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Leadership and Information Technology

1:10) 28-APR-2001 16:49 Richard Farson

It is my great pleasure to introduce the leader of this policy forum, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. I first encountered Alex's ideas when Hall Sprague of our staff told me I should definitely read an LA Times review, written by Alex, of John Seely Brown's great new book about the way information technology really seems to be working (John is an ILF Fellow, by the way). I was so impressed by it that I got in touch with Alex, where he is an historian of technology at the Stanford University Library, and began a fascinating email relationship, leading to my inviting him to moderate this policy forum. I later ran into John Seely Brown at a meeting, and we agreed that Alex's review was brilliant. Since then, I have had a chance to read other material by him, and all I can say is that I know we are in for an interesting, informative, and, I trust, a productive time in this forum. So, welcome Alex, and good luck with this brand new constellation of leaders.

1:11) 29-APR-2001 00:41 Larry Solomon

Let me add my welcome to you, Alex. I will try to support the exchange of ideas and interaction in this conference. I look forward to an exciting and interesting experience. I know that this is a topic of extreme importance at this point in history.

1:12) 30-APR-2001 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

[Takes microphone]

Hello to everyone participating in the workshop on information technology and executive leadership. As your moderator, it's my responsibility, as well as my pleasure, to start us off. Before I start, my thanks to Richard for the invitation to participate in this project and for the kind words about the review of Social Life of Information. It's an excellent book that I highly recommend to everyone.

I should begin by very briefly explaining how Richard and I came up with this subject. I've been teaching courses on the history of information technology and have found that very little historical work had been done exploring the impact of IT on leadership and high-level decision-making (though military history is a bit of an exception). Certainly, most new IT is aimed at middle management and other ‘techies’, and while it has to be sold to executives, the reigning assumption, even here in Silicon Valley, is that it won't be used in the corner office. In short, is there another Digital Divide, perhaps even more significant than the one we're used to hearing about? Is IT something that generally reaches down into middle management and production but not up into strategy and decision-making? Are our expectations of what information technology can do for us - what skills it can supplement, what knowledge it can enhance, what activities or actors it can replace - out of synch with the reality? If so, what does that mean for the way institutions - companies, universities, governments - use and respond to IT?

My hope is that we can learn from each other about these issues and come up with some new insights worth sharing with the wider world. I look forward to being part of this process but hope my own role will be a low-visibility one. My job is to encourage things to continue along and on-track (or to make sure the diversions are worthwhile). The literature regarding online communities conjures various ideals for moderators - they're conductors, facilitators, seminar leaders, etc. - but for so distinguished a group, I think my best model is that of the courtier, whose court presence (ideally) blended effortless brilliance with unobtrusive, yet critical, support of his social betters.

If you want to get in touch with me, I can be reached at apang@stanford.edu or by phone at (650) 233-9579. These coordinates are also available through the "People" section of this site.

Perhaps it would be useful if, as each of you come online, you introduce yourselves and say a bit about why you're here.

1:13) 01-MAY-2001 17:03 Mary Boone

Hello Alex, I'm delighted to meet you.

I have an enduring passion for the topic of integrating IT with leadership. In 1990, I wrote a book called Leadership and the Computer for which I interviewed 16 CEOs about their hands-on use of computers (and this was, of course, pre-web!). I find it fascinating that this is still topical over 10 years later. To boil several hundred pages down to a sentence, I found that the primary reason CEOs didn't use computers personally is that that saw no reason to. They didn't see any connection between leadership and computing. My book was aimed at changing their ideas about that.

This year, I published another book called Managing Interactively. In it, I talk about how we've had interactive technologies around for about 30 years, but we haven't had the interactive ‘attitudes’ on the part of managers and executives that are needed to go along with interactive technologies. So, for example, many technologies that are purportedly interactive end up being used to broadcast rather than interact.

I'm also working on a new theory about the connection between computing infrastructures and the way power is shared or not shared in organizations. I'd love to learn more from you about the history of IT.

1:14) 01-May-2001 17:44 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Mary, thank you very much for introducing yourself. I've bought, but confess I haven't yet read, your latest book; Carl Hiaasen's Sick Puppy keeps jumping in my lap.

It will be very interesting to learn why the CEOs you interviewed thought that they didn't need to use computers and whether you think that's still true. Likewise, I know I'm not the only one who will want to find out what a more interactive attitude in management would be like.

Let me shamelessly exploit your knowledge - I mean, impress your fellow IFLers and give you a chance to make a few more book sales - with a big question: how computer literate do leaders have to be? It's easy to assume that the leader ought to have a gut-level feeling for the craft and culture of the enterprise; and given all the attention given to IT in recent years, it's easy to believe that close knowledge of ASP, CRM, ERP, etc. at the top level is a matter of company life or death. (Given how expensive systems are, how the impacts of IT decisions can ripple throughout even the biggest company, and how IT purchasing can be connected to other strategies, it’s hard to imaging executives NOT being involved.) But we don't expect the CEO of an aircraft manufacturer to be able to have a pilot's license, be an expert in hydraulics, understand the intricacies of selling to foreign markets, and master the details of tax and environmental law; is it a problem if they don't know how CAD/CAM has changed the practice of aircraft design, or supercomputers affected the nature of modeling? So, what level of awareness or familiarity is necessary for successful decision-making? Are there particular attitudes or levels of expertise in IT that you see in leaders of companies that use IT intelligently?

You would like to hear more about the history of IT? I'll try to weave it in as we go along, but I'll lay a couple cards face-up on the table. Put simply, the argument I've been developing - in my courses, and to a smaller degree in print and pixel - is that ‘information technology’ covers a far wider range of things than we normally recognize. It extends far beyond computers, networks and other highest-profile manifestations, and that we can learn many lessons useful today from the history of information technologies as old as the telegraph, printing press and alphabet. Being in this forum is, in some degree, a test of this theory.

To give an example of an information technology that's not usually thought of as IT: the tall office building. Interestingly, the early adopters of skyscrapers were insurance companies. Why insurance companies and not railroads or manufacturers? Skyscrapers gave the appearance of solidity and prosperity, which is useful for an image-conscious industry; but they were also valuable as tools for managing the flow of information within the company, and making it more efficient. In the modern insurance industry, you have lots of policies. You charge a little for each, and make your money by bringing in premiums, minimizing actuarial risk, and - and this is the thing you have the most control over - keeping internal costs (of processing claims, billing, etc.) down. Skyscrapers were tools for centralizing and managing information flow and driving down transaction costs. You could put your researchers on one floor, claims on another, marketing on another, and the information would zip around among them, rather than crawl across town. Insurance companies were early adopters, because their business essentially consisted of managing money, information and risk. Hence, their interest in making use of the most advanced information management tools around. (This is also why they're among the earliest business users of computers in the 1950s.)

The fact that space is still an issue in information management - or in the creation and sharing of knowledge - is one that we're fitfully realizing. John Seely Brown's book, Social Life of Information, has an elegant chapter on the ways in which space continue to define how well knowledge workers do what they do.

1:15) 02-MAY-2001 09:21 Donald Straus

Alex, your 1:14 gets us off to a good start with the following quote: (I hope I didn't garble it by trying to move it here) "Information technology covers a far wider range of things than we normally recognize in that it extends far beyond computers, networks, and other highest-profile manifestations, and that we can learn many lessons useful today from the history of information."

My current interest is in its potential use in helping democracy to survive, but this may be too far off the main focus of interest you and others here have in mind. So, I will be, perhaps, confusingly brief in trying to explain what I have in mind:

A common image of "we, the people" is still rooted in the New England Town Meeting. To what extent do we want to reinvent this image for the 21st century? How might information technology help us accomplish this goal? For example, could we reshape the badly polluted referendum from adversarial sound bite jousting into a more collaborative problem solving process?

1:16) 02-MAY-2001 13:43 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Don, Welcome to the forum. Where is Mt. Desert, ME?

I confess I used to be skeptical of the notion that we could use technology to revive a more intimate, collaborative form of political life; now, I'm more optimistic.

When I first heard the idea, it sounded like one of many utopian ideals projected onto the Internet in the early 1990s; but it was Brown and Duguid's Social Life of Information that really made the compelling case for me. (Since I keep mentioning Brown and Duguid, I should alert readers to a Web site about the book; at URL is http://www.slofi.com. Also, at the risk of self-promotion, my review of it is available at http://www.stanford.edu/~apang/personal/slofi.html.) One of the book's main arguments is that we make a major, two-mark mistake in the information age. First, we believe that complex human activities are fundamentally a kind of information processing; and second, we assume that those activities can be comfortably fit into beige boxes running Windows. This is not to argue that efficiencies can't be achieved through computerization, or networking doesn't make distance learning and far-flung group collaboration possible. But it is to say that we tend to assume that ALL educational activities can be fit into a browser, that all the communication that happens in a face-to-face meeting can be transferred into instant messages and that skill can be downloaded into databases of best practices.

In fact, all these activities are far more complex than the information-processing model would have us believe. Education is much more than the communication of information; management is more than decision-making based on data inputs; important skills often elude description or reduction to formula; even apparently mechanical work - like copier repair - depends more on judgment and experience than we realize. These activities aren't defined by formal rules, but by culture and tactical knowledge. It's not a matter just of ‘knowing about’, but of ‘knowing how’. (The real tragedy comes when no one recognizes the loss until it's too late to correct it - as when libraries microfilmed books and newspapers and threw away the originals, only to find that the microfilms failed to capture the color of early newspapers, were often badly-produced and decayed to the point of illegibility after a few years.)

Likewise, political life is one of those things that may look primarily like a form of communication, and indeed might benefit from the cooling effect that a little distance and digital rationality would provide; but there'd be a lot that would be lost in the shift from real to virtual political activity. But on the other hand, there's a rich history of information - or communications - technologies (broadly defined) working with democracy. Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada's A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present has some very interesting material about the role the Founders imagined America's information infrastructure - its newspaper market, postal system, etc. - would play in improving democracy. For the founders, a rich and accessible communications infrastructure would make for better-informed citizens and promote the unity of the nation. Hence, the heavy subsidies on newspaper exchanges, which made it possible for editors in Boston to get free copies of papers from Philadelphia and Richmond, and to reprint from them shamelessly. Intellectual property took a hit, but the people became better informed, and indeed, the experience of sharing common news helped make people become "The People".

Newspapers and mail are parts of an information infrastructure that we don’t even notice but which continues to be important to and influential in our national life. They raise the question: what kinds of activities can we reasonably expect to do as well or better online? Even if all of political life couldn't go online, what parts of it would be enhanced or augmented (to use the favorite term of local hero Doug Engelbart)? Perhaps the town meeting model would work well for local government, even if it might be unwieldy at the national level?

This is, of course, a question that we can ask of all kinds of organizational activities, including management and leadership.

1:17) 02-MAY-2001 15:06 Donald Straus

Alex, I quite agree with all your warnings not to over-rate the role of technical communications. Augmenting was the correct word when Doug first invented it. Today, facilitated problem solving is more up to date.

1:19) 03-MAY-2001 11:48 Richard Farson

When I talk to information technology specialists in organizations, they are always trying to figure out ways to serve top management, such as how to get the CEOs to use computers, and how to prepare data that might help with their decision-making. I think that they fail to understand that top leaders typically don't want ‘information’, that is, they don't want it until it has been massaged. To offer them access to inventory or personnel records or any other huge databases is not appealing. They want interpretations of information, opinions, advice, experience, stories and wisdom. That's why, when choosing between databases and each other, top executives will always choose each other. Now, email has helped to give them a new kind of access to each other and increasingly it is being used. But, email is a primitive communication device compared to what is already available in conferencing technology, let alone what could be available if the leaders were to become involved with the technologists and other researchers in trying to figure out how information technology could serve their strategic interests.

Anyone know where that's happening?

1:20) 03-MAY-2001 20:42 Mary Boone

Alex, I like to call myself a technology pragmatist. I believe that CEOs are correct in avoiding the personal use of computers until they understand the connection between what they do and what computers can do. It used to drive me crazy when people would put executives through ‘computer boot camp’ and teach them things like operating systems. It was such a colossal waste of time!

Instead, it's my belief that we need to look at what we're trying to accomplish and then select the right technology, the right building, etc. to match the objective we have. It sounds simple, but most IT departments have been working on a technology-driven model for years.

Richard is right; executives want access to the minds of their colleagues, and it is the collaborative tools (both technical and non-technical) that can be of most value to them personally. It was quite an uphill battle in 1990 to convince people of this when I wrote Leadership and the Computer. All anyone wanted to talk about was databases, and I was talking about things like computer conferencing, etc.

I'd like to set forth an idea I have about leaders, decision-making and management. In the past few years, management and popular literature seem to be fixated on ‘top executives’ - CEOs, etc. And in my last book, I myself focused on CEOs. But in this new book, I intentionally used the word ‘management’ and, while I included a chapter on top executives, I wanted to make the point that in an increasingly chaotic and fast paced environment, we need whole systems of people working interactively to handle the variety generated by the system instead of simply relying on the ‘brain of the firm’ as Beer would call it. Therefore decision making has to happen at all levels, strategy has to be generated at all levels and technologically-assisted collaboration is appropriate at all levels.

If this is so, then communication and collaboration become more important than ever (and incidentally I use a much broader definition than most people of communication). Therefore, information tools, use of space, large group approaches, storytelling, etc. become more and more important to our ability to cope with the complexity that, of course, we ourselves generated.

Don, Hi! In my opinion, Engelbart's term ‘augment’ really isn't out of date. Now, we're capable of augmenting the intellect of whole systems of people (of course Doug was doing the same thing via Arpanet with some slightly different tools).

Hope this isn't too long a post. I'll pass the talking stick and sit back down now.

1:21) 04-MAY-2001 16:34 Richard Farson

It's like old times for me to see Mary and Don online. What a pleasure. I won't take the time of this conference to reminisce, but I do want you to know how glad I am that you are with us. Don, I hope that you pursue the line of thinking you were taking in your initial comment. Too often I think that we regard IT only in corporate or institutional terms, but it is my hope that we can mobilize the top leadership in the ILF to deliberate on, and suggest policies relating to, the broader strategic social and political applications of IT as well.

1:22) 05-MAY-2001 14:26 Douglas Strain

Good to meet you, Alex and Larry, and a special hello to my old friends Dick, Mary and Don from earlier days at WBSI. I think Mary Boone is right on in indicating that we have had interactive technologies around for many years but haven't had interactive ‘attitudes’ on the part of ‘top’ else why would we label them as ‘top’? Going back 50 years to the group dynamics of Carl Rogers, the early days of WBSI and the Ojai Conferences where I first met Dick, there were very few CEOs. Conferences like that were where you sent the ‘troops’ in the hope that they would learn how to work better together under the ‘direction’ of the CEO. So as I see it, Alex, IT from the typical CEOs viewpoint is not about information but about loss of ‘control’ and how can a ‘good’ CEO ‘run’ a company without ‘control’?

Hi, Don, it is really good to hear your ‘voice’ again! Yachats, Oregon, where I now live, is even smaller than Mt. Desert. Therefore, we can elect a Mayor who is a retired professor of Philosophy and have the luxury of having really constructive town meetings. Not so in nearby Salem, where our State Senators have to be in ‘control’.

That is enough out of me for the day. It is good to be back ‘home’.

1:23) 06-MAY-2001 13:16 Larry Solomon

Hi, Doug. It’s good to have you joining us. Maybe it would be helpful to distinguish between ‘managing’ and ‘leading’. We know what managers do: plan, organize, implement and control. But what do leaders do? And how does, or can, IT contribute to that?

1:24) 06-MAY-2001 14:11 Donald Straus

As a bold intervention, let me try a response to Larry's question with equal economy of words. A leader knows the solution to complex issues and leads the troops along the path already selected by him/her. A manager (21st Century definition) first seeks a definition of the issue and engages the troops in a collaborative search for it as a first step along the path to a solution.

1:26) 06-MAY-2001 20:43 Mary Boone

Amen, Don Straus! Thanks for the 21st Century definition of a manager. When I talk about ‘interactive management’ that's exactly what I mean. You can't imagine the pushback I've been getting since the book came out about the difference between ‘managers’ and ‘leaders’. I think it's related to the whole loss of control thing that Doug mentioned earlier. A lot of people are having trouble with my chapter on ‘sharing power’, and lots of people love my chapter called "Get Over Yourself". Interesting paradox, no?

1:27) 06-MAY-2001 22:27 Raymond Alden

It’s kind of like a reunion, isn't it? Hello, dear friends from away back! I've been downloading and then waiting for a chance to read and catch up. I have success, finally, if momentarily.

Alex, your interest in IT history reminds me of an experience about 20 years ago at Harvard. I sat in on a presentation of a grad student doing a piece on the way IT (she didn't call it that) influenced business organization. Her particular pitch was the ‘vertical file’, which she compared to carbon paper, gel copiers and even the paper clip, in its influence on the ability of management to ‘manage’ large distributed organizations.

At about the same time, I was impressed by a presentation in our corporate boardroom by ‘wall street types’ (I think it was a group from Salomon Bros, whose name I may have just misspelled). They introduced the concept of ‘information float’ - obvious, I guess, but new to me at the time. The value of the time between when a piece of information is known to someone and the time when it becomes known to the person who can act on it in important ways.

It led me, a bit later, to the idea that we can now make anything that is known in one place to be known in another place almost instantly, but we hadn't yet figured out how to use that fact in managing organizations.

Have we figured it out now?

1:28) 08-MAY-2001 12:45 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Raymond, I'll bet dollars to donuts that the graduate student was JoAnne Yates. Her dissertation later was published as Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, which has become a classic in the literature on the history of corporate IT (IT very broadly defined, once again).

1:29) 08-MAY-2001 13:49 Richard Farson

It is my impression that the control issue operates just the opposite of the way in which we are discussing it here. I believe control seems more of an issue to lower level managers and hardly an issue at all to top leaders. Is that because they can take their control for granted, or because, as I suspect, at the top the control issue is not paramount? I think it is crucial that we make this judgment because it would lead to very different decisions about what IT to supply to top leaders.

1:30) 08-MAY-2001 14:12 Raymond Alden

Yes, Alex, I recognize the name of JoAnne Yates. Her thesis registered with me because my first job after military service, in 1946, was in an environment where the antique corporate IT was a conspicuous limiting factor on current operations. But that's another story.

Dick, how are you using the term ‘control’ here? IT can be used for control, of course. It can also be used to enable responsiveness. Are you suggesting that the two are the same?

1:31) 08-MAY-2001 14:25 Richard Farson

Ray, the ability to instantly make things known in one place available in another is surely a mixed blessing. Isn't that what leads to information overload? Perhaps, when we are talking about strategic leadership, which is what top leadership has to be about, ‘information’ is not the word we should be using. I suppose what we should be talking about is a term more like ‘perspective’ or ‘wisdom’ or ‘ideas’.

1:32) 08-MAY-2001 18:04 Mary Boone

I want to return to a question Alex posed at the outset of this conference that I think relates to recent postings. He asked, how much do top executives really need to know about information technology? At the risk of seeming overly simplistic, I believe that in most cases, executives need to understand the functionality of a variety of information technologies, but they usually don't necessarily need to understand the mechanics.

In my mind, IT executives have a responsibility to describe IT in ways that make sense to executives. In general, it's usually a relatively straightforward process. For example, I've explained neural networks and expertise location software to executives in a few sentences.

Control issues often arise when you have an IT executive that's engaging in intentional obfuscation. Business leaders want to know what tools and technologies they have at their disposal to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently. In my mind, it's IT's job to do that matching process in ways that make sense. They need to be able to deconstruct business strategies and determine what technologies might be appropriate, describe those technologies to executives in functional terms, and then come to a joint determination if that is what is needed. Executives know what needs to be done, and IT people can tell them whether it's possible or not.

(One caveat to all I've said thus far: Things do get a little more complex when you talk about what policymakers need to know about technologies because policy decisions can be quite different from business decisions.)

To address Dick's question about wisdom versus information, I think if you are talking about tools for executives to use themselves, then yes, wisdom might be a better word. But the fact is, sometimes executives just want raw information like stock prices. It all depends on the executive and his or her objectives. If they want to use tools for leadership, then things like expertise location software, computer conferencing, email, teleconferencing, etc. are likely to be useful to them. And having a visceral experience of one or more technologies, used on a personal basis for real work, can provide a good foundation for understanding other technologies that the executive may need to know about but not need to use.

1:33) 08-MAY-2001 20:08 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

What Richard, Mary and Don point to is a trend in IT adoption that has held for at least the last century, but which - I think one can argue persuasively - is on the verge of becoming obsolete.

The traditional assumption among executives has been that computers are a bit like typewriters, calculators, accounting systems and other office machines. You definitely want your subordinates to know how to use them, but they're not necessary for higher-level decision-making, policy, etc. As Richard put it, leaders of organizations need "interpretations, opinions, advice, experience, stories [and] wisdom", rather lots of numbers; this has led them to prefer "access to the minds of their colleagues", as Mary put it. Maybe this has been a perfectly rational calculation. Information technologies (since the 1800s) have been designed to speed up or automate routine work (e.g. typewriters, payroll systems), collect and preserve large bodies of information (e.g. file cabinets, punch-card tabulators), or perform mathematical calculations (e.g. calculators, early computers) - i.e., to do for secretaries, clerks, middle managers, and the like, what steam power did for factory workers.

Richard and Mary's points also explain why communications or real-time information technologies (i.e. technologies that shorten Raymond Allen's ‘information float’) have been adopted more quickly than information-processing and management technologies over the last century. I think it's accurate to say, for example, that the stock ticker rose higher than the telegraph in Wall Street offices; and of course, the telephone is everywhere in an organization. This supports the idea that in the future, the important niche for IT at the senior managerial level is not going to be computing in the traditional senses - the manipulation and analysis of data, the preparation of documents, etc. - but rather communication.

I don't know of any efforts at developing communication or collaboration technologies specifically aimed at the needs or interests of senior managers, or even anyone doing research on this subject. But if Mary is right, the lines we've drawn between organizational levels, responsibility for policy and types of intellectual labor (i.e., the higher up the organization, the more global and abstract you become) will no longer work in the future, and it will become important for our technologies to be flexible enough to work in multiple ways or serve these various corporate subcultures.

1:34) 09-MAY-2001 09:33 Donald Straus

I am posing this question just for clarification: There have been two threads of the discussion of "Leadership and Technology" thus far: 1) use by business leaders and 2) use for citizen participation in government.

Am I correct that use by business is the one that interests most participants here and therefore should be the focus for our remarks? I support that - and will only suggest here that use for citizen participation might be the focus for a later discussion.

1:35) 09-MAY-2001 12:25 Richard Farson

Don, I hope that we can continue to include the focus on the public sector. But it isn't just citizen participation that is the issue. Here again we have leaders who are disconnected from IT. How can IT serve strategic leadership in the social/political area?

1:36) 09-MAY-2001 13:38 Larry Solomon

Several years ago, long before the sophisticated IT we have today, one of my professors in graduate school suggested that a large electronic billboard should be erected across from the capitol building in Washington, DC. That display board should be a map of the United States, and in each state should be displayed minute-to-minute poll results on a given issue that is before the public. It would be like a stock market ticker, reeling off the public's sentiment regarding policy issues currently under debate on the hill. If the poll results were at all accurate (and, of course that would be crucial), then Senators and Congressmen would have to be disciplined in their public assertions regarding "what the public wants/thinks", since the data would be there for all to see.

1:37) 10-MAY-2001 13:36 Donald Straus

Larry, I am concerned about placing more emphasis on "what the public wants/thinks" - which is really the product of opinion polls - before we first address the quality of education on the issues that the average citizen possesses. We need to move more toward collaborative problem solving procedures and away from adversarial sound bit pressures. A big topic, but in my mind one with an equally big priority!

1:38) 10-MAY-2001 13:58 Larry Solomon

What role can IT play in furthering collaborative problem solving? There is a professor at UC San Marcos who has a decision-making facility that is built upon a computer program that takes the individual responses to a given question, collates them, summarizes the outcome and suggests next steps in moving toward a consensus. Local organizations utilize the facility to further decision-making about issues that face their executive committees and work groups. I'm sure there are other applications that can be made of IT to further collaboration. Just posting the poorly educated opinions of various segments of the population on a billboard is, of course, not the final answer. Can IT be used to move collaboration toward a synergistic outcome; and avoid the pitfalls of ‘groupthink’ in the process?

1:39) 10-MAY-2001 18:13 Raymond Alden

We are feeling the effects of the proverbial ‘rolling present’ here, aren't we! There are at least three threads running in parallel.

1. There is a distinction being made about information vs. interpretation vs. wisdom, etc. that I think misses a point. When I spoke of having what is known in one place available immediately in another place, I did not have in mind that it would be a good thing for the CEO to know all the available information. I did have in mind that the CEO would want to understand that the capability was there and think about how to use that capability wisely, adapting his structure and style to take advantage of it - and, of course, to avoid information overload by himself and others. To do this, he would have to have some understanding, I think, of IT works - what it will do and what it won't do, or doesn't yet do.

2. The prospect of instantaneous accurate opinion poll displays available to the Congress scares the hell out of me!  I just came from the barber shop (and look better for it, even if I feel worse) where I listened to frightening exchanges of opinion by ‘ordinary folk’ who knew nothing at all of what they were talking about. I hope, and believe, that we have designed our system of government for better things than this.

1:40) 11-MAY-2001 14:33 Donald Straus

Larry, regarding your 1:38, what I ‘envision’ is a shift from confining citizens to a passive role that results in a bombardment of sound-bites into one in which they can partake in active education leading to participative decision making. In this vision, IT makes it possible to provide a seminar experience (which until recently was necessarily restricted to face-to-face gatherings) for many thousands of people. For example, we will soon (five to ten years?) have digital TV in most homes and the capability of the TV to be an expansion of what e-mail (like this group is experiencing) could do to duplicate traditional town meetings.

What is missing is the ability (and experience) of those who have developed FACILITATION (rather than CHAIRING) of meetings to enhance the decision-making potentials of groups. I see this as a promising, and still not widely accepted, field for experimentation.

I am not suggesting that such procedures should replace the role of legislators, but rather that it will replace the current role of citizens simply to be counted in polls.

1:41) 14-MAY-2001 09:04 Richard Farson

I'm told that there is a lot of collaboration software on the market, enabling work teams to join in non-geographic communities, and to accomplish even complex and creative work online, but I don't know the software myself. Perhaps others do. Does it work for top leadership in strategy building?

1:42) 15-MAY-2001 21:46 Mary Boone

Richard, there are a host of collaborative technologies out there (I listed and defined about 30 in my book). Have top leaders used them for strategy building? By and large, no they haven’t (I'm going on anecdotal evidence here). I did, however, gather some interesting anecdotes about top executives using technologies to augment face-to-face meetings with large groups. These were primarily polling instruments to get real-time feedback during a presentation.

Certainly, executives have used videoconferencing (and I consider that a collaborative technology) and they use audio conferencing all the time. Email too. I remember right after my last book came out 10 years ago, one of the executives I interviewed was rather miffed with me and said, "Why did you write about email? Executives will NEVER use email. They want databases". He called me 5 years later (in the early days of the web) to tell me he was dead wrong and could he take me to lunch as an apology!  Email use by top executives may not be ubiquitous, but it has certainly grown over the past 10 years. The point is that there are whole ranges of technologies that can serve as leadership tools, but we don't have enough technology generalists who can illustrate creative ways to use them for leadership.

Don, do you remember Newt Gingrich's reading list for Congress way back in 1995? He put Leadership and the Computer on the list because he really saw the need for leaders to understand technology. He heavily promoted the use of technology by citizens as a means of holding government accountable. Remember when he had all that Congressional stuff put online? I think if we want to use computers for citizen participation in government, that's more likely to happen after the leaders understand the value and capabilities of the technologies. Then maybe they'll be willing to allocate the funds to get citizens involved. Although, I have to say, I'd be hard pressed to suggest they invest in computers or other technologies until after they get better voting machines!

1:43) 16-MAY-2001 09:01 Donald Straus

Mary, see my 1:40 above regarding trying to meld the growing art/skills of facilitation with the upcoming digital TV via Public TV. I strongly believe that a high priority is to introduce collaborative decision making into the mix of our political process, but perhaps this is too academic an approach. I would love to get your view on this, and also that of Larry Grossman (former Chair of National Public TV). I think he once attended a WBSI meeting. Do you know him?

Incidentally, I wish you would put your e-mail address on the bios for this conference.

1:44) 18-MAY-2001 01:11 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Isn't it interesting how we've started using the message numbers as citations? It's a bit like Biblical chapter and verse. (John Locke, incidentally, strongly disliked the use of chapter and verse, on the grounds that it encouraged people to read the Bible as a set of separate - and separable - passages, rather than as a grand whole. But I don't think we have to worry too much about that here.) I wonder if the designers of Caucus intended them to be used this way.

My apologies for being such a hands-off host these last few days, not that the discussion has suffered from my absence. In the real world, my wife and I just took possession of a new house, and I've been pulling up carpet, dealing with hot and cold running contractors, and so on since the weekend. However, the illusion of control is starting to dawn.

I wonder if it would be useful at this point to split up the discussion into a couple parts: into, say, a thread on management and IT, and one on the use of IT in improving the democratic process? I can see some ways in which a comparison of the ways IT could be used in each realm could be valuable - especially given the underlying desire to make BOTH more participatory - but maybe we would get farther on each by treating them separately for a bit, then attempting a synthesis. Any preferences?

Don, one important issue to deal with in an online network devoted to political discourse and decision-making is that of reliability - not the kind of reliability of having the servers always up, but the kind that comes from transparency in the process. At Britannica, we experimented for a time with online opinion surveys (beloved by Marketing, reviled by the content side of the shop, which at the time I ran), and we often saw what you could call the Kamal Ataturk Effect: no matter the question (who was the most important politician of all time, the greatest baseball player, the winner of the 1952 Kentucky Derby), the answer was Kamal Ataturk. Clearly, in the great Chicago tradition, someone was voting early and often.

Credibility of process is likewise the great bugaboo of Web search engines (how do you know the results aren't weighted, through programmer's assumptions or bribery, to favor some sites?), Web shop bots (how do you know they've really selected the lowest price?), and any kind of online survey. We've recently had a lesson in how even something as simple as counting votes can become complicated and contingent when you deal with millions of them. Could you assure a potentially skeptical public that an online system you're offering them wouldn't be subject to the same kinds of potentially catastrophic uncertainties, or couldn't be hacked?

Mary, I wonder if you could say a bit more about the differences in traditional versus interactive managerial styles? Maybe a more focused example would help - say, contrast how each would develop a policy or respond to a crisis. I think Raymond Alden's point in 1:39 about the ultimate futility of parsing ‘information’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’, etc. is right on. Among other things, even if most of the time managers want more abstract distillations of big data sets, there are times when they want a specific piece of information - a stock price at the opening bell, the news from a foreign capital during a coup - as soon as possible, in as raw a form as possible.

1:45) 18-MAY-2001 09:38 Donald Straus

Alex, regarding the ‘difference’ between management and democratic-governance use of IT: One way of combining the two - at least at the start of our discussions - would be to consider the use of IT for problem-solving tasks rather than for surveys and polls of opinions. In fact, I believe that this was what you meant by focusing on participatory procedures.

Am I correct (and here I would rely on the views of Mary and Lisa and perhaps others) that much of the new research in business circles is focused on "participatory decision making". I believe there are many lessons learned in that research that could greatly enrich the less successful efforts of those concerned with ‘governance’. What I have in mind is: the use of facilitated rather than ‘chaired’ discussions, the value of collaborative efforts at understanding the problem, pertinent data and different goals before short-circuiting the decision process by the introduction of adversarial solutions.

These are basic (almost cultural) shifts in how we reach decisions that really should precede a consideration of IT as a means to put them into practice.

1:46) 18-MAY-2001 18:00 Richard Farson

I think most of the participants in this discussion know of Caucus's ability to allow the branching of discussions into separate items. If you like, we could start one or two new branches along the lines that Alex suggests. What do you think?

1:47) 18-MAY-2001 19:58 Raymond Alden

I think it would be a good idea to ‘branch’ but not necessarily right at this moment. Don's thoughts about collaborative decision-making are applicable to both branches and could well be addressed here rather than twice.

1:48) 24-MAY-2001 11:57 Walter Anderson

Hello. I'm coming in late, was not able to join the conference earlier because of a little technological glitch. So, I'm mindful of IT's shortcomings at the moment. I find this a fascinating discussion and plan to check out the material on the links Alex cited earlier. I'm interested in all dimensions of this subject, have just completed a book on global civilization which deals, of course, with many of the themes being discussed here. I kind of like the term "informatization of society", coined some years ago by a couple of French writers.

1:49) 24-MAY-2001 14:36 Richard Farson

Hi, Walt. Welcome. You have a lot to bring to this discussion, and I'm looking forward to your contributions.

I think we are seeing that what top leaders want each other more than information. What can IT do to foster that? What does it mean to have access to each other, and along what dimensions? How can advice, opinion, criticism, interpretation and encouragement be made systematically available? What more might leaders really want from each other? Can IT give them something they are not getting now in other ways? Does it perhaps get into less rational areas such as friendship? Does it cross emotional boundaries that IT usually doesn't address? Should it be organized on industry-wide rather than organization-wide basis? Or should it be organized between the private sector and the state?

1:50) 28-MAY-2001 15:11 Walter Anderson

I don't know much about what's going on in this field, but it seems obvious to me that what's necessary is not only the right technologies, but also the right kind of facilitation by people and organizations (such as WBSI) to make it easy for leaders to use the hardware in ways that are easy and productive for them.

1:51) 28-MAY-2001 15:37 Richard Farson

Good point, Walt. Having the software surely isn't sufficient. Some good collaborative software now exists but isn't used. Your point suggests that we need to design meta-organizations that could facilitate clusters of leaders using IT in new ways. The ILF is potentially one, as you point out. But there would have to be many others, working within and among organizations and with leaders in various combinations, to create a new atmosphere of acceptance of the technology and to inspire its use strategically.

1:52) 28-MAY-2001 17:32 Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby

For what I have been able to see at the Media Lab at MIT, the idea is that IT will evolve into something so ubiquitous that common people will be able to participate in decision-making processes that never before were considered. This is an application of IT rather than the management of it or the use by executives. The common person is the target. Get them all into the digital age. Participate. Vote. Influence processes. Dick Morris is trying to do that with this Vote.com. How successful? I do not know. But democratizing the management of nations via the digital age is certainly an obvious field of development.

1:53) 28-MAY-2001 18:52 Douglas Strain

Some of the recent conversation has caused me to ruminate about some of the paradoxes that Dick Farson brought out in his most interesting book Management of the Absurd. For example "There are no Leaders. There is only Leadership. In our complex society, leadership is less the property of the individual than the property of a group." Certainly, in a high tech company such as ESI, we soon found that consensual decision making was the only way to keep ‘reinventing’ ourselves so that we could remain in existence for the last 50 years, and during that time ‘leadership’ roved around the company almost like relay runners passing the baton.

Another of Dick’s non-intuitive insights is encapsulated in his chapter entitled "The Best Resource for the Solution of Any Problem Is the Person or Group that Presents the Problem". Again, there is a ‘group dynamics’ solution that would warm the cockles of Carl Rogers's heart and has proven to be a very rewarding management style for our company.

Another is from his book Listening is More Difficult that Talking. In the earlier incarnation of WBSI, I found ‘listening’ to the written words of others to make listening easier and more reflective that oral engagement, so I would chalk up a plus for computer mediated discussion. Further, the use of it for group dialog ‘levels the playing field’ so that all can be ‘heard’. A very useful tool for facilitating participative leadership!

Considering these insights about ‘group leadership’, I have great hope that our increasing technical competence in information technology will provide the tools for a different and more productive form of shared leadership.

1:55) 28-MAY-2001 23:14 Richard Farson

On that last point, Doug, you suggest another advantage to online communication. People often refer to missing the valuable communication of voice, body language, etc., but we seldom appreciate the fact that online communication reduces stereotyping, a process that determines much of our communication face-to-face. With this medium, we are not pigeon-holed as women, children, blacks, elderly, etc. That's got to be an important advantage in management, community building and human relationships in general. I remember when one of our staff members was having a vigorous real time intellectual discussion with a stranger online, which was interrupted when his correspondent said, "I've got to go. My mom has called me to dinner." He was twelve.

1:56) 28-MAY-2001 23:20 Raymond Alden

Two sides to that, Dick. Affinity that is caused by shared characteristics - including gender, age, race, etc. - does bring people together as well as separate them.

For purposes of stimulating leadership, I'm sure we can agree that the stereotypes work against us. But there are situations where they work for us, too, i.e. in community building - see another conference on that point.

1:57) 29-MAY-2001 00:09 Richard Farson

Touché, Ray. Actually, we seldom appreciate the value of stereotyping because we are made so aware of its evils. We are constantly reminded of the times when we unfairly judge someone because of our prejudice based upon stereotyping. But stereotyping is how we cope with the world, including, as you point out, choosing our associates. Stereotypes are actually a shorthand way of handling our highly complex encounters with others and are usually accurate. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are inaccurate, but they are unfair to those who do not fit, or do not intend to fit.

1:58) 29-MAY-2001 00:29 Harlan Cleveland

Hello. I'm even later than Walt, which often happens. As a veteran of the 1980s WBSI, I may carry - if briefly - a heavier load of delinquency guilt than most of you would.

(My delay isn't even excused by technological trouble. My wife had operations on both her feet a month ago, which has required me to serve as the ‘designated houseboy’. I'm glad to report that I have yet to burn either a dinner or myself. There is now light at the end of the tunnel; Lois will be walking, and now without pain, within a month or so.)

The dialogue (multilogue?) in this conference is relevant and interesting, but I find myself wondering if it wouldn't benefit from (a) a more global (or at least, a ‘less domestic US’) orientation; and (b) focusing more on the wider impacts and implications of "the informatization of society".

What I mean by (b) is that there are already a lot of top executives who have a rough idea how to ‘do e-mail’, but who may not have given much thought to what the spread of knowledge, enormously enhanced by modern information technologies, is doing to the prospects for: more fairness for many more people; ‘flatter’ and more participative organizations (the ‘twilight of hierarchy’ and all that); the erosion of ‘trade secrecy’ as a basis for business strategy; the recognition that ‘intellectual property’ is an oxymoron; the dwindling of geography (e.g., regionalism) as a viable principle of organization - in business, and prospectively in politics too; and so forth.

Having just collected a good deal of thinking on all this - in a book that won't be published until next year - I would be glad to discuss these and other "impacts and implications of information technology". But are such wider ramifications as these ‘within the pale’ of this conference?

1:59) 29-MAY-2001 16:19 Larry Solomon

Hello, Harlan. I'm Larry Solomon, Managing Director of the ILF. Welcome! I'm pleased to have you joining the forum. Your comments are stimulating and should generate much discussion.

1:60) 29-MAY-2001 19:56 Raymond Alden

Hi, Harlan. It's good to be with you again!

I hope that these wider ramifications are "within the pale" of this conference, and I look forward to hearing more about them.

What bothers me the most about leadership participation in networking is the extent to which the most elementary barriers are effective in keeping people out. Off and on for some twenty years now, I've been trying to introduce people to this sort of conferencing as a tool to efficient operations of almost any sort - and with a truly notable lack of success.

There is one situation in local government that makes a good illustration. The leader of the governing board laments the narrowness and shallowness of public interest and participation. I provided a conference site, like this one, and distributed instructions widely. That leader has yet to appear on the site - after two years - and she has a graduate degree in computer systems!

Clues welcome!

1:61) 30-MAY-2001 01:24 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Reading the latest issue of Fast Company (a magazine whose breathless, arch "let us help you keep from feeling guilty about your incredible success" has been deflated some in the last year - one of the few good things to come from the dot-come collapse - I came upon the following (available online at http://www.fastcompany.com/online/47/futurist.html):

"We live in a society where nobody is completely in charge of anything. Leaders are managers of complexity, but in a high-tech age, if all information comes from the top, it's probably ineffective and too late... Increased complexity requires that people from all levels of the organization have the freedom to think for themselves - not just obey orders. More than ever, executive leadership means that you have to consult the group and then point the way.

"If nobody is in charge, we have to update some fundamental thinking about leadership. Increasingly, the executive's task is to minimize and clearly define what everyone needs to agree on and to maximize individual choice and ingenuity. The best executives lead by constantly asking questions and then genuinely listening to the answers. In really lively organizations, executives not only delegate work but also control the incentive to imagine...

"A move toward more decentralized networks is good news for individual creativity and productivity, but to maximize employee morale, executive leaders will have to enjoy complexity and constant change. For some, it will seem a burden. But for those who really have what it takes to be CEO, the momentum will carry its own excitement." - in a short article on Harlan Cleveland. A couple brief paragraphs that sum up a significant amount of what we've been talking about. Welcome, Harlan.

1:62) 30-MAY-2001 02:53 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Harlan Cleveland's call for us to pay more attention to "the wider impacts and implications of 'the informatization of society'" (in 1:58) and Walter Anderson says (in 1:50) that "what's necessary is not only the right technologies but also the right kind of facilitation by people and organizations (such as WBSI) to make it easy for leaders to use the hardware in ways that are easy and productive for them," I think they're pointing at something significant: that thinking of technologies as JUST hardware and software misses what's really interesting about technologies. You have to pay attention to how they're used; what larger systems (technical, financial, organizational, political) they're part of; how users think about them (and how those uses might differ from what creators intended); and the language - the metaphors, exemplars, etc. - that structure attitudes towards them. In this scheme, you can think of just about anything as a technology. An accounting method can be a technology (especially if it's encoded in a spreadsheet), as can an organization.

I think everyone here agrees that the traditional model of management, developed for the kinds of large enterprises (e.g. GM, GE, IBM) that dominated the American economy through the 1960s or 1970s, is either hurtling towards obsolescence or has already gone over the edge into irrelevance. As Thomas P. Hughes, the elder statesman of the history of technology, would put it: we've moved from a world of modern systems (which emphasized hierarchy, control, and used mechanical metaphors) to a world of postmodern systems (which are decentralized, work through trade and influence, and can be described with organic metaphors). (This from his latest book, Rescuing Prometheus. The first chapter is available online at http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hughes-prometheus.html; a good review is at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/reviews/980920.20gartent.html.)

This older model of management - this set of practices, this way that managers understood their tasks and themselves - was built and supported through a specific set of institutions, in particular the corporation. It was ALSO supported by a set of communications technologies which served to regulate flows of information, define what was worth paying attention to and what wasn't, and generally help determine who had power and what was considered important. The memorandum, the monthly report, the annual report, modern accounting practices, even the file cabinet and business meeting - all these date from the late 1800s and early 1900s. (It's amazing to think that meetings have a history - it's like discovering that pajamas were invented in Paris on January 9, 1541.) The memorandum was constructed to provide a formal structure for documents, to provide a uniform standard for cross-divisional communication and to help managers sort out what was important to communicate from what wasn't (if you couldn't express it in a memo, it was unimportant).

Accounting practices offered a quantitative tool for understanding the health of an enterprise. Meetings were designed to communicate information from the top down, and to a lesser degree from the bottom up. Monthly reports were designed mainly for communicating upward. These tools were taught in business schools - whether evening schools or Harvard - and came to structure communication within large enterprises, for better or worse.

Now, what role is information technology (broadly defined) playing, and what role SHOULD it play, in supporting the evolving model of management - the kind that Richard, Harlan and everyone else sees dominating the business world today? (The ‘should’ is maybe where the substantive policy recommendations may come - as Larry Solomon reminded me a little while ago, there IS a destination here, no matter how engaging the journey!) Obviously, technologies that are useful for collaboration are valuable, inasmuch as they provide a platform for working across long spaces, asynchronously, and in an environment whose (at least initial) egalitarianism can provide an "important advantage in management, community building, human relationships in general" (as Richard put it in 1:55). But what else does the well-equipped, forward-looking company need to keep and eye on? In particular, what are some of the less-visible but important technologies that can serve such an organization - i.e., what should replace the memo and monthly report? I have my own ideas, but I'm not going to play my whole hand yet.

1:63) 30-MAY-2001 16:58 Richard Farson

What a lesson in contextualizing your last paragraphs have given us, Alex. It's so obvious when you point it out, and so embarrassing to think how often we have treated technology as somehow separable from its context.

If we were to establish some criteria, or basic orientation, for designing policies in this area, I would suggest that we go beyond an Aristotelian, rational model to one that embraces the coexistence of opposites. For example, the introduction of participative approaches to management does not end hierarchy - it may even strengthen it. Another example, top leaders tend to deal less with problems and more with predicaments. So management, as one goes up the ladder, is less problem solving (in a rational sense) and more coping with paradoxical dilemmas. Indeed, it can be argued that leadership is largely the management of dilemma. IT, however, is based on fairly rational models, I would think. Perhaps fuzzy logic will be more useful to us as we tackle this area.

1:64) 02-JUN-2001 18:48 Hallock Hoffman

I am logging in mainly to say hello to many old friends and acquaintances and to say how much I am appreciating this conference. I must also say that I have very little to contribute to it. As I try to think of why I have little to offer, I hack back to a conviction that developed the longer I worked at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and later as a founder of The Fielding Institute: the more I learned about how the institution worked, the less I seemed to know. Of course, my organizations were small, while this discussion seems to be mainly about large-scale organizations with layers of personnel. At Fielding, I was convinced that if the organization ever let the staff grow beyond 30, it would be impossible to continue to be what we were. (Since I retired, it has grown much larger and has 800 students instead of 460, and seems to be succeeding well.) What I was lacking was any sense that IT could make the central staff work, despite the fact that Fielding was an early invention of the on-line university; almost all our business with our students was conducted on line.

I still do not understand how wisdom can be truly exchanged without personal contact, although I know that information can be distributed very effectively without it.

I guess that obliges me to define wisdom: I only mean the combination of information with the depth of intellectual and emotional commitment that happens when people have complete personal exchanges.

Well, excuse the rambling. I'm reading your wise statements with intense interest.

1:65) 02-JUN-2001 20:49 Richard Farson

Your sly joke at the end of your last comment demonstrates that you really don't need convincing. But how about the Committees of Correspondence, The Federalist Papers and the letters of Robert and Elisabeth Barrett Browning? Much is exchanged in personal, face-to-face conversation but not much wisdom, I fear, except for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. That surely stands out as a place where wisdom was exchanged every day by design. Hallock, what do we have to learn from your experience in those magnificent dialogues there? Robert Hutchins' leadership? Group composition? Guest presenters? Ground rules? Martinis before lunch?

1:66) 03-JUN-2001 00:17 Harlan Cleveland

Thanks, Alex, for noticing that one-pager in FastCompany. I'm glad that you found it worth quoting. The interview on which it was based was long, but the resulting copy was so short it summed up only a fraction of what I tried to tell the interviewer. Nevertheless it seems to have twanged some chord that resonates: it has already produced a surprising number of e-mail messages in my ‘in-box’, taxing my capacity to answer each comment personally, which I think I ought to do.

1:67) 03-JUN-2001 00:59 Harlan Cleveland

Regarding Hallock Hoffman’s 1:64, I wonder whether your comment about "distance learning" doesn't draw too sharp a line between ‘face-to-face’ and computerized ‘distance’ contacts.

One of the big lessons I took away from Dick Farson's (WBSI's) 1980s experiment in computer teleconferencing was that "distance learning" is best combined with "face-to-face learning". They are not alternatives, and neither is an effective substitute for the other.

In a 1980s writing, I tried to sum up what I was learning this way:

"With the dwindling of distance, 'distance learning' has now become a major business in many parts of the world. Like all new fashions, it has its limits; computer-assisted communication is not a substitute for face-to-face contact. But, the converse is equally true. Once I get to know you pretty well, up close and personal, I really don't need to see your face every time we talk on the phone or exchange messages by e-mail. What's clear by now is that combining up-close and distance learning enhances the educational experience, beyond what is possible with either mode alone."

I have just put together a book of essays using some of my earlier writings, and I thought about whether the intervening years had changed the basis for the judgment in the quoted paragraph. I decided to go with the text as written. If there is a postmodern wisdom that should now be substituted for it, I'm all ears.

1:68) 03-JUN-2001 01:20 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I share Richard's skepticism, expressed in 1:65, that wisdom "happens when people have complete personal exchanges." Books have proved a great way to connect people who otherwise would never be able to communicate, in a way that has at least sometimes encouraged the emergence of wisdom. Classical Chinese scholars saw themselves as engaged in a dialogue with - even competing with - writers from previous centuries. (Or so I'm told; I don't know enough about Chinese scholarly practices to really know for myself. I'm probably a rich mine of glittering misinformation.)

Likewise, Machiavelli wrote eloquently about this imaginary exchange: "When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door, I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There, I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours, I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them."

And of course, the scene of ancient saints - Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine - and ordinary people having visitations or visions while reading is a stock part of Christian iconography. (It reaches its apex with the Annunciation: just try to find a representation of it in which Mary ISN'T reading, even though the Bible says nothing about what she's doing when Gabriel appears.)

Of course, the wisdom that comes from such reflection, and from the kinds of imaginary conversation that Machiavelli describes, may be somewhat different than what Hallock Hoffman had in mind. Still, I find it worth recalling that a medium that we often dismiss as passive, linear, and other Bad Things could be so powerful a tool - an augmenting technology, as Doug Engelbart would put it - for the making of at least this kind of wisdom.

1:69) 03-JUN-2001 02:54 Richard Farson

Leaders at the CEO level are exceptionally busy people. I have read studies indicating that they change tasks every 11 minutes, that they spend upwards of 90% (I think it was 99%)of their time in some form of conversation, in meetings, interviews, in the hallway, on the telephone, dictating, etc. Clearly they are dependent in their workday on getting whatever wisdom they might get from conversation. It remains a challenge as to how we might enhance the acquisition of wisdom through information technology. Obviously, one way is to improve access to the words of others. Another is to provide better access to the wisdom that they already have, but don't know they have. Or can their previous exercise of wisdom be banked, and then consulted, or automatically interjected? Curiously, as busy as they are, jumping from one task to another, if they are asked how many really important decisions they need to make every year, they will say "only two or three".

1:70) 12-JUN-2001 22:32 Donald Straus

Almost a week has gone by without ‘action’ in this forum, so I will venture a suggestion that harks back to my comments in 40, 43 and 45. I do this with some trepidation, since it would seem that most of our participants are primarily interested in IT for business, but perhaps what I will say is not too irrelevant.

I strongly believe that there is an urgent need for ‘researching’ the use of IT for citizen participation in governance. Not for the 1960's connotation of "power to the people", but for quite a different reason.

Many of the hard decisions ahead have to do with coming to grips with environmental/population impacts on our planet. And most of the strategies for reversing the damage that our consumption patterns are causing will demand difficult changes in our life styles.

I have found it useful in some teaching that I have done to suggest that these changes/choices demand that we THINK THE UNTHINKABLE IN ORDER TO AVOID THE UNTHINKABLE.

What I mean by that phrase is that we will not voluntarily or easily accept the higher costs of environmental protection, unless we first ‘internalize’ the unthinkable results if we do not accept those costs. Nor will we easily internalize such perceptions by simply listening to or reading the wisdom of others. Only through participating in deliberative discussion will we emotionally accept the unthinkable consequences of running out of water or global warming sufficiently to accept the ‘unthinkable’ sacrifices needed to mitigate such results.

One possible way to involve citizens in such deliberation might be to harness the skills of facilitated, participatory discussion with the new, computer-like technology of digital television (especially via Public Television). The timing is right for this, since digital TV for everyone is still some years away, but many of the Public TV stations are now thinking about how best to use this new technology.

Perhaps this is a challenging, useful and interesting route to travel for this forum.

Forgive this interruption. But there are not many forums that I know of where I would have the luxury of spilling my thoughts so freely as I have done above!

1:71) 13-JUN-2001 14:42 Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby

I am enjoying a lot the discussions. I have little to contribute at this point, since the wisdom about leadership is clearly more in your hands. I am just a devoted student and ardent follower.

1:72) 13-JUN-2001 15:32 Richard Farson

Now, Rodrigo, your modesty is becoming, but I know that you have been one of the major leaders in South America for many years. You have much to contribute to this discussion. Would you be willing to comment on the possible differences in the perception and use of information technology by the leaders of South America as compared with Europe and the US?

1:73) 14-JUN-2001 14:39 Richard Farson

Don, one of the learnings of psychologists is that how one asks a question will determine the perceived intelligence of the respondent. In political surveys, for example, if we ask people how they intend to vote on a particular proposition among many on a ballot, they will never have heard of it and appear stupid. If, on the other hand, we were to be able to simulate alternative futures, showing the trade-offs and consequences, they would choose wisely and appear intelligent. Too often the press and others treat people as if they are stupid but well informed, when it is the other way around. So, perhaps the new developments in IT could present people with alternative futures, much to our advantage as a society.

1:75) 14-JUN-2001 17:17 Donald Straus

Dick, I totally agree with your 1:73. I would also like your response, as a psychologist AND an environmentalist, with regard to the need for deeper understanding by the average citizen of the consequences of future environmental degradation before they will accept and support the current need to make some sacrifices to avoid the consequences of that degradation.

1:76) 14-JUN-2001 20:37 Richard Farson

Yes, I'm afraid that while there is much that can be accomplished through legislation, regulation and action at the upper levels, ultimately, on environmental matters, all of us have to cooperate, and that will require our shared understanding of the risks and benefits. I think that most will agree, for example, that the eventual solution to environmental degradation is likely to be in the area of conservation, even though we keep hoping for clean technology like solar or waste-free nuclear energy. But, conservation requires cooperation at all levels of society. It doesn't work if only a few of us do it, and the changes will be wrenching. For example, imagine how difficult it would be to ask people to give up eating meat or automobile travel or air conditioning. We might as well ask them to cut off their right arms. It may not be possible to dislodge people from such God-given rights, even when the dramatic scenarios are graphically presented, any more than we can get an adamant gun owner to give up his gun after hearing about a father coming home, wondering why things don't look quite right, getting his loaded gun, and surprised by his 12 year old daughter playfully jumping out of a closet to scare him, shoots her, and her dying words are, "I'm sorry, Daddy." I was at dinner the other night with such a gun owner, and I mentioned that people with loaded guns in their houses are 43 times as likely to shoot themselves or a loved one than they are an intruder. He said, "Not me!"  That said, I do think that when the situation is made more graphic, many people will change. Curiously, the psychological research shows that when you make things too scary, it becomes counter-productive. For example, if you want children to brush their teeth, it is better to talk about cavities than about blood or gum disease or cancer.

1:77) 18-JUN-2001 15:26 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I wish to extend my apologies for disappearing for an extended period. Like the East Coast blackout of 1965, several small things (like the end of the academic year, delivery guys, contractors and electricians who – respectively - can't count, can't read and can't tell time) overloaded an already burdened system.

While waiting for contractors and delinquent students, I've been reading Steven Johnson's forthcoming book Emergence, which makes the argument that emergent behavior is something that explains a great deal of the interesting behavior of cities, brains and various other complex entities. The essential idea is that systems can exhibit considerable intelligence that exceeds the capabilities of its individual members. Ant colonies, for example, are intelligent in a way that individual ants are not, and even have distinct - albeit very limited - personalities. In a similar manner, city neighborhoods - from industrial concentrations (think how many cities have areas called Jewelers' Row, Printers' Row, Bankers' Row) to the kinds of neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs in her work on cities - possess a kind of enculturated intelligence that isn't quite the sum of its individuals. What's fascinating about these things is that no one's in charge: these systems have lots of resilience and intelligence, and survive far longer than any single member.

This has been especially striking because of the resonances between this argument and some of the points that participants here have been making. It obviously overlaps with what most interests Donald Straus - the use of IT to help the body politic evolve, to become capable of dealing with the scale of contemporary problems without abandoning the principles of participation and democratic action. The collective local intelligence of the town hall could handle eighteenth and nineteenth-century issues, and still works for very local problems; but the problem is that fewer and fewer important problems are really local. This, I now suspect, is the flip side of the problem that is the principal concern of this forum. I've been asking what kinds of things leaders today need to make reasonable decisions. Perhaps the better way to frame the question is to ask: what kinds of technologies or organizational forms help institutions develop this kind of responsive intelligence? And what does that leave executives to do? Would it drive executive time between decisions up from 11 minutes to something else? When I first read that fact (see Richard's 1:69), I thought, ‘Gee, I wonder what kinds of devices could help manage that flow?’ But the end of the anecdote suggests that the real solution is to reduce the flow.

The other interesting reading that recently caught my eye was a couple pieces on Silicon Valley executives: Oracle's Ray Lane topped the executive salary list (at $250 million), while a new study indicates that CEO lifetimes are getting shorter, as company boards demand faster turnarounds, better response to crisis and greater profitability. Clearly, CEOs aren't obsolete yet, even in a region that prides itself on being the technological and entrepreneurial capital of - well, the world in the late 1990s and first several months of 2000, anyway.

1:78) 18-JUN-2001 15:31 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Richard's point about the relationship between conservation and cooperative action reminded me of something going on in the world of environmental regulation and policy. There's been a fair amount of interest in these circles in the use of commodities markets to achieve environmental goals. For those who are unfamiliar with it, the system works like this: a government issues a number of pollution credits to energy producers, etc., who can then ‘spend’ them (by polluting), or sell them to other companies or conservation groups who can just retire them. The government determines how many of such credits will be issued each year and can manipulate the supply. By issuing fewer credits each year, they reduce pollution levels.

Governments like it because it's cheaper to run such an exchange than it is to determine, and then enforce, a new set of regulations. It has two other virtues. First, it turns pollution into something that companies really have to PAY for, the same way they do electricity or other goods. (Traditionally, pollution was free; it was the air scrubbers, stringent disposal practices, etc. that cost you.) Second, it creates a system that possesses a measure of intelligence about the costs and benefits of pollution and the economical solutions. It doesn't force all companies in a sector to reduce NO2 emissions by X percent, for example, but allows companies to determine which economic goals - avoiding the cost of pollution or the cost of upgrading - is more attractive, even while pushing the entire system toward a certain goal.

This might not be quite the sort of example of cooperation that Richard had in mind, but still, it is a successful one.

1:79) 19-JUN-2001 01:43 Richard Farson

No, it's not like all of us driving smaller cars or becoming vegetarians, but it is a good example of the kind of action at the top that can make a difference. That's where our policy recommendations might be directed.

1:80) 19-JUN-2001 09:47 Raymond Alden

The problem is that fewer and fewer important problems are really local. I hope that this fact, undeniable as it may be, does not suggest that problems that are not "really local" need not be addressed locally.

I