Organizational development and quality of work life

What are important elements needed for organizational development and high quality of work life for employees?

• Strong leadership. Here is a link to a thought provoking article in the American Scholar on solitude and leadership.
  
• Shared collective purpose and goals
• Good management of "assholes" ( a term used by Dr. Sutton from Stanford)
  
• Prevention of "organizational silence"
  

Climate of silence

• Climate of silence is detrimental to organizations' ability to change and develop in the context of pluralism.

• Climate of silence also has destructive outcomes on employees:

1. Employees' feelings of not being valued
2. Employees' perceived lack of control
3. Employees' cognitive dissonance
   

• If you experience fear every day, it drags you down and you become cowardly.
• After my suggestions were ignored, the quality of my work was still there, but I wasn't.
• See the Figure from Morrison and Milliken's (2000) article below on the negative effects of organizational silence on organizational decision making, organizational change, employees' feelings, cognition, etc.

From Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World,
Morrison and Milliken, Academy of Management Review, 25( 4), pp. 706-725

Quotes of the day

"He lost his ability to think" said Superman

"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me ‘Superman’ did not exist…she thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming with enough power to save us", Geoffrey Canada

"The status quo can be changed, but it takes a lot of outrage and good examples", Bill Gates

From the documentary "Waiting for Superman"

Meaningful computing education

Recently, I read two articles, one on Singapore and its success as a country and the other on Google.org and its not so successful attempt to make an impact in philanthropy. I find both articles inspiring as I continue my search for "meaningful computing education". I believe meaningful computing education can be built on the guided leaning approach of "problem-solution-impact". Here are some ideas of how to implement this approach from Thomas Friedman's recent article in the New York Times:

• Teaching and learning needs to make connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.”, for example.

Here is another view of the problems that prevent Google.org, known as DotOrg, to achieve its bold objective of "ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems" as suggested by Larry Page, Google founder, in 2004.

• The New York Times article reported that after five years "DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks."
• For example, "it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments."
• What is the problem here? Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford, argued that Google has two different ideas about what DotOrg can do. One is that "DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find." And the other is that "DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information."
• Yet others attributed to the fact that Google used an engineering approach rather than a challenging problem approach makes it difficult for it to address important development problems. In other words, they are creating solutions and looking for problems instead of the other way around.
• For example, the idea of Google developed a system to track counterfeit drugs never got off the ground because it was proposed to build on top of SMS technology which did not excite Google engineers.
• Yet another evidence from previous DotOrg: "They never understood that technology is a means to an end, and that in the developing world, sometimes basic technology, like the collection and compilation of data, can have enormous impact."

All the evidence seems to point towards changing the way we teach computing to students.

Subtle ... but Significant

I learn a subtle but significant way to refer to people from the book "The Soloist".

Nathaniel, the main character in the book, is not a mentally ill musician but a musician with mental illness.

"It's a subtle but significant difference, recognizing the person before the condition."

Judgmental culture and new media technologies

The events surrounding what happened to Shirley Sharrod has taught us so many lessons about our actions in the world that anyone can write a so-called "news". Some of these lessons are written by the NYTimes Op-Ed contributor, Van Jones:

"The only solution is for Americans to adjust our culture over time to our new media technologies. The information system gives us more data than ever before, faster than ever before. But we don’t yet have the wisdom in place to help us deal with it."

"In time, we will. The worst of the partisans will get their comeuppance and become cautionary tales for others. Public leaders will learn to be more transparent. We will teach our children not to rush to judgment. Technology will evolve to better expose fakers."

"We have to understand that no one can be defined by a single photograph, open-mike gaffe or sound bite. Not even our greatest leaders could have survived if they had to be taken to task for every poorly conceived utterance or youthful demonstration of immature political views. When it comes to politics in the age of Facebook, the killer app to stop the “gotcha” bullies won’t be a technological one — it will be a wiser, more forgiving culture."

Delivering happiness: A Zappos' way

CBS News recently ran a story and a vdo interview of Tony Hsieh (Zappos' CEO). Here is the link to the article.

The bottom line is Zappos focuses on delivering happiness to customers, employees, and hopefully investors. Can they actually do that? Apparently so. I am an occasional Zappos' customer. I always had a pleasant experience with Zappos when I called their customer service. Zappos does not believe in outsourcing its call center. The call center is in Las Vegas. It does not have a script to talk to customers either. It also does not have time limit on customer calls.

The question is can every company follows this practice? Tony Hsieh thinks so. He has a book out this year. Here is the link to the book sold on amazon.com.