. Even though we have led very different lives — he had been married, had six kids, was very independent early in life, and had been in the military for 20 years; I was the pampered youngest child, not married, no kids, lived at home up until law school — there was an immediate real connection, way beyond friendship, beyond just family. Like somehow our souls knew each other from some other time and place and met up for a beer. Now, I consider him one of my closest siblings and friends. How do our different yet similar beginnings produce vastly different lives and outcomes yet our psyches retain some common elements that look like genetics? Again, nurture vs. nature. Equally, I’ve heard lots of people talk about how they’ve always been close to a sibling, while I’ve been close to different siblings at different parts of my life — close to my next-oldest sibling, a brother, when I was young, say up to age 14; close to my second-oldest sibling in my late teen years; close to my oldest sister and her son when I came back from university and up until my Dad died, and then again more recently; close to my other sister, third oldest, after my dad died and for a number of years afterwards; and closest to my “middle” brother (fourth-oldest) as mentioned above. A wax-and-wane type experience.
Fourth, I became an aspiring writer. I need to know how to access the psyche of a fictional character, how to get into their head and write what THEY would do, not what I would do if I was pretending to be them. To figure out how to flesh the character out fully — the role of hero, villain, mistress, husband — and how to make them real, not names or formulaic archetypes.
Lastly, I became a husband and a father within the same year. Huge changes in my life and in my roles as a person. What role does my behaviour play in my son’s development? He has had some physical challenges, and almost everything he has faced, regardless of what we have done to help him, it really is just him overcoming them on his own. Outgrowing some stuff, ignoring others, figuring out the rest. We help, but the biggest difference over time is just him being awesome. Is it just nature?
All of which has led to a renewed interest in psychology. I don’t want to do a full degree, with electives, exams, papers, etc. I just want the knowledge, not a piece of paper to certify it. And while I can find it just about anywhere (library, internet, Amazon, etc.), what I really wanted is what I always want when looking at a new area — curated content. The fruits of the labour of someone who has already trod the same path before me, who says, “Here is a good framework to understand an issue” and “Here’s some stuff you should read”. I may develop strong interest in certain areas of psychology like child development, but to start, I really wanted a good overview to show me the whole canvas, not the exciting brush strokes in one corner.
Instead of just buying a textbook and reading it, I found a free online psych course, with credentials behind it to reassure me it’s not some quack throwing stuff up on a blog (hey, wait a minute, says my id, but we’ll ignore him for now).
I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 17: Conclusion: Rethinking Canadian Development Cooperation — Towards Renewed Partnerships?” by David R. Black, Stephen Brown and Molly den Heyer as the three editors. Their conclusion, and the title of the book, is that things are a-changing when it comes to Canadian aid, and whether it is under Harper’s governance or over a longer time period, it is time to rethink Canadian aid as a result. Except I don’t think that is the conclusion I get from a more critical review of the text. Bear in mind that I am not reading it as an academic, I’m reading and critiquing it from the perspective of a manager — does it hold any resonance for me, does it identify the key factors at play, does it ring true? Generally, no. Noting, of course, it wasn’t written for the likes of me.
Note too that I am not disagreeing with their conclusion i.e. that aid partnerships might benefit from a re-think in terms of foundations, international partnerships, partnerships with Canadian stakeholders and intra-governmental partnerships, but rather that this book doesn’t provide the evidence to get us there.
Their main argument is that “aid in Canada has shifted”, either overtime or under the recent Conservative government. In terms of principles, they argue that humane goals (i.e. altruism) have been replaced by self-interested goals (i.e. commercial trade goals). This shows up through the book — introduction, chapters 1, 4, 7, 9, 15 and 16. The sub-argument is that power has shifted, tied aid has gone down but private sector trade interests have gone up. Equally, they argue that specific policies around humanitarian aid (chapter 2), use of force (chapters 8, 13, & 14), gender equality (chapter 11), and Children-in-Development have all turned toward poorer development outcomes. Combined with changed management for whole-of-government approaches and a focus on aid effectiveness (introduction, chapter 1), the conclusion is that principles + policy + management have changed for the worse, and it is time to rethink Canadian aid.
Except, as I said above and my critique of each chapter, I’m not convinced the lines of evidence are there. When it comes to principles, the argument is that it is no longer about humane goals and only about trade — yet Swiss kicks that argument to the curb really well in Chapter 6. Reality backed by hardcore stats, not spin supported by anecdotes and rhetoric.
For policies, some of the analysis is decent but focused on such small sample sizes that even a first-year statistics student could tell you that they were statistically insignificant. Decent premises, but with few facts other than anecdotes, combined with projects representing a tenth of a percent of the overall budget. Pick a different set of projects and you would see “no change” at all.
For management, it is argued that it represents a wholesale change to new factors, but the same factors have always been there. Not as prominently discussed, but equally present. Results, data, short-term focus over long-term focus. Nothing new for CIDA or development pressures. And, more importantly, equally present in domestic organizations as well. The push for clearly demonstrable short-term results is not driven by aid effectiveness changes but rather by the current government’s overall approach to measuring results in any organization. The real question is if this produces a real difference for CIDA, or just run of the mill adaptation.
I think the book could have come to the right lines of evidence if they had tackled slightly different questions. First and foremost, they should have asked “what is development”, both in terms of what it means to Canadians as well as what it means in aid circles. For example, private sector development is a popular target for NGOs who argue that it shouldn’t be done and by the private sector who argues that governments can’t do it. Yet PSD is one of the few avenues that will generate new resources to sustain development gains. New monies have to go into the country, and since aid isn’t sustainable, it has to be the private sector that generates it in the long term. Like through trade. This isn’t to say everyone should do everything possible related to trade and call it development, but rather that a thorough examination of the types of PSD projects and their likelihood of producing strong development results would be a good basis for further analysis. If you want to conclude that Canada is doing it wrong, it would help to first establish that projects of Type A are generally good and projects of Type B are usually less effective and that as a result of ties to Canadian business, ask if Canada is now doing more type B than type A. That analytical framework would work for any of the sub-policies, but you need to show the framework rather than assume the outcomes and cherry-pick projects that support your premise.
Equally, however, if people want to say a “whole-of-government” policy is bad for development, presumably they mean it produces either the wrong results or at least less effective results than other purer policies. Great, if that is true, it should be easy to show which ones work better, why, how they produce better results, and then, to apply to the Canadian context, show how Canada is now choosing less effective projects. Except none of the articles in the book can meet that bar. Instead, it uses rhetoric and spin to say “better to do it another way, worse to do it this way” (with no evidence) and then say “see, they’re doing it the wrong way”.
Finally, if they want to rethink aid, I would expect them to talk about the other things that affect development and don’t get much attention normally. Things like migration, remittances, investment (as mentioned in Chapter 1 briefly). Or redistributive politics within a country (like the BRICs).
If I had evidence of THAT, I might agree there is a need to rethink Canadian aid. But if the principles haven’t changed allocations (as per Swiss), if the policies only change for minor levels of investment or with only anecdotal projects, and if management focus for government changed rather than aid management itself changing, then I think a different measuring stick is needed. I had hoped this book would be it, but it wasn’t. Maybe it never intended to be.
