Seth Godin wrote recently about Culture being invented by people who do not want to mess with new technology.

First he defines culture in terms of the opera, the novel and the newspaper – which is a debatable point in itself; but his main thesis is that the people in the ‘culture’ business would rather have technology stay still so that they can keep perfecting the culture.

I would argue that the top performers in any business (including the culture business) are actually early adopters of new technology – if only to stay ahead of the competition.

In fact there is a strong and perhaps unconscious feedback cycle set up between the early adopters and the innovators. This helps with the fine tuning and mass adoption of technology.  The advances in technology has bettered the human condition since the beginning of time – and allowed space for ‘culture’ to experiment and flourish.

With apologies to the chicken and the egg, technology does come first and culture follows.

As organizations hurtle through the accelerating pace of change and try to find their place on the table, it is refreshing to go back to basics and find clarity and direction. The changes in technology broadly referred to as ‘Web 2.0′ are here to stay and have caused stodgy enterprises to take notice – to reinvent themselves as ‘Enterprise 2.0′. Lost in the technology or people focused debate are the basic time-tested management principles best articulated by Peter Drucker.

According to Drucker, the purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Also, organizations need to give ‘knowledge workers’ control over their work and environment, allowing teams to work towards broad business objectives instead of prescriptive plans.

If you think about it organizations conforming to Drucker’s vision will by definition be ‘Enterprise 2.0′. Technology, processes and organization structures are all components for the roadmap to get to that milestone.

Greg Lloyd (@roundtrip) has a terrific take on this debate. He declares himself a Strict Druckerian as opposed to the Technarian and the Proletarian.

I think we are all Druckerians if we stop and think about it.

Ever been in one of those brainstorming workshops with lunch provided, staring at a blank whiteboard with a ‘facilitator’ exhorting everyone not to be bashful and to think outside the box.

Thinking ‘outside the box’ is the romantic ideal of creativity, but the brutal truth is that there ALWAYS is a ‘box’ that defines at the very least the goal of creative thought – and in most cases – a variety of constraints that need to be respected on the way to creative nirvana. Asking people to think and to begin with a blank sheet of paper will cause a ‘thinker’s block’ in most cases while the ‘thinker’ works through the goals, constraints and assumptions in his mind. Mark McGuinness has a very interesting experiment on thinking ‘inside the box’. He concludes that

‘Creative freedom’ is usually spoken of as a positive thing – but in this case, having total freedom to write any kind of story they like tends to paralyse people.

So, a successful brainstorming begins with something already on the board. There HAS to be a workshop owner (not just a ‘facilitator’) who brings the framework to the table and has a vested interest in the end-product. All participants should be there for their skills, experience or a ’stakeholder-pass’ – not just to have more ‘heads’ to get to bear on the problem.

The workshop ‘owner’ taps into the entire group – gets them to add more flesh to the framework, validate or repudiate assumptions, extend the concept into the practical execution challenges, push and poke at imagined or defined boundaries and iterate through various cycles of conception to execution to fine tune the solution.

On tools, I prefer mindmaps and structured (lateral) thinking as the two most valuable accelerators for brainstorming.

At the individual level, laying out your ideas on a mindmap is a powerful idea management technique that I can personally attest to as my implementations evolve. It can be scaled up to manage group brainstorming sessions as well  – with similar powerful outputs as Michael Deutch insists.

From a structured thinking perspective, we need to make sure that the discussion has adequate representation of the six color ‘thinking hats’ from Edward de Bono – (Facts, Emotions, Critical-Judgment, Positive-Judgment, Creativity and Big-Picture). I am still trying to digest Jeffrey Phillip’s refreshing new term ‘Elastic Thinking’. More on that later.

Group Brainstorming in itself does not ‘generate ideas’. It helps amplify and sharpen individual thoughts – that need a vehicle for validation and improvement – and an organization framework for implementation.

James Taylor is out again revealing secrets. Here is the latest dirty laundry.

Business users don’t want to “maintain rules” any more than they want to “write code”

What they want to do is run their business better……

…..They can’t and don’t want to use the same technology IT does but they can and should be brought into the process. To deliver this requires thought and effort but it will pay off in increased agility, decreased costs and improved precision in decision-making.

I agree with James’ prescriptions on what IT needs to do to make it easier for business users to define business rules that ‘run the business’. The Business Rules Engine interface needs to be intuitive and  familiar;  presented in a business metrics context; allow ‘what-if’ scenario building; and provide audit and governance ‘under the covers’.

The underlying assumption here is that business users do have a reasonably well-defined and agreed-upon decision-making criteria. So when ‘business rules’ need to be built into the ‘business logic’ of a system, the IT team should be able to pick up the binder listing all the rules and start implementing the system. In an Orwellian parallel universe maybe. Not in the real world.

Too frequently the business needs to think through the business processes, objectives, decisions and rules first before any system can be implemented. These rules are again subject to change depending on business direction and market conditions. So IT is increasingly abstracting the business-rules-engine component out of the underlying implementation.

IT can develop and procure Web Services that enable individual business processes – and provide ’switches’ to configure the process and its interaction with other processes. The Business Rules Engine that brings the full value chain together is then the ultimate responsibility for business domain experts within the business.

No matter how dirty, techie, complex or ridiculous the Business Rules Engine is, the business needs to know where the switches are and how to drive. Can the business visualize a Ferrari dashboard or is a Model-T ‘dashboard’ sufficient?

Kevin Carey has a very thorough review on the state of Higher Education cost structures in the Washington Monthly this month. He showcases innovative uses of technology in lowering costs of lectures – leading to increase in productivity, better grades and lower costs.

The key is letting computers do what they do best—grading multiple-choice tests, providing 24/7 access to text, audio, and video, connecting people to one another at a distance—while retaining the human element when only real people will suffice. The Virginia Tech Math Emporium is staffed twelve hours a day with a combination of upper-division math majors, graduate students, and faculty, each of whom is prepared to help students with any of the Emporium-based courses.

And even when the notoriously nocturnal undergraduate lifestyle puts teachers of any kind out of reach, the Emporium never closes and the computers never sleep. Virginia Tech students always have access to the mind of Michael Williams, the ghost in the Emporium machines.

Kevin goes on to explain why universities are not passing the cost-savings back to students. In fact, tuition costs are rising – with all of the money being spent on ’status-building’ investments in athletics, building, etc in order to boost college ranks on various lists like the one maintained by US News.

Leaving the economics of higher education aside, the technology application is the interesting part. Applying technology in agriculture and manufacturing resulted in phenomenal productivity increases in the past decades. Technology has increased productivity in the so-called Third Wave of Services industry already with communications, collaboration and analytical tools. Even in education, we have plenty of online courses and other technology-enabled initiatives. Moving the boundary well into the hallowed lecture halls on campus is new. Professors are being replaced by intelligent machines! Sounds like a sci-fi movie plot…

You can learn to speak any language you wish on a tape/CD/Computer; Pilots can learn to fly planes using computer simulators; and you can google for any piece of information that you care about on the Internet. So, why do we need Professors for delivery of classes? Let them design new computer courses. They can even design feedback mechanisms into the delivery so that students can provide input for the course to self-correct. Professors can then be free to do original research and expand the frontiers of knowledge.

Machines have taken over the campus. Are you sure your Professor is human?

Brent Hutchison John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas recently wrote on a Harvard Business Review blog about the Gamer Disposition - an attitude and set of traits that are ideal for today’s employees. He writes that

Today’s multiplayer online games are large, complex, constantly evolving social systems. Their perpetual newness is what makes them enticing to players.

The gamers have bottom-line orientation, understand the power of diversity, thrive on change, see learning as fun and pride themselves on discovering radical and innovative solutions. All these together are the perfect buzzwords for a resume or a cover-letter that I want to receive for everyone on my team. In this age of accelerating change, we cannot afford static structures and certainly no team that cannot be nimble and quick at the draw.

After establishing that Gamers have the best traits for being the best employee today, it will be interesting to ponder why that might be so. Interactive games provide a compressed timeline, a clear goal but unstructured and unknown environment – requiring rapid learning, environment scan, evaluation of options and decision making…in order to get rewarded by immediate feedback and hopefully a promotion to the next level!

Looks like getting Gamers to be employees is a great idea, but be prepared to create a challenging and exciting environment for them…or watch them switch to another game.

‘Being adaptable’ is one of those backhanded compliments. It can have negative connotations associated with being wishy-washy, spineless, impressionable, naive, crafty, calculating, opportunistic and similar. Despite this the history of civilizations is full of examples where adaptation was critical for survival and for growth.

Adapting and evolving to exploit changes in the environment has now become a business buzzword - being Agile. Definitions of agility can range across the continuum from operational agility to business-model agility. I agree with the latter definition that James Taylor clarified recently.

Agility to us, I think, is a measure of responsiveness to change rather than responsiveness to customers or to orders. It is not the time it takes a company to, for instance, restock a product. While that’s an interesting thing to measure, it is not agility to me. The time it takes a company to change its reorder approach or a specific product/vendor is, however, a measure of agility. 

Being an agile organization requires it to be able to rearrange its people, processes and systems into new configurations at short notice. ‘Composing’ new value chains and business models using existing processes as components is the new competency that sets organizations apart. The new generation systems need to support these process-components in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). And, we need many more of those ‘multiple-hat’ people who morph among roles like architects, business-analysts, project-managers, designers and customer-advocates.

Those video-game playing, text-messaging, social-networking, hyperactive, mobile, multi-tasking kids – and adults – are perfect for this paradigm. Systems are now available as Services that you plug into as and when needed. Businessweek claimed recently that  you may never buy software (or hardware) again.

No longer do small companies have to spring for servers and IT staff just to get the basics. With software services, you don’t install programs on your own computers or server. Instead, you sign up online for software and use it while you’re connected to the Internet.  

This agile, anything-can-change-at-any-time world needs ‘being adaptable’ in spades. The pace of change is accelerating and business-ecologies are constantly forming, dissolving, splitting, aggregating and reforming in a kaladeoscopic blur.

The Adaptables are center-stage now – as always leading the charge for survival and growth.