Management Conversations:


Developing A New Management Capability
Page 2



Knowledge Age: (Present-????)
The current combination of the Internet and massive computing power, the entry of two billion workers from China and India, and the movement of information and buying power to the consumer once again form a nexus that will change how businesses create value. Moreover, there is a sense that process has largely been exploited and it is time to work on the people side. Management needs to develop new capabilities to exploit the current nexus. These new capabilities will revolve around improving how organizations leverage knowledge and creativity. Since knowledge and creativity are social processes, the new capabilities will revolve around social interaction. From a social interaction standpoint, organizations can be looked at a network of context setting, coordinating, committing, and learning conversations. The primary capability management has to develop is to leverage conversation to improving the 'fidelity' of this network. The focus once again will be on cutting variation, improving quality, and cutting out waste. But this time the target will be improving the conversations in the organization. A few 'info-degrading' nodes can have undue influence - degrading the performance of the whole network. Management will have to figure out how to find out what conversations are critical; who should be involved in each conversation, how to make sure relevant information is available, and how to know reduce waste in the conversations.

This new management capability will take active effort and attention to intentionally shape the context setting, coordinating, committing and learning conversations needed for the performance of work. Productivity gains will occur though raising the throughput and quality of information flows while cutting out the waste of these conversations. We are on the brink of a new age. The new capability of managing conversations to improve the organizations ability to set shared context, coordinate, reliably commit and to learn and rapidly adapt to changes in the market are what is needed to meet the new challenges ahead.

Continue: Page | 1 | 2

# # #

David Hallowell is Managing Partner at Six Sigma Advantage, a consulting firm that applies Six Sigma to products, services and the technologies that drive them. For more informatin, please visit www.6siga.com.

Dennis Stevens leads Synaptus, a consulting firm that helps executives improve business performance by bridging the gap between strategy and performance. For more information, please visit www.synaptus.com.