Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Participant
The process of decision making is of great importance, and what I'm hearing about it troubles me a bit. Some executives tend toward quick decisions; some tend toward procrastination. And these tendencies are personal, independent of the IT process.

We say that good IT speeds up the decision-making process, when what we mean is that it MAY improve the quality of decisions, and in the context where getting good information is the limiting factor, it offers the opportunity to speed the decision process.

Those qualifications are critical!

Learning to USE the IT process for good purposes is important, of course. To a quick-decision-maker it should improve quality; to one who has been waiting for better information, it should improve speed; to a procrastinator it will make no difference at all; to a big-ego "decider" who didn't want the input anyway, it will make no difference at all.

I suspect what Mary is trying to tell us is that it's the people that matter. IT is just a tool, and some people won't learn to use a new tool.

"If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail."

Participant
Thanks, Mary and Ray, for your fascinating and provocative comments. You make me think about several questions: Do we know if IT actually speeds decision making by making more information available? Or do we even know that it makes decisions better? (Considerable psychological research suggests that new information is rejected after about the fourth wave of inconsistent evidence comes in. We can only change our minds so many times before we stop admitting new information.) Is Ray right, that personal style is so determining that it is not affected by technology? Does the interactive nature of the technology, and the ease with which information can spread, necessarily mean that the power and authority of the leader is diminished? Since authority is an expandable concept, can't it spread throughout an organization and at the same time increase the authority of the leader? I know that's paradoxical, but....well, you know me. Is leadership accurately characterized by the "leader as decision maker"? Doesn't leadership actually involve much more consulting, cooperating, smoothing, questioning, urging, inspiring, and community building, than deciding?

Mary, your concerns about this administration's secretive decision making are surely warranted, as evidenced by Cheney's refusal to divulge the operations of the group that developed the energy policy. Rumsfeld has the same mindset, I fear.

Ray, there is a danger in thinking that technology is just a tool. Technology, as Langdon Winner showed us years ago, is autonomous. It has a life of its own. We do not control it as much as we think we do. Indeed, to a great extent it controls us, working in invisible ways to shape our lives. Forget about IT, and think about automobiles, if you need evidence of how that works. IT is no longer a tool. It is an uncontrolled giant, influencing every aspect of our lives.

Participant
Don, an interesting piece on this morning's NY Times’ Op-Ed page by Harvard historian Alex Keyssar, details just how strongly our history as a nation has been characterized by keeping certain groups away from the election process, an effort that continues to this day. He criticizes the Carter-Ford recommendations on election reform for treating the last election as if it were troubled only by inadvertent and accidental problems. Reading his analysis, one realizes the mighty political resistance there would be to any effort to empower the entire electorate. Keyssar wrote "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States."

Participant
Dick: your 113 touches upon one of the little discussed and truly fundamental issues that will determine the future of our democratic processes: just what role do we wish to see for "we, the people". In posing this question, as I am prone to do these days, I find a deep ambivalence that is often not consciously recognized, and often denied, by most of us.

Logically, I am a strong believer in a more active role for "we, the people". I view with alarm the diminishing number who vote, and recall with pride how it was the voter, not the nabobs in Washington, who forced us out of the Vietnam War.

Emotionally, especially after riding the NYC subways or recalling the last election, I fear the consequences of leaving my country's future to we, the people rather than to "We, the ILF".

ILFing we, the people is surely an ILF target. :)?!

Participant
Re #112: I withdraw the "just". IT is many things besides being a tool. In the limited context of how it changes the style of a leader, short term, I think it is mainly a tool.

Re #114: In a discussion with another group over the last three days of travel, we touched upon "get out the vote" drives, pros and cons. I think we decided the "cons" win. I don't really WANT people to vote who don't read, think, and act at least somewhat independently.

Participant
Ray, you are not alone, of course, in wishing that the elections could be restricted to those literate, educated, thoughtful people among us. History is full of efforts to introduce such restrictions--property owners, literacy tests, poll taxes, women, blacks, children, etc. The courts have usually acted, at least eventually, to enfranchise those previously questioned groups, coming to the conclusion that democracy is served best by inclusion. When you think about it, literacy, education and thoughtfulness is stratified in elite groups, and those at the upper levels, even if there were literacy tests or college graduation requirements, would eventually restrict voting even further, because literacy is no guarantee of reading, and reading is no guarantee of education, etc. Coming from the University of Chicago, I look down on all other universities (W could never have graduated from Chicago) and therefore, if I could make the discrimination, I would only permit Chicago graduates to vote! And maybe only those from the College and the Humanities and Social Sciences--I'm afraid the business and medical schools don't really create thoughtful people! See how it works? Democracy protects us from that dangerous elitism.

Participant
Understood. I would not endorse ANY exclusion. But that doesn't mean that encouraging the uninterested potential voter to go to the polls is in society's best interest.

Participant
We don't give people the right to vote because they are responsible. We give them that right so that they will be responsible, because it gives them a sense of ownership. It is very much in our eventual interest to extend the vote to all members of our society, even to those who do not now have it.

Participant
Just to be sure we're all on the same page: You are speaking of "right to vote". I was speaking of "encouraging" voting and registration.

I think we are not in disagreement. I would like to see everyone vote who wants to vote (within most of the usual constraints as to age, place of residence, etc.).

Participant
I, too, would want to see everyone vote who wants to vote; and I would like to have every eligible voter want to vote. Is it possible to have an informed electorate, even those who are educationally challenged? Certainly this points the finger at the media and the communication process. How better to educate the voters than through the use of the information technology now at hand. But, if sound-bites, mud slinging, biased reporting by an oligarchically controlled press and other disastrous processes (such as the presidential-candidates "debates") are clogging up the channels of high fidelity communication, then what is the answer?

Participant
I'm checking in after several days of "participating" in organizations that assume you can't really participate unless you get on an airplane and come to a f-2-f meeting. The comments in the first part of August motivate me to "participate" this way, which is often more congenial

Even before I read her comment (1:110), I was delighted to see that Mary was commenting. The delight was enhanced when she obviously understood right away--which probably means intuitively--what I meant by pushing this phrase "Nobody in Charge."

There are four simple (I think) steps in my argument--which I'm not trying to copyright, since my ambition is that it should become the conventional wisdom. Step #1: Nobody's in charge. Step #2: Therefore everybody has a chance to be partly in charge. But (most important) Step 3: Most people will not, for one reason or another, reach for that brass ring. Therefore (Step #4), those who do will find they are "leaders."

No one is a leader in everything; we're all followers in most things. But where each of us decides to take the lead, the "how" of leadership is fundamentally different--not order-giving but suasion, "facilitating and coordinating" as Mary puts it, certainly requiring skills and attitudes that are more "horizontal" than the "vertical" norm of past centuries (even most of the 20th).

I think this shift has been underway for quite a long time, certainly the past few decades and in some ways even for centuries. It has been enhanced by, but not produced by, modern information technology (the "marriage of computers and telecommunications").

Mary mentions Alexander Haig's "I'm in charge here." My published comment at the time still seems apropos: "That [declaration] produced neither reassurance nor anger from the American people but nervous laughter, as in watching theater of the absurd. We the people know by instinct that in our pluralistic democracy no one is, can be, or is even supposed to be 'in control.' By constitutional design reinforced by the information-rich conditions of work, we live in a nobody-in-charge society." (The Knowledge Society, 1985, p .40)

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