Start talking, start thinking. Start writing, stop thinking...

Introduction. Introduction to what? I have an assignment to write; it's due in 11 days and it's just not happening. I'm stuffed to the gunnels with background reading. I have inklings, thoughts, and opinions just busting to come out, but whenever I start to try and write, they sidle off and hide in the corners. How rude! How unhelpful of them!

When I start talking though, well that's a different story. Up those ideas rush, a gaggle jumping up and down, clamouring to be the first. Pouring out. I pick up a pen, try to craft a story to contain them, create a little structure to frame them, and suddenly all I can hear is an absence of thoughts, a lucid stillness. Damn those pesky synapses!

Competition vs cooperation

Competitive advantage an example of trading based on the commonly cited outcome of Prisoner's Dilemma: screw your rivals before they screw you. Get better, faster access to resources so that you can grow at the expense of other organisations. Very much a win-lose scenario. How sustainable is this strategy in the long-term — should we believe Porter?

Look at 'sustainable cooperative advantage'; long-term, high trust relationships reduce the likelihood of defection. Many players, so tragedy of the commons = uncoordinated individual actions of multiple agents.

Cooperation... hailed, but actually not usually supported by espoused values. Told that collaboration is key, but the behaviours rewarded for demonstrate otherwise. Think Rousseau: acting inauthentic = self destruction [Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse]

Authoritarian management styles enourages self-interest?

Exploring an idea formed after reading Matt Ridley's The origins of virtue — "Heavy government makes people more selfish, not less." [p.263]. He argues that top heavy intrusive governance has lead to a breakdown in community spirit and a lowered sense of individual responsibility. I wonder whether this would also be true within organisations?

Does authoritarian management lead to less reciprocity and trust, and a tendency towards self-interested behaviours, e.g. do work, get paid, go home; nothing more, nothing less? A lack of social contracts [see first paper] would have an impact.

Are more cooperative [flat] organisations more akin to Ridley's examples of groups of cooperating individuals for the good of the group? Trust is essential...

Hayek's views
The central roles of the state [read organisation/management?] should be to maintain the rule of law [read focus?], with as little arbitrary intervention as possible.

I went back to school today!

I've just embarked on a two-year course in organisational development at Bristol Uni.

Talk about messing with your head, but today has been a real shock to the system. No one has ever introduced me to the concept of "critical thinking" and how to structure your thoughts and ideas in a way that has some hope of being understood by someone else. Me, I've always tended to just jump in, feet first, and hope for the best!

I think that today's the start of an interesting journey, and one which I want to record in some way. My blogging habits, so far, have been sporadic to say the least. I find it hard to understand why anyone else would want to read my random train of conciousness, but I'm almost tempted to start sharing this blog as I start exploring new concepts and ideas as part of my course. We'll see...

Moss Kanter: 10 rules for stifling innovation

Rosabeth Kanter goes into leading-edge corporations, learns from them and then serves up what she's learnt in nicely digestible messages for the rest of us...

10 rules for stifling innovation

1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it is new and because it is from below.
2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures.
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals.
4. Treat problems as a sign of failure.
5. Express your criticisms freely and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time.
6. Control everything carefully. Count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make sure that any request for information is fully justified and that it isn't distributed too freely (you don't want data to fall into the wrong hands).
8. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps people on their toes).
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off or move people around.
10. Never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

Can't help thinking that some people apply these rules to life generally, not just at work!