Ramblemuse Touch Points

The comments in my last entry on tightening funding and schedules, reminded me of several conversations I’ve had with colleagues regarding the need for creative slack to remain productive.

Tom DeMarco explored this in his book, “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency” I also came across a fairly long and comprehensive paper by Herold et al. (2006). What is the relationship between organizational slack and innovation? Journal of Managerial Issues.

Further back, Dr. Joseph Bordogna (NSF) gave a commencement address in 1997 on “Unexpected Turns, Unprecedented Opportunities”. Bordogna mentions the work of the noted Japanese management expert, Ikujiro Nonaka, who had just became UC Berkeley’s first ever “Professor of Knowledge”. He also quotes from an Economist article. I found that article in the 29 May 1997 issue under the title “Mr. Knowledge”. The two paragraphs quoted below hold high relevance (in their violation) for the conditions and “occurrences” at LLNL that I’ve recently described.

When set beside most modern American writers, Mr Nonaka’s thoughts about knowledge seem different in at least two ways. The first is his relative lack of interest in information technology. Many American companies equate “knowledge creation” with setting up computer databases. Mr Nonaka argues that much of a company’s knowledge bank has nothing to do with data, but is based on informal “on-the-job” knowledge—everything from the name of a customer’s secretary to the best way to deal with a truculent supplier. Many of these tidbits are stored in the brains of middle managers—exactly the people whom re-engineering replaced with computers.

The second thing that makes Mr Nonaka stand out is his insistence that companies need plenty of slack to remain creative. Allow employees time to pursue hare-brained schemes—or just to sit around chatting—and you may come up with a market-changing idea, argues Mr Nonaka; force them to account for every minute of their day, and you will be stuck with routine products.