“Excellence
is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we
have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted
rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a
habit.”
His explanation for the excellence achieved by ancient
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt (June 22, 1767 – April
8, 1835)
Described language as a
system which "makes infinite use
of finite means", meaning that an infinite number of sentences can
be created using a finite number of grammatical rules.
Perhaps the greatest
German philosopher of liberty, he wrote on the role of liberty in individual
development and in pursuit of excellence. As Prussian minister of education, he
oversaw the emergence of
Man’s progress is marked by development
of various forms of energy – animal, steam, electricity, hydrocarbons and
finally nuclear. The pursuit of
excellence is still driven by personnel energy. The heavy burden on personnel
makes excellence very rare though it is universally desired and understood. IT
is unable to drive the pursuit as unpredictability of teamwork demands
personnel energy. The processes and practices that develop the collective mind
are driven by knowledge free flow. My work creates the grammar for IT to assemble
and drive the infinite composite processes of collaboration on each event with
finite repeatable actions. Its compelling means for communication transform IT
into reliable intelligent energy for driving the consensus cum concerted action
that leads to excellence.
Uniting the intelligence of a group on
an issue is far superior than having a single person
invested with the intelligence working on the issue. An individual working on
an issue must run the risk of impairment in knowledge application due to ego,
facades, hubris, delusion, division, etc. There is also the problem of
stimulation of the intellect to a higher level that debate within the group can
achieve.
The seminal study of
excellent companies by Peters and Waterman (P&W), ‘In Search Of Excellence’
(T. Peters, R.Waterman, 1982), identifies the
determinants of excellence:
# |
7S
Variables |
Relation To Knowledge Work |
|
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. |
Shared Values Staff Style Skill Strategy System Structure |
The variables decide business performance. They may be looked
upon as constructs of the collective mind. The quality of the many-to-many
knowledge interactions they initiate reflects the maturity of the enterprise
as an organization. |
Table-1: The McKinsey 7S Framework for
excellence variables
Eight practices, e.g., close to the customer, hands-on value
driven, autonomy, bias for action, etc., distinguish the knowledge flows of
Table-1 for the excellent companies. They understand that an environment of
freedom, purpose, pride in values, winners at work, trust, efficiency, etc.,
elicits extraordinary application from ordinary humans by engaging the natural
passion of personnel for meaning, truth and beauty, viz., harmony with
experience and nature. The unrestrained
flow of intellect and insights in dealing with an issue, and their channeling drives all the practices. P&W promote 'Management By Walking About' (MBWA),
meeting rooms, experimentation and ad-hoc task forces for results, and suggest
a learning organization for a creative culture. Senge's
'The Fifth Discipline' (1999) defines the culture. It urges four disciplines
that emphasize individual and team learning for shared meaning, supplemented by
system thinking to see patterns and the truth. The disciplines foster sound
judgments and innovation for acquiring the power to change reality. Tools like
De Bono’s (1985) celebrated Six Hats tool for raising
the quality of thinking aid the disciplines.
The learning organization also depends on focused knowledge free flow
supported by access to enterprise wide experience.
It is clear that excellence
is a product of best practices common to all knowledge processes and that
focused free flow of knowledge progresses excellence. The seminal works do not
establish a reliable mechanism for distributed and changing team members to
develop open minds and have focused knowledge free flow.
A
reliable process to drive knowledge free flow in a chaotic and fast moving
environment, compounded by distributed and changing team members, is today held
to be impossible since knowledge resides in the head and its flows are
discretionary. The conventional wisdom has been articulated by Drucker in Managing For The
Future, (Drucker, 1991): “In making and moving things, capital and technology are factors of
production. In knowledge and service work they are tools of production……. In
knowledge and service work, partnership with the responsible worker is the only
way; nothing else will work at all.”
Appendix-1 lists some of the outstanding problems of uniting distributed
intelligence on an issue.
Bmail
The paper http://www.waykm.com/101_Of_Better_Administration_With_IT.htm introduces a means for the daily Business Communication that unites the
intelligence of a distributed group on an issue as needed by progressing
the focused free flow of knowledge. Dialogue is chosen as the method to bring
about the pooling of intelligence. The result is a whole greater than the sum
of its parts.
The References introduce some of the major ideas incorporated in Bmail:
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