The thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder...they are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.
The best way to understand a system is to look at it from the point of view of people who want to subvert it.
The PC is custom-made for the indolent: you can give every impression of being hard at work when in fact you are doing your shopping, booking a holiday or otherwise frolicking in the cyber-waves. And thanks to mobile technology you can now continue to frolic while putting in face time in meetings.
It can be hard to begin your climb up the greasy pole without making some effort: the trick is to be brimming over with clever ideas for other people to execute. But when you become a manager your problems are solved: you can simply delegate all your work to other people while you spend your days attending international conferences or “cultivating relationships with investors”.
Profound changes in the workforce are making teams trickier to manage. Teams work best if their members have a strong common culture.
...the most successful teams have leaders who set an overall direction and clamp down on dithering and waffle. They need to keep teams small and focused: giving in to pressure to be more “inclusive” is a guarantee of dysfunction.
Psychological resistance can be fierce when companies use data collected from their customers to charge them more.
The fashion for collaboration makes some sense. The point of organisations is that people can achieve things collectively that they cannot achieve individually. Talking to your colleagues can spark valuable insights. Mixing with people from different departments can be useful. But this hardly justifies forcing people to share large noisy spaces or bombarding them with electronic messages. Oddly, the cult of collaboration has reached its apogee in the very arena where the value of uninterrupted concentration is at its height: knowledge work.
A growing body of academic evidence demonstrates just how serious the problem is. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, discovered that interruptions, even short ones, increase the total time required to complete a task by a significant amount. A succession of studies have shown that multitasking reduces the quality of work as well as dragging it out. Sophie Leroy, formerly of the University of Minnesota (now at the University of Washington Bothell) has added an interesting twist to this argument: jumping rapidly from one task to another also reduces efficiency because of something she calls “attention residue”. The mind continues to think about the old task even as it jumps to a new one.
Many employees are spending so much time interacting that they have to do much of their work when they get home at night.
The biggest problem with collaboration is that it makes what Mr Newport calls “deep work” difficult, if not impossible. Deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy: it is only by concentrating intensely that you can master a difficult discipline or solve a demanding problem. Many of the most productive knowledge workers go out of their way to avoid meetings and unplug electronic distractions. Peter Drucker, a management thinker, argued that you can do real work or go to meetings but you cannot do both.
Companies are always having to make difficult decisions, whether allocating limited resources (such as promotions and bonuses) or sacking people if they hold the organisation back or if the market turns down. It is preferable to make such decisions on the back of robust criteria rather than on the basis of managerial whim. Increasingly, firms also have to defend those decisions in the courts against people who feel hard done by. Firms that embrace more touchy-feely assessment systems, let alone get rid of them entirely, may be setting themselves up for legal nightmares.
Slackly managed teams can become hotbeds of distraction—employees routinely complain that they can’t get their work done because they are forced to spend too much time in meetings or compelled to work in noisy offices. Even in the age of open-plan offices and social networks some work is best left to the individual.
Some employees are such enthusiastic collaborators that they are asked to weigh in on every issue. But it does not take long for top collaborators to become bottlenecks: nothing happens until they have had their say—and they have their say on lots of subjects that are outside their competence.
But employees—particularly young ones—need to recognize the long-term costs of working in a constant state of distraction.
The thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder...they are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.