Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Participant
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 it's right on 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 and 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 CEO's 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".

Enough out of me for the day. It is good to be back "home".

Participant
Hi, Doug; 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?

Participant
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.

Participant
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?

Participant
Kinda 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. Success, finally, if momentarily.

Alex, your interest in IT history reminds me of an experience about 20 years ago at Harvard, where 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 board room 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, 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?

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).

Participant
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.

Participant
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?

Previous Page        Next Page

top