Reading :: Machiavelli, Marketing and Management

Originally posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:13:31

Machiavelli, Marketing and Management

by Phil Harris, Patricia Rees, Andrew Lock

"This book resulted from the Machiavelli at 500 conference held in Manchester in May 1998," the editors explain in the introduction. This edited collection has some of the advantages and many of the disadvantages of other books resulting from such conferences. The advantages include a wide variety of disciplinary and field perspectives and a tendency toward dialogue among chapters. The disadvantages include a tendency of some of these chapters to talk past each other; to disagree on even the most simple of premises (was Machiavelli chiefly concerned with power or the republic? was he totally amoral or extremely moral? did he believe in the divine right of kings, or was that notion foreign to the Florentine republican?); and to go over the same ground in poorly coordinated ways. Again, these disadvantages are common in such collections, but they are exacerbated here because the chapters are focused on Machiavelli's impact, and that impact is hard to gauge when the contributors don't seem to agree on who Machiavelli was.

The collection is at its most schizophrenic in Beatrice Rangoni Machiavelli's chapter, in which she approvingly lists several positive interpretations of her distant relative's work, not acknowledging that these interpretations are mutually contradictory -- they can't all be true.

Some insights do emerge in the reading, particularly contextual insights about Machiavelli's time; a discussion of whether Machiavelli was poststructuralist; an examination of Machiavelli from within different ethical systems; and a contrast between Machiavelli and Marx (Machiavelli took human nature to be essentially fixed, Marx didn't). But those insights take some work to uncover. >

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Reading :: The Art of Project Management

Originally posted: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:14:23

The Art of Project Management

by Scott Berkun

I'm looking at Amazon.com's listing for Berkun's The Art of Project Management right now, and the page recommends that I buy the book along with David Allen's Getting Things Done. It's hardly a coincidence. Project management and time management both deal with work fragmentation, an increasingly pervasive phenomenon. Both are vital skills for knowledge economy jobs, especially software development. And although they deal with different levels -- collaborative vs. personal -- they share many similarities.

Not coincidentally, they both represent skills that I need to develop as well as scholarly interests that I am pursuing. So I've been reading several project management and time management texts (and studies) lately. Berkun's book interested me because it had gotten a very positive mention from Slashdot.

Berkun was a project manager at Microsoft for several years before striking out on his own. Not surprisingly, his book trades on this fact, offering scads of anecdotes and illustrations from his Microsoft years. These stories really are illustrations: They illustrate specific, well grounded principles under the headings of plans, skills, and management. Berkun is methodical in exploring these different headings, and his writing style is clear (although he sometimes tries too much to be clever).

The projects that Berkun is talking about managing tend to be software development projects, and much of his advice is specific to that industry. But much more of it is easily translated to other sorts of projects. In particular, I was interested in the last chapter, "Power and Politics." Berkun tends to oversimplify things a bit here, but he discusses several concrete techniques for negotiating, persuading, and influencing decisions.

The book is a quick read, but it's also solid (392 pages) and a bit intimidating. Fortunately, it's written so that you can skim it and/or focus on specific chapters. If you're interested in complex project management, take a look.

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Reading :: Where the Action Is

Originally posted: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 20:19:28

Where the Action Is : The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

by Paul Dourish

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time. Paul Dourish's work has interested me ever since grad school, when I read the article on "technomethodology" that he published with Graham Button. And of course Bill Hart-Davidson discusses this work frequently.

It's not what I expected. I had expected an empirical case or series of cases that were investigated by or analyzed through a theoretical, analytical, or methodological framework ? which is the usual mode for books in this series. But Dourish's project is to develop a theory of interaction, based on phenomenology, that is suitable for investigating, developing, and understanding embodied interaction: "interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us" (p.3).

This project involves defining and attending to embodiment: "a form of participative status. Embodiment is about the fact that things are embedded in the world, and the ways in which their reality depends on being embedded" (p.18). Increasing attention to embodiment, he says, results in new sensitivity to settings; describing and analyzing work activities and artifacts in concrete terms; and an understanding that artifacts can play different terms (p.19). Dourish gets to these concerns by discussing phenomenology's origins, concerns, and applications.

Throughout, Dourish gives examples from embodied computing and suggests ways in which an embodied perspective could change our approach to computing. But I found myself wishing that the book was more like what I had thought it would be: I wanted Dourish to compress the theoretical/methodological discussion and present an extended case study to illustrate how this phenomenological perspective affects the investigative and design work he describes.

Nevertheless, the book is valuable. I'm struck by how similar it is in its presumptions and examples to other work coming out of Xerox PARC and RXRC. If you've read work by Graham Button, Lucy Suchman, Abigail Sellen, or Richard Harper, this book is going to sound at least somewhat familiar, and its exposition of embodied practice is going to bring new insight to those works.

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Reading :: The Future of Work

Originally posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:11:04

The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life

by Thomas W. Malone

Thomas W. Malone, a professor in MIT's Sloan School of Management, has an extensive and interesting publication record with which I only have passing familiarity. This book, however, is written for a lay audience; Malone mentions his research, but not in great detail, instead concentrating on developing a vision of what work might look like in the future.

That vision looks a lot like the one his colleague Shoshana Zuboff has described. Malone believes that work will become more decentralized, democratic, and participative, largely because of the changes introduced by pervasive information technologies:

For the first time in history, technologies allow us to gain the economic benefits of large organizations, like economies of scale and knowledge, without giving up the benefits of small ones, like freedom, creativity, motivation, and flexibility. (p.4)

Malone charts a continuum of (de)centralization, from very centralized hierarchies (ex: military organizations) to loose hierarchies, democracies, and markets (p.6). Hierarchies, he says, are a solution to a particular problem: organizing large numbers of people efficiently in the face of high communication costs (see, e.g., p.22). But with information technologies, the costs of communication drop, making more decentralized structures possible. Malone sees these more decentralized structures as a way to retain efficiency in large organizations while distributing power and freedom more evenly. He makes this argument by first looking at patterns in human societies (Ch.2) and then applying them to business (Ch.3). And although this may be a productive move analogically, it becomes clear in Chapter 3 that he doesn't see it as an analogy; he equates political and organizational structures. In the book itself, this seems to be far too easy. (I can't speak to his other scholarly work.)

Related is this oft-made point about why societies are organized in a particular way:

As usual in human affairs, there were many factors. But one stands out as particularly important: our old friend, communication costs. (p.24)

Again, Malone makes the easy leap to isolate a determinative causal factor. Communication costs are "particularly important" in determining organizational structures. This point may have some merit, but Malone repeatedly papers over other possible factors and never strongly builds the case that communication costs are driving the changes he describes. And again, it's possible that this has something to do with the fact that the book is written for a lay audience. But as is, the point seems too easy and too unsupported.

Let's get farther into the book. Malone goes on to describe the shift from corporate hierarchies to networks, making the same points we've seen in Zuboff and Maxmin and in Castells: organizations are tending to get smaller, interlinking and cooperating with other companies rather than incorporating or assimilating them. Outsourcing is becoming a more prevalent way of expanding capacity. Companies control larger flows of cash, but they exert less control over business activities. Networks of companies, like the Japanese keiretsu, are doing the work that used to be done within monolithic companies (p.31). Malone links this trend to information technologies: "We've found that when an industry makes greater use of information technology, the average size of companies in that industry tends to decrease after a lag of about two years" (p.34).

Malone goes on in Chapter 4 to examine cases of organizations with loose hierarchies: Linux, Wikipedia, MIT, and AES. Chapter 5 looks at cases farther along the continuum toward decentralization: companies run as democracies such as Whole Foods and W.L. Gore. And in Chapter 6, he gets to the most decentralized types of organizations, those run as markets.

Chapter 6 is really the most interesting of these, since it points to the most extreme realignment:

What if ... many tasks currently done by large companies were done instead by temporary combinations of small companies and independent contractors? Taking this idea further, what if most businesses consisted of only a single person? (p.74)

Malone advances the term "e-lancer" to describe this sort of "electronically connected freelancer" (p.74).

In an e-lance economy, the fundamental unit is not the corporation, but the individual. Tasks are not assigned and controlled through a stable chain of management, but rather are carried out autonomously by independent contractors. These freelancers join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done ? after a day, a month, a year ? the network dissolves, and its members become independent agents again, circulating through the economy, seeking the next assignment. (p.75)

Malone gives the example of the film industry, which works in roughly this way. He concedes that e-lancing is not the best structure for projects that must be developed and sustained over long periods (p.76). But for those who e-lance, one attraction is that they can focus on and accommodate their own values (p.76).

In this arrangement, trust becomes extremely important (p.80).

Of course, freelancing involves giving up long-term employment and benefits. Malone acknowledges this problem, and envisions guilds that look after workers' needs, just as the Screen Actors' Guild provides benefits for actors (p.85). These guilds, he speculates, might emerge from existing groups that already support workers in various ways: the Association for Computing Machinery, labor unions, temporary agencies, college alumni associations.

In this new, decentralized arrangement, Malone argues for a new management model: less command-and-control, more "coordinate-and-cultivate" (p.129; compare with Zuboff and Maxmin as well as Arquilla).

What's this book good for? If you're interested in getting up to speed on the new economy literature, this might be a good introduction. It's more readable than works such as Zuboff and Maxmin's, but not nearly as well argued or supported. It is even more optimistic about the economy than they are -- and that's saying quite a bit.

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Reading :: Ashtanga Yoga

Originally posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:43:18

Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual: An Illustrated Guide to Personal Practice

by David Swenson

If you know anything about yoga -- and I did not until late last year -- you may have heard of ashtanga yoga. Maybe you've entered into a practice room for your kundalini or hatha flow class, and wondered why it's so hot. What the heck was the previous class doing? Or perhaps you've actually seen an ashtanga class and been struck by how regimented the movements are, how constant the motion is, and how little time is held in each pose. You may have thought of it as "extreme yoga," and you may even have heard of the variant "power yoga."

I'm just speculating, based on the reactions of others and the remarks of instructors at the place where I've begun ashtanga classes. I only have a hazy idea of what other yoga variants might be like. To me, ashtanga seems like a set of exercises, similar to stretches and calesthenics, but very well planned and integrated. As they should be: yoga has been around for thousands of years, and ashtanga is based on an ancient text.

Yoga originates in spiritual practice, and using yoga primarily for developing strength and flexibility -- which is why I'm taking the class -- would be seen by some as watering down or corrupting the practice. Apparently I'm not the only one: all of my instructors have been inclusive, and at least one has outright claimed that yoga has no necessary spiritual connection. Nevertheless, the language of yoga's spritual roots does make its way into books such as David Swenson's Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual. Swenson, who lives in Austin, is one of the foremost ashtanga instructors in the world. And he doesn't shy away from alluding to the spiritual beliefs that have contributed to the development of yoga: his descriptions of the principles and postures are full of discussions of energy flow, chakras, etc. And although I at first became impatient with these discussions, wanting a more physiologically grounded discussion, I came to appreciate the vocabulary and concepts that are embedded in the discussion. Realistically, I'm not sure that I could understand a physiological discussion, but I can certainly envision energy (metaphorically) flowing through chakras, and that's enough to help me interpret what's happening during the poses.

And I need all the help I can get. I suspect I have below-average spatial intelligence and body awareness, and my exercise for the last several years has consisted of walking to the bus stop. Fortunately, Swenson provides that help. After the short initial discussion, Swenson illustrates each pose in the first and second series, both with photos and textual descriptions. The photos can be pretty scary -- I'm amazed the human body can get into some of them -- but Swenson also illustrates some intermediate poses that almost anyone can do. (One thing I really like about ashtanga is that you systematically perfect your practice; each practice includes some sort of accomplishment.) The textual descriptions are often couched in idioms that sound either translated or 19th-century, but they are generally clear and show flashes of genuine humor. The writing and editing are not terribly strong, but they do what they need to do.

I'm reviewing this book here, but unlike most of the books on the list, I'll probably end up reading it over and over as I continue in my practice. If you're interested in ashtanga, check it out.

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(Reassembling the Social)

Originally posted: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:37:02

I haven't read Bruno Latour's newest book yet, but Collin has.

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Reading :: The Rise of the Network Society

Originally posted: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 21:29:31

The Rise of the Network Society

By Manuel Castells

The Rise of the Network Society is the first volume of a three-volume work entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. I first ran across it as a cite in John Arquilla's work on networked warfare, but apparently it's well known in other circles. In fact, two of my colleagues are reading Castells' work.

Colleague A saw me carrying this book a couple of weeks ago. "Oh, you're reading that? I'm reading Volume 2 right now." What do you think, I ask. "He -- seems to have a high opinion of himself," Colleague A said with evident reservation.

Colleague B saw me with the book a few days later. "You're reading that too? So am I. I've been avoiding it for a long time because it's so massive, but it's cited so frequently I figured I had to read it. It's like Das Kapital." Colleague B thinks it's fantastic and has decided to order the other two volumes as well.

And what does Colleague C -- C for Clay -- think about it? C is still deciding. The problem is that Volume 1 deals primarily with economics, which is not my strong suit. And although the author has obviously thought quite a bit about these matters, and has been celebrated for his work, I don't have much of a frame of reference for evaluating most of his economic claims. The parts that I can evaluate are mixed. For instance, much of what he says about changes to work organization seems dead on, based on my observations and readings. On the other hand, his chapter on electronic communication draws heavily on scholars such as Havelock and Postman, neither of whom I find particularly convincing in terms of understanding communication changes.

Let me sketch out Castells' basic argument, which is fairly complex. Writing in 1996, he argues that capitalism has been profoundly restructured as "informational capitalism":

Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterized by greater flexibility in management; decentralization and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms; considerable empowering of capital vis-a-vis labor, with the concomitant decline of influence of the labor movement; increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships; massive incorporation of women into the working force, usually under discriminatory conditions; intervention of the state to deregulate markets selectively, and to undo the welfare state, with different intensity and orientations depending upon the nature of political forces and institutions in each society; stepped-up global economic condition, in a context of increasing geographic and cultural differentiation of settings for capital accumulation and management. (pp.1-2)

So far, this is familiar territory, covered (with considerably more optimism and less macroanalysis) in Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy and similar works. But Castells brings to bear decades of scholarship and reams of economic data to develop these points.

One factor he discusses is of particular interest to me: telecommunications. Castells argues that

what characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation. ... The uses of new telecommunications technologies in the last two decades have gone through three distinct stages: automation of tasks, experimentation of uses, reconfiguration of applications. In the first two stages, technological innovation progressed through learning by using ... In the third stage, the users learned technology by doing, and ended up reconfiguring the networks, and finding new applications. (p.32)

Telecommunications deregulation, in Castells' analysis, was key to the networked society because it reorganized and spurred the growth of telecommunications, leading to "the global integration of financial markets and the segmented articulation of production and trade throughout the world" (p.52).

Networks, Castells says (quoting Mulgan), were created not to communicate but to outcommunicate. They are adaptive, open-ended, and multi-edged (p.65). They are meant to move along the product of the information economy: information itself, which has become the product of the production process (p.67, 172). And even though this is the age of deregulation, Castells says, the role of the state is vital: "it is precisely because of the interdependence and openness of international economy that states must become engaged in fostering development strategies on behalf of their economic constituents" (p.90). States steer policies toward collective competitiveness (p.90).

The circulation of people drives innovation in this economy (p.95). And "the new production system relies on a combination of strategic alliances and ad hoc cooperation projects between corporations, decentralized units of each major corporation, and networks of small and medium enterprises connecting among themselves and/or with large corporations or networks of corporations" (p.96). In the new international division of labor, there is a "variable geometry" that dissolves historical, economic geography (p.106).

Castells identifies several organizational trends or patterns:

• The transition from mass production to flexible production (p.154), characterized in part by "customized, reprogrammable production systems, capturing economies of scope" (p.155). (Think in terms of Victor and Boynton's co-configuration model.)
• "The crisis of the large corporation, and the resilience of small and medium firms as agents of innovation and sources of job creation" (p.155).
• New methods of management (p.157), necessitated by the vertical disintegration of production along a network of firms, substituting for a vertical integration of departments (p.158). (Think of Zuboff and Maxmin's federations.)
• Interfirm networking, or a "multidirectional network model enacted by small and medium businesses and the licensing-subcontracting model of production under an umbrella corporation" (p.160).
• Corporate strategic alliances, involving the intertwining of large corporations (p.162).
• The transition from vertical bureaucracies to horizontal competition, involving seven trends: "organization around process, not task; a flat hierarchy; team management; measuring performance by customer satisfaction; rewards based on team performance; maximization of contacts with suppliers and customers; information, training, and retraining of employees at all levels" (p.164).

"Networks," Castells says, "are the fundamental stuff of which new organizations are and will be made" (p.168).

But technologies and networks don't play a determinist role. "Cultures and institutions continue to shape the organizational requirements of the new economy, in an interaction between the logic of production, the changing technological basis, and the institutional features of the social environment" (p.194).

In response to these macro-level changes, Castells says, work and employment are transformed. The traditional form of work is eroding (p.268). Employment now is characterized by decentralized data entry (p.248); the concentration of higher-level operations in the hands of skilled workers (p.248); multiskilling of jobs (p.251); the individualization of responsibility (p.251) and labor (p.265); and segregation by education (p.251). "The new social and economic organization based on the information technologies aims at decentralizing management, individualizing work, and customizing markets, thereby segmenting work and fragmenting societies" (p.265).

In chapters 6 and 7, Castells that ? at least in social terms ? the network society is reconfiguring space and time. (This argument sounds a bit like the one we encounter in Distributed Work.) Chapter 6 chronicles the growth of information flows (p.382) and argues that information technology leads to the breaking up of spatial patterns into a "fluid network of exchanges" (p.398). "The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows" (p.412). Chapter 7 similarly argues that time is compressed and processed in the network society (p.439); "the network society is characterized by the breaking down of rhythmicity, either biological or social, associated with the notion of a lifecycle" (p.446).

Colleague B is at least right in this: reading The Rise of the Network Society is like reading Capital. It's overwhelming, hard to digest, and full of fascinating ideas that take a lot of background to churn through. I'll be churning through this for some time to come, I think.

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Reading :: Swarming on the Battlefield

Originally posted: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:00:24

Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future

by Sean J. A. Edwards

Recently I've been reading a lot of these RAND reports and other texts on the swarming doctrine ? a way of attacking enemies that is fundamentally different from the massed formations that have typically characterized mechanized warfare. But most of the swarming literature has been frustratingly short on specifics, and consequently there's a lot of slippage in what swarming actually means. People familiar with military strategy have told me that swarming does not seem to be the fundamental shift in doctrine that it purports to be ? "we've been doing this forever," they have said, referring to decentralized decisionmaking and other characteristics. Part of the problem, I think, is that "swarming" has been overused and stretched to mean too many things; it needs a treatment to nail down the concept, explain the characteristics, provide a variety of case studies, and explain its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

Sean Edwards' study goes most of the way in accomplishing that. Edwards, who worked under Arquila and Ronfeldt at RAND, undertakes a quasi-experimental comparison of several historical cases of swarming: Scythians v. Macedonians, Parthians v. Romans, Seljuk Turks v. Byzantines, Turks v. Crusaders, Mongols v. Eastern Europeans, Woodland Indians v. U.S. Army, Napoleonic Corps v. Austrians, Boers v. British, German U-Boats v. British convoys, and Somalis v. U.S. commandos. For each, he carefully examines the case and catalogues both advantages and disadvantages. Then he summarizes some general conclusions with the appropriate caveats:

The cases have highlighted some successful countermeasures to swarm tactics, such as

• pinning a swarm force using either a part of one's own force or a geographic obstacle (Alexander, Crusades)
• eliminating the swarm force's standoff-fire advantage (Byzantines)
• eliminating the swarm force's mobility or elusiveness advantage (U-boats)
• securing the countryside by building a linked network of fortifications (Macedonians)
• separating the swarmer from his logistics base (Macedonians)

Edwards also make the important point that the threat of WMDs leads armies to consider far more dispersed formations, making swarming more attractive than it might be otherwise.

In all, if you're genuinely interested in swarming as military doctrine, Edwards' study is a really important one to read. But the application appears to be quite strictly military. Edwards does a good job nailing down the term, and in the process, squeezes out the more metaphoric applications (such as Hugh Hewitt's application of the term to blogging). In my book, that's not a bad thing. >

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<< Hell freezes over >>

Originally posted: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 03:54:57

I'm tenured.

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Reading :: The Agile Organization

Originally posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 01:28:07

The Agile Organization: From Informal Networks to Complex Effects and Agility

by Simon Reay Atkinson and James Moffat

The Agile Organization is primarily interested in applying insights of postmodernism and complexity theory to military organizations, and secondarily to applying the same insights to other organizations. "Postmodernism" here is used a bit differently than what we often see in rhetoric:

In this regard, too, the philosophy of Post-Modernism?that denies any single truth or belief?may also be reflected in our understanding of organizations and how they form and aggregate. The networks we consider are held together by certain trusts in which individuals believe. These trusts and beliefs are often different from those that define others and it is these that make the group or organization ?different.? Where these different organizations come into contact and/or overlap, certain rules of conduct are necessary to define how they work together if conflict is to be avoided. These rules need to reflect the underlying beliefs and truths by which the different organizations exist. (p.9)

This is a fairly good summary of the book's themes. The problem the authors face is that organizations are not as tightly structured or delineated as they were in the past because interconnections have become much easier to make. So organizations form and aggregate in different ways. And the common thread is "trusts and beliefs" and how they are negotiated. This is the turf of rhetoric ? the study of argumentation ? and the authors indicate throughout that after a long era of work rationalization, the centralized hierarchical structures that have often hedged in negotiations are breaking down. They list key properties of complexity that are emblematic of the "agile" organizations they study:

1. Nonlinear Interaction. The interaction between neighboring entities is nonlinear. Small changes can have large effects.

2. Decentralized control. The natural systems we have considered, such as the coevolution of an ecosystem, are not controlled centrally. The emergent behavior is generated through local interactions.

3. Self-Organization. We have seen how such natural systems with a large number of degrees of freedom can produce extended ordered structure, without the need for guidance from outside the system.

4. Non-Equilibrium Order. The order (for example the space and time correlations) inherent in an open, dissipative system existing far from equilibrium.

5. Coevolution. We have seen how such systems are constantly coevolving. Clusters or avalanches of local interaction are constantly being created across the system. These correspond to dispersed correlation effects in space and time, rather than a central imposition of large-scale coincidences in space and time.

6. Collectivist Dynamics. The cascades of local interaction that ripple through the system. (pp.36-37)

For all that, the authors lightly touch on what they see as the central way to understand complexity in organizations: mathematical analysis (p.43). This strikes me as counterproductive since such an analysis seems to assume stable nodes, and a truly "agile" organization's nodes would seem to be continually changing and defining one another. (See actor-network theory's work on defining actors.) Nevertheless, the authors have some really interesting insights. Take this section on work organization in industry, which sounds as if it has been taken from Victor and Boynton:

The linear production line in the car industry is a clear example of a series of bounded and unchanging specializations that form part of a management by detail (micromanagement). This works wonderfully well provided that everyone wants a black Model T Ford. However, in today?s and tomorrow?s market environment, demand is more likely to include small batches of complex products, each with varied characteristics. In this much more variable and dynamic environment, the response has been to abandon the production line in some cases in favor of a number of very specialized cells that can self-organize in different ways through a process of mutual negotiation. (p.92)

The authors go on to discuss how small organizations are initially bound by trust and kinship; as they scale larger, these bonds of trust tend to become formalized to allow scaling, and eventually "The network ceases to be self-organizing and scale free, and changes to being a network of formally defined locally clustered cells with longer range links between them: a Small World" (pp.110-111). This account of scaling is more structured than actor-network theory's, but perhaps less so than activity theory's. The problem, of course, is the ontological problem I mentioned earlier.

The authors also propose a proportional relationship between the system and the management process: the more agile one is, the more agile the other must be. "Each person in the chain was rigidly controlled within a tightly applied stovepipe and delivered an output as required by the input. There was little or no lateral movement?each function could be undertaken within the guidelines provided" (p.156). In the industrial age, neither management nor process were agile, and the result was "stovepiping," the partitioning of the organization into noncommunicative sectors (p.127). The Information Age model is decentralized, emergent management (p.130); the authors relate this model to the complexity concepts mentioned earlier through a succinct table (p.132). A little later, the authors provide an interesting analysis of British and US military agility that indicates a mixed bag. Agility will require changes for these organizations: "For both countries, it will require controlling less and commanding more" (p.167). They argue for "concessive" decision-making, which is

about trust: trusting in individual staffs and commands to do the right thing and so enabling one or another to lead, as guided by other involved and so pre-connected parties. Ultimately, it should allow command to exercise authority, seamlessly, across services, staffs, and nations. (p.181)

And that brings us again to trust. The authors argue that trust must be established and exchanged within one''s organization but also across organizations (p.188). And although the authors are particularly talking about military organizations, the lesson seems to be applicable to other sorts of organizations as well.

Overall, this was an interesting read, although a little light on the scholarly side.

Update: Simon Reay Atkinson emails:

Thanks for your positive review of our work - we appear to be scoring a few goals! You are right to conclude that we may be scholarly light but our intent was to take a few non-specialist horses to water and get them to drink a little at the well. We also hoped to raise questions particularly regarding Command and Control: to paraphrase President Clinton, 'It's Command and Control, Stupid'. That leads into some interesting questions and dilemmas - how, for example, does an organisation become more networkable. Back to Command and Control.

Yes, I thought this was a really intriguing point: the military can't get away from command, but it can rethink how command is accomplished. The Agile Organization argues that organizations need to concentrate on "controlling less and commanding more," devolving decision-making while retaining the overall command. That is, overly hierarchical organizations tend to micromanage through strict and often inflexible rules and command chains; flexible organizations set goals, but allow considerable discretion in terms of how the goals are accomplished. Atkinson and Moffat do a great job of demonstrating concrete ways in which this realignment works. And although they focus on military organizations, I can't overemphasize the intriguing connections with new economy/distributed work literature.

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Reading :: Rapid Problem-Solving with Post-It Notes

Originally posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:10:45

Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes

by David Straker

I wanted to like this book more than I did. In fact, I ordered it through interlibrary loan because it sounded so intriguing. In my research, I've been consistently impressed by how people invent solutions using post-its, and I've also studied how Contextual Design uses post-its in its affinity diagrams (a variation on the KJ quality method originated in Japan). So I had high hopes that the book would provide some broader insights along these lines, particularly insights that might help students think through issues of work fragmentation and/or through affinity diagrams.

And, yes, there is a lot of value in it: David Straker has put together a set of (generally) useful and easy to absorb tools for brainstorming, sorting and comparing, examining relationships, understanding affinities and grounded categories, and charting and planning actions. But the book has two problems.

One is that it's barely more substantial than a series of blog posts; the amateurish typesetting (it looks like it was composed in WordPerfect), spacious cartoons, and oversized headings seem like they're just trying to fill space, and compressing them to a reasonable size could have turned this book into a pamphlet or a modest website. The case study in the third section, and the three pages spent discussing the proper way to peel a post-it note, contributed to this impression.

The other is that post-its turn out to be the hammer that makes every problem look like a nail. The best fits for post-its were the sorting and affinity diagram/KJ tools. Other early tools seemed fine too. But later, the book goes very wrong by suggesting uses such as creating task timelines ? a use that really is much better done with a calendar or project management software.

Still, if the book is handy and if you're as interested in post-it notes as I am, you should take a look.

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Reading :: Robert's Rules of Order

Originally posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:52:52

Robert's Rules of Order (Newly Revised, 10th Edition)

by Henry M. Robert III, William J. Evans, Daniel H. Honemann, Thomas J. Balch (Editor)

Yes, you've heard of this one even if you haven't read it. Nearly every organization uses (or sorta-kinda uses) these rules to govern their deliberations. We certainly do in my department. And after four years of listening to our chair and parliamentarian making motions and correcting ? well ? mine, I decided that I really should become conversant with them.

I'm glad that I did. Robert's rules of order are really fascinating. They provide a procedural framework for governing and regulating deliberations, something that is vital so that organizations don't make decisions rashly, ride roughshod over minority factions, or revisit decisions ad infinitum. The rules are detailed and cover an incredible number of permutations, as you might expect from rules that have been evolving as long as they have.

What really got me interested, though, was when I began thinking of Robert's Rules of Order as a rhetoric text. It sets the ground rules to which interested parties agree so that they can productively deliberate, and the rules themselves also become evidence for meta-arguments about procedure. It would be fascinating to teach a class with this as the text, although I don't anticipate teaching that class.

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Reading :: Swarming and the Future of Conflict

Originally posted: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:49:44

Swarming and the Future of Conflict

by John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt

Whereas the authors' Advent of Netwar focused on the organizational structure of networks, this RAND report focuses on the key doctrine of netwar: swarming. (This doctrine is what interested Hugh Hewitt in his book Blog.) Swarming is

the systematic pulsing of force and/or fire by dispersed, internetted units, so as to strike the adversary from all directions simultaneously. This does not necessitate surrounding the enemy, though swarming may include encirclement in some cases. Rather, emphasis is placed on forces or fires that can strike at will ? wherever they will. (p.9)

The authors concede that swarming has historical precedents, but "swarming could not come into its own as a major way of war, because its organizational and informational requirements are huge. Swarming has had to wait for the current information and communications revolution to unfold as robustly as did the earlier forms of fighting" (p.9).

Those earlier forms of fighting were the melee (every fighter for her/himself); massing ("stacked, geometric formations" (p.13)); and maneuver warfare. In contrast to these, swarming involves autonomous or semi-autonomous units in a convergent assault; amorphous but coordinated "pulsing" or striking from all directions; small, internetted maneuver units; integrated surveillance; and attacks that disrupt the adversary's cohesion (p.21). The authors give several good examples of each, including swarming (e.g., German U-boats, Parthian horsemen, ants, bees, wolf packs). The nature metaphors put me in mind of A Thousand Plateaus, although I doubt the authors have read that work.

Overall, this was an interesting and illuminating report, and I can see how this doctrine has influenced recent changes in the US military. I also think that Hewitt did have it largely right when he applied swarming to recent "blog swarms," although the swarming that Arquilla and Ronfeldt are discussing seems more coordinated and controlled than what Hewitt is discussing. I'm more interested in applying lessons to nonmilitary organizations, of course, and in that vein I see some similarities with pieces such as The Cluetrain Manifesto.

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Reading :: Advent of Netwar

Originally posted: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:31:37

Advent of Netwar

by John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt

This RAND report precedes the authors' Networks and Netwars and outlines much of what the authors discuss in their chapters from that volume, but in greater detail. What they discuss is, again, fascinating. In their estimation, netwar entails the blurring of offense and defense, spatial boundaries, jurisdictions, and all sorts of distinctions (p.13). This blurring has to do with the newness of networks as an organizational design (as opposed to social networks) (p.19). The networked form, they say, follows other forms ? tribal, institutional, and market ? and although it is not completely new, it is newly enabled by pervasive information technologies (p.33).

In networks, members collaborate heterarchically:

Its key principle is heterarchic collaboration among members who may be dispersed among multiple, often small organizations. Network designs have existed throughout history, but multiorganizational designs are now able to gain strength and mature because the new communications technologies allow small, autonomous, dispersed groups to coordinate and act jointly across great distances as never before. (p.33)

The authors follow this up with a nice tabular comparison of tribes, institutions, markets, and networks. This table compares key areas, realms, interests, values, risks, and so forth; one thing that caught my eye was the structural comparison of space, time, and action. The authors argue that power is migrating to actors who are skilled at developing networks (p.43) and that networks may lead nation-states to become leaner and work in concert with nonstate actors (p.45). Think in terms of Rumsfeld's "leaner" military, with its precision strikes, emphasis on communications technologies, and heavy use of non-governmental organizations and subcontractors.

In netwar, the authors argue, the targets should be information-rich components: for instance, don't eradicate smugglers' drug crops, target their electronic bank transfers (p.90). The tactics of netwar are oriented not toward destroying assets but toward disrupting communication and coordination.

The authors conclude that netwar is less like Clausewitz and more like Sun Tzu, less like chess and more like Go. Sun Tzu, they argue, understood the importance of information dominance to victory (p.101). >

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(Reading Roundup: Gonzalez and Mark on Managing Currents of Work)

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:32:14

I blogged recently about scholarship in fragmented work, particularly some recent studies by Gonzalez and Mark. Although I was really taken with this work, one point that bothered me was their use of the term "working sphere," of which I said:

Notice that the working sphere is primarily defined by the material and human concatenation rather than the orientation toward a particular goal -?although "motives" is slipped in there. This sounds much more like distributed cognition's functional units than, say, activity theory's activity systems. And without that strong object-orientation, it seems likely that the unit is going to have trouble being nailed down or explained. On the other hand, downplaying the motive gives the working sphere the same advantages as actor-networks, ontologically speaking.

Victor Gonzalez read the review and was kind enough to forward a new paper that expands on the notion of working spheres:

González, V. and G. Mark (2005): 'Managing currents of work: Multi-tasking among multiple collaborations' in European Conference in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Spring Verlang, September 18-22, Paris, France. pp. 143-162.

(The paper has no page numbers, so I'll refer to the first page as page 1 and so forth.)

In this paper, Gonzalez and Mark continue using ethnography to review how workers switch among working spheres. From the abstract: "We discovered that to multi-task and cope with the resulting fragmentation of their work, individuals constantly renew overviews of their working spheres, they strategize how to manage transitions between contexts and they maintain flexible foci among their different working spheres" (p.1). And in the process, they define working spheres in more detail in respect to other analytical frameworks, particularly activity theory. In the first footnote, they say:

Compared with other types of conceptualizations, a working sphere is closer to the notion of activity as defined by Activity Theory, in the sense of connecting sets of actions toward particular objects (Leont?ev, 1978). However the notion of working sphere lacks an emphasis on high-level motives as the notion of activity does (e.g. becoming a project leader) and focuses instead on practical short-term purposes (e.g. enrolling and attending the training sessions on leadership). (p.4)

Yes, yes. The working sphere is "a unit of work that, from the perspective of the individual, has a unique time frame, involves a particular collaborative structure, and is oriented towards a specific purpose" (p.3). It may last for longer or shorter periods. Working spheres are like topoi or assemblages or (most strikingly to me) contextual design's focus areas.

So perhaps I have to withdraw my complaint that working spheres can be handled within activity theory's activity systems. Those triangles seem to be containing less and less these days, and I think that's partially because they were developed to deal with a different sort of work: stable, cyclical, developing over time. AT lacks a strong vocabulary and set of concepts for describing work fragmentation. And although scholars such as Nardi and Engestrom are working to address that issue with AT, I think it will take some development to get these efforts off the ground ? and common terms for describing this sort of oscillation among activities, terms such as "boundary crossing," evoke journeys across demarcated areas rather than the rapid focus shifts that Gonzalez and Mark describe. In fact, they remind me a bit of Bodker's work with focus shifts (again in an AT tradition), but whereas Bodker saw these focus shifts as resulting from breakdowns, Gonzalez and Marks see them as part of the normal flow of operations. And perhaps that's the way to deal with the question in an AT framework: to emphasize polycontextuality over border crossing, to see interruptions as the new state of things, and thus to imagine activities overlapping each other in a sort of polydimensional scheme.

Back to working spheres. Working spheres seem to be well suited for studying the contextual cues and assemblages of tools and practices that are necessary for polycontextual focus shifts. On the ground, workers perform this work in part through the continual review of overviews (not a surprise to anyone who has read Getting Things Done). These overviews can be local or global and can be reviewed at different levels of aggregation (p.12). And they're necessary for managing transitions from one sphere to another (p.16). Sensibly, the authors call for ways to mark, support, and facilitate interactions among these working spheres:

We argue that technological support should be oriented towards helping individuals maintain both local and global perspectives of their working spheres, providing the ability to represent information in portable devices that can be located on their desks or hung on walls, and be connected and synchronized with other tools such as email, electronic calendars, or other systems. Similarly, those technologies can serve to link and share information about the progress that individuals have in their personal working spheres to the systems used by the organization to manage and coordinate team projects or manage customer requests. (p.18)

Yes, yes. Again, this sounds a lot like contextual design's focus areas, although Gonzalez and Marks' account is less anecdotal and more theoretically founded. The authors see collaborations as the intertwining of multiple working spheres and argue that new resources must be provided to help workers transition among these working spheres. Certainly this makes sense, and again this connective work is not well theorized in activity theory (although again, scholars have recently been attempting to formulate theory in those terms). As I continue my own attempts to develop AT along these lines, I'll be looking at this work often.

Reading :: Expanding the Scope of Localization

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:50:26

Expanding the Scope of Localization: A Cultural Usability Perspective on Mobile Text Messaging Use in American and Chinese Contexts

by Huatong Sun

Huatong Sun's dissertation won the 2005 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication. It's easy to see why. This dissertation examines a spreading form of textual communication ? text messaging on mobile phones ? and uses it to provide considerable insight into usability and localization. In fact, this is exactly the sort of work I'd like to see more frequently in computers and writing studies: careful, systematic, empirical work that examines new forms of textuality, develops systematic ways to understand and study it, and unfolds its implications for written communication. And what new textuality is more widespread and more suddenly used than SMS? By breaking away from the big screen and the hoary textualities that are the staple of computers and writing studies ? MOOs, MUDs, online chats used in classrooms ? Sun demonstrates how to make computers and writing studies newly relevant, applicable, and ? dare I say it? ? useful.

Using a combination of activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies, Sun examines texting in China and in upper New York state, and of course finds cultural differences. But she also finds similarities. One striking similarity is that text messaging is so difficult. In Chinese and in English, each character often takes more than one press on the phone's keyboard (although, as she points out, there are some ways such as predictive typing that can lessen that burden). Texting is far more difficult than it needs to be. Yet texting has taken off at an incredible rate due to its advantages and the degree to which people can customize it. So we find that the Chinese tend to perceive and write text messages as a form of ci, a classic poetic genre "used for expressing feelings of the common people and portraying mundane life details" (p.164), while U.S. users tend to use text messages to perform small talk. And particularly in her case studies of U.S. users, Sun investigates how text messaging interacts with other communication technologies such as IM and voice; one couple, for instance, texted each other until peak hours were over and they could talk more cheaply (p.182). "Affordances of each technology are used here to arrange a stronger rhetoric," Sun argues, then proves it (p.183).

Just a note: Sun is one of a string of smart, innovative graduate students that Bill Hart-Davidson mentored during his stay at Rensselaer. I'm envious of Bill's obvious talents as a dissertation director, and I continue to be impressed with his students' work, especially Sun's.

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Reading :: Networks and Netwars

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:19:13

Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

by John Arquilla, David F. Ronfeldt

Although I was not that impressed with Hugh Hewitt's Blog, I was intrigued by his references to John Arquilla. Arquilla works (or worked?) for RAND, where he developed the concept of "netwar," a type of low-intensity conflict made practical by new information technologies:

To be precise, the term netwar refers to an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age. These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed organizations, small groups, and individuals who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often without a precise central command. Thus, netwar differs from modes of conflict and crime in which the protagonists prefer to develop formal, stand-alone, hierarchical organizations, doctrines, and strategies as in past effots, for example, to build centralized movements along Leninist lines. Thus, for example, netwar is about the Zapatistas more than the Fidelistas, Hamas more than the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the American Christian Patriot movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, and the Asian Triads more than the Cosa Nostra. (p.6).

And, it might be added, about al Qaeda. In fact, bin Laden makes several appearances in this volume, which was written before September 11 but published shortly afterwards; the editors include an afterword discussing the attacks. And reading this volume has helped me to understand both al Qaeda and the US military response much better. The netwar strategy places a premium on decentralizing control, capability, and decision-making, and that decentralization is made possible by pervasive "internetting" or intercommunication among nodes. Think in terms of Afghanistan, where US special forces were authorized to infiltrate in small bands, keeping constant communication with air cover and authorized to negotiate with locals. Or think in terms of how the Iraqi army immediately dissolved when US forces reached Baghdad, leaving the invading forces with the problem of building security forces from the ground up while insurgents conducted irregular, improvised attacks. "Many ? if not most ? netwar actors will be nonstate, even stateless. Some may be agents of a state, but others will try to turn states into their agents. Also, a netwar actor may be both subnational and transnational in scope" (p.7).

In their introduction, the editors describe various network topologies. Smugglers may arrange themselves in a chain; a franchise or cartel might arrange itself in a hub with actors tied to a central node or actor; and militant peace groups may arrange themselves in an all-channel network in which every node is connected to every other (pp.7-8). The third is the most difficult to organize and sustain, but also the most powerful, as it offers "no precise head or heart that can be targeted" (p.9). In addition, organizations may form hybrids of these basic types. And, the editors caution, hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks (p.15). They helpfully outline prominent cases of netwar, from the Zapatistas to Chechnya to the Battle for Seattle (p.17); most of these are examined in subsequent chapters.

The rest of the book consists of case studies with interesting implications. In "The Networking of Terror in the Information Age" (pp.29-60), Michele Zanini and Sean J.A. Edwards argue that combating terror networks must involve monitoring changes in IT use (p.52) and targeting information flows (p.53). In "Transitional Criminal Networks" (pp.61-97), Phil Williams likens criminal networks to "boundary spanners" (p.77) that cross borders and markets. He identifies several different business roles, including organizers, insulators, communicators, guardians, extenders, monitors, and crossovers (pp.82-83). In "The Emergence and Influence of the Zapatista Social Netwar" (pp.171-199), David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla examine the Zapatista insurgency in Mexico, leading with the intriguing thesis that "social newar is more effective the more democratic the setting" (p.171); they demonstrate that the Zapatista insurgency's success rested on its ability to network with sympathetic NGOs that helped to turn the public's sympathy their way. They also call the Zapatistas the world's first "postmodern" insurgency.

Perhaps the most intriguing case study is of the "Battle for Seattle," the protests that occurred in that city in conjunction with the WTO summit in 1999. In "Netwar in the Emerald City: WTO Protest Strategy and Tactics" (pp.201-235), Paul de Armond dissects the conflict in detail, demonstrating how an all-channel network organized itself, constructed a strategy and tactics, and outflanked the Seattle response at every turn.

One of the most interesting overview chapters is Luther P. Gerlach's "The Structure of Social Movements: Environmental Activism and its Opponents" (pp.289-310), in which the author argues that networks are segmentary (composed of diverse groups), polycentric (having multiple, often competing leaders), networked (with mutiple linkages) (pp.289-290). Part of what makes these organizations so effective is that leaders may be charismatic and compelling, but they do not carry a movement on their own; movements are loosely affiliated but split and divide based on affinities, leading them to spread like kudzu (or, if you prefer, rhizomes). Interestingly, groups are interlinked through personal relationships and sustained by "living links" such as "traveling evangelists" (p.296) ? something that I certainly have seen in large organizations. The looseness and leaderlessness of these organizations lead to system reliability: organizations can both learn from and disavow failures, leading to relatively low-risk, high-yield development of the organization as long as the narrative is skillfully managed. Disavowal and emulation result in a sort of trial-and-error learning (p.305).

Let's sum up. What strikes me is that the all-channel communication model, the confusion of boundaries and peripheries, the headless/leaderless organization, and the devolution and distribution of authority and control, sounds a lot like some of the more ambitious new economy work. If you read Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy, for instance, they push the idea of small, flexible federations that come together temporarily to serve one customer's need, then disperse. Some of the "new economy" work in activity theory goes in this direction too. That wouldn't surprise Arquilla, who thinks that netwar is a precursor of larger changes.

Something to watch out for, though, is that the nodes of these networks don't seem to be well theorized. One problem that actor-network theorists have encountered is that their work is read as if "nodes" = human beings; their idea was that nodes were actors, which could be humans, nonhumans, or combinations; the idea was to leave the unit open in an ontological sense. I don't think that's how Arquilla and Ronfeldt are using the term; I think their nodes really are humans and/or aggregations of humans. And that means that the nodes are relatively fixed, closer to an activity network than an actor-network. Yes, it makes a big difference theoretically. >

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Reading :: Breaking Up (at) Totality

Originally posted: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:22:42

Breaking Up (At) Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter

by D. Diane Davis

I haven't read much thoroughgoing feminist theory since grad school, but what really struck me about authors such as Cixous and Kristeva was that they sounded like Terry Gross trying to tell a penis joke.

You know what I mean if you've listened to much NPR. Gross starts by introducing the interviewee, using her trademarked Very Thoughtful tone of voice. At some point she decided to inject her own (inevitably orthodox) views, which she always telegraphs with a nervous chuckle and a series of hesitations, then delivers with a leading question. That question is stated, withdrawn, and restated in rapid fire, as if posing a leading question in three different ways will somehow camoflage it as a leading question or make it any less of a statement. "So (heh hah), don't you think that ? have you ever ? do you wonder if ?" And when Gross is unsure or insecure, her voice grows even more thoughtful and her vocabulary even more academic. If she were to tell a penis joke, it would take ten minutes and she would radiate nervous discomfort all the way through.

Diane Davis, on the other hand, knows how to tell a really ribald penis joke. And, yes, that is a compliment.

Diane happens to be in the office next to mine. She's smart, animated, extroverted, and in constant motion. If you want to get a sense of her, you really should read this book. It's less colloquial than Diane is in real life, but it retains her gusto and iconoclast outlook. But perhaps "iconoclast" is not quite right. The book is about disrupting established, patriarchal modes of discourse ? hence the feminist theory ? but its goal is to encourage new sorts of conversations through affirmative laughter. Diane goes after this goal by drawing on Deleuze, Haraway, and similar scholars to explore themes of heterogeneity and multiplicity. She encourages us not to "fear fluidity" but rather to examine rhetoric ontologically, relying less on unified subjects and more on metaphors of fluids and clusters. The book "after an instantaneous gestalt switch rather than a long-term political program; we are after tactics rather than strategies" (p.56). The inventive use of typography throughout allows her to underline her points playfully. It's a bit like watching Rip Taylor.

Actually, the typography is symptomatic of Diane's extroversion. And like many extroverts, I think she has a hard time understanding that her vision of writing as uninhibited, orgiastic, excessive, festive, etc. is not especially appealing to introverts like myself. To an extrovert, introverts seem to be filled with fear and that's what makes them reserved, uninterested in engaging in the Burkean parlor, more inclined to strategy than tactics. No, introverts often find public engagement draining; festivals and parlors are tests of psychic endurance. Metaphors based on those sorts of events are therefore extremely unappealing to introverts ? accomplishing precisely the opposite of what they intend, binding rather than liberating, exhausting rather than rejuvenating. Characterizing this reaction as fffffffear is a bit unfair.

Despite the metaphor, though, the book really is valuable. Diane thinks about issues of power and privilege ontologically, and in doing so, levels a sharp critique of composition pedagogies (including feminist pedagogies) that often hits its mark. Don't be put off by the gnome on the front cover (not Diane's choice, by the way). Take a look.

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Reading :: Blog

Originally posted: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:45:41

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World

by Hugh Hewitt

Near the end of this book, published in early 2005, Hugh Hewitt discusses the implications of the blogosphere for one particularly relevant sector:

When the first Supreme Court nominee of the new media era arrives, watch the blogs explode with commentary and investigation. Everey opinion the nominee wrote or case on which the nominee participated will serve as fodder for the new media. Anita Hill would not have lasted a weeked with the new media on her case. But a flawed nominee will melt more quickly than a Popsicle in Vegas in July. ... It will be a magnificent battle of text merchants. (p.148)

And so it came to pass. First Roberts, then Miers, and now Alito are being subjected to blogospheric examination. But it's worth noting Hewitt's role in Miers' inquiry: faced with a pick who appeared underqualified, whose position as President's counsel raised real questions about the separation of powers, Hewitt fell in line behind the nominee. Blogger Qando describes Hewitt in this way:

If you were to combine all three Powerline bloggers, Sean Hannity and any given Republican Party Chairman in some sort of GOP experiment to create the most reliable Republican pundit ever...you'd have Hugh Hewitt: the distilled essence of The Party Man.

I point out this issue not to hammer on Hugh Hewitt as a person but to illustrate one of the problems with Blog, his book on the blogosphere. Blog really does have some interesting insights and even flashes of brilliance. But it is also frequently blinkered because Hewitt really is a Party Man: he casts things in terms of Right and Left, he identifies Right as right, and he identifies the President as Right. So other dimensions of the political discussion ? in the Miers case, the good and proper perpetual antagonism among branches of government, which transcends party lines ? gets lost in his analysis. Symptomatically, he describes Andrew Sullivan as a "onetime conservative" ? after all, Sullivan used to support the administration, which made him conservative, and now he doesn't, which made him liberal. Yes?

No. But this limitation, which causes Hewitt to gravitate to heroic bloggers on the Right, diminishes the insights of the book only a little. Hewitt cites two ways of understanding the blogosphere as a transformative moment, a moment in which "everyone can be a journo" if they have a cameraphone and a blog (p.x), every reader can be an ombudsman and editor (p.37).

One way is by seeing the blogosphere as symptomatic of a Reformation. In Chapter 2, Hewitt retells the story of the Protestant Reformation, noting how the printing press provided the means for relatively cheap reproduction of texts and therefore routed around the bottlenecks that had allowed the Catholic Church to monopolize information. Once the printing press made the Scripture available to the masses, the principle of sola scriptura became a workable principle and the priesthood of the believer became tenable. That is, the printing press allowed Christians to decentralize church authority. This metaphor is somewhat illuminating, though I suspect it's not especially accessible to those without an evangelical background.

The other way is by seeing the blogosphere in terms of military strategy. In Chapter 1, which I found the most interesting chapter in the book, Hewitt calls on conflict theorist John Arquilla's work to provide a strategic vocabulary. Hewitt quotes Arquilla, who sounds a bit Harawayan:

Networking means much the same for the military as it does in business and social-activist settings, not to mention among information-age terrorists and criminals: monitoring the environment more broadly with highly sophisticated sensors; expanding lateral information flows; forming and deploying small, agile, specialized teams; and devolving much (but not all) command authority downward. But it also has a doctrinal implication that these other types of actors are learning faster than the U.S. military: It's a good idea to become adept at "swarming."

Swarming is a seemingly amorphous but carefully structured, coordinated way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable "pulsing" of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. It will work best ? perhaps it will only work ? if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. The aim is to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, attack it, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse. (pp.3-4)

Let me emphasize that Hewitt is quoting Arquilla here; these are not Hewitt's words. Hewitt's contribution here is not in originating the idea but in applying it to the blogosphere. Although the idea doesn't really fit ? the blogosphere is not divided neatly into warring camps except in the minds of Hewitt and similar partisans ? it provides some insight into blog swarms.

Both ways of understanding the blogosphere emphasize decentalization of authority, and this is a theme that runs through the book. Hewitt contends that decentralization of authority has been most obvious in journalism so far, but it is spreading across other information fields as well (p.94). So the second half of the book is all about managing organizational identity in the face of this new decentralization. Hewitt really embraces what has elsewhere been called the "hyperlinked organization", encouraging blogs at all levels of the organization, as well as discussing strategies for dealing with blog swarms. (One is simply being truthful; here, he sounds a lot like The Cluetrain Manifesto.) In fact, he says that CEOs should blog honestly and daily (p.124).

Blog, in fact, was published by Thomas Nelson publishing, whose CEO has been blogging for a while on the theme of "working smart." I ran across this blog via a link from 43 folders and have checked in occasionally; after reading Blog, I'm fairly certain that the author began blogging on Hewitt's advice. It's relatively secular. (In fact, the CEO took a lot of heat in his comments section a while back when he announced that his company would donate Bibles to Katrina victims. One commenter asked: Why Bibles? Why not the Koran? The CEO replied: Um, because we publish Bibles. Like the commenter, I hadn't realized that fact until I read the reply.)

The second half of the book loses steam. In fact, Hewitt is clearly blue-skying the implications of blogging for different sectors in Chapter 12, probably because the book wasn't long enough. But the first half of the book is certainly worth reading.

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Reading :: Essentials of Strategic Project Management

Originally posted: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 20:56:51

Essentials of Strategic Project Management

by Kevin R. Callahan, Lynne M. Brooks

I know very little about project management, but I've been meaning to learn, both for my own edification and for better understanding organizations. So I went to the library and picked up ? I'm not ashamed to admit it ? the thinnest two project management books I could find. One was Essentials of Strategic Project Management, which turned out to be a good move. Essentials is a short read broken into assimilable chunks. And although it's pitched to larger organizations, the principles are applicable to academic organizations as well.

The book sets up a typology for managing projects: "STO," which stands for the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of planning. The strategic level is managerial and involves initiation and planning of projects. The tactical level involves some planning as well, and also execution; project leaders handle this work. Finally, the operational level, which is handled by team members, involves some execution as well as closing and control (p.32). The typology, of course, is a way of ensuring a division of labor and (not incidentally, though this is dealt with gently in the examples) avoiding compulsive top-down micromanagement.

Once the typology is described, the book discusses how to mesh it with the organization type and the organization's overall business strategy. Coherence is a big theme here, not surprisingly, and the authors devote a lot of thought to reconciling the different components of a complex organization.

One of the more thought-provoking sections for me was the one on project maturity. Apparently project management maturity in organizations has five levels:

1. Initial Process
2. Structure Process and Standards
3. Organizational Standards and Institutionalized Processes
4. Managed Process
5. Optimizing Process

By my reading, my organization is between levels 1 and 2. And although academic units are certainly different from business units, I still think there's a lot to learn from the maturity model set forth here. I'll have to do some meditating on this.

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