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Ariella
11/29/2017 3:47:20 PM
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Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
< Sadly, some mediocre people have a way of rising to the top. > @Kishore too true! I've been in similar situations and also seen people get away with shamelessly copying my work and then having the company pretend they cared a great deal about it but not doing anything constructive on that front.
vnewman
11/29/2017 3:19:23 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
@elizabethv - At my firm, IT was actually called Information Services to underline the importance of customer service. One of the hardest “directives” were we given per our CIO is as members of the IS department we were also PR agents for the firm’s systems, which frankly, weren’t always very reliable, seamless, or intuitive. That meant we could never seem to sympathize or agree with the user when they were having problems. Sometimes I just wanted to say - you know what - you’re right, this is broken, doesn’t work well, doesn’t make sense, etc etc. And sometimes I did. And sometimes I got in trouble. But for me, being genuine with my users felt much better than pushing the corporate technological agenda.
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
@JohnBarnes: Agreeing with oneself has to be a delightful experience! I guess it is also about the composition of people. I was working in this cloud company as a contractor where one of the ladies pressed my case. She was thrilled with the samples I submitted enough to literally sing paeans to them in a meeting. On the other side, there was my boss who was hired after me, who was not pleased when I expressed my opinion that a term like "innovation gap" was not striking or appealing enough to attract attention. Something like "valley of death" would be more intuitive and striking. Later, when he had a chance to make a direct phone call to me, on the pretext that the company collaboration software was not working, he vented his spleen and ended my contract. Sadly, some mediocre people have a way of rising to the top.
JohnBarnes
11/29/2017 2:37:08 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
WHOOPS.
Kishore, I noticed I had a duplicated message (the joy of responding on a phone while out and about....), deleted one of them, and it was apparently the one on which your message (to which I was about to respond) depended. And that was actually the next message I was going to respond to!
So ... reconstructing, and I hope doing so fairly, I think you thought the difference between my experience in a couple of R&D shops and yours in industry might be because it was in industry, but I'm wondering if the actual difference might have been just that the nature of research and innovation has changed a lot. Both my experiences were in private industry "skunk works", i.e. lab-type places dedicated to trying to do things that hadn't been done before (so in that sense relatively more "academic") but doing it in a sort of contained bubble within a much larger, more staid company. (In fact at the first one, our managers were constantly struggling to avoid having inappropriate metrics and goals imposed on us; the second was a somewhat better defended space).
There's not nearly as much blue-sky invention, and a lot more recipe-engineering, in present technical advances. This probably means both a different kind of knowledge worker and a different kind of environment. Perhaps R&D culture just isn't quite as different from the rest of private industry as it used to be.
At the moment I'm doing a quite small pilot data science project in an industry that hasn't had much data science in it before, and the market research person I report to and the IT person I get support from are both great, so organizational clash is minimal. (And since I'm the only person actually right there doing the specific project, I find I'm quite reasonable and almost always agree with myself).
JohnBarnes
11/29/2017 2:19:41 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
vnewman,
I'm not sure which side of the argument is the "it" here, but the general idea as I understood it was that if you have everyone teleworking on a common project, they tend to be very conservative in their approach: they do what has almost always worked before, not least because they can count on everyone else to understand it. If you pile them into an office together, they're more likely to try more innovative things, supposedly because of less fear of being misunderstood and because of greater willingness to spend a while communicating about an idea before implementing it. (I can testify from personal experience that if you have a team scattered over remote locations, they are all acutely aware that by the time they see proposed ideas from each other, those ideas might already be implemented in draft, so rather than possibly make someone tear up their work, they let anything that isn't actively awful slide by).
So the "back to the office" movement a decade ago, anyway, was claiming gains in creativity and innovation. (I think those are claims that should always be regarded with very deep suspicion, anyway -- they're not meaningfully measurable most of the time and there are such things as tiny-but-very-important innovations and gigantic bogus changes of language that managment mistakes for innovations).
vnewman
11/29/2017 1:53:50 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
@JohnBarnes I don't remember that study, but do you mean it in a negative way where it is either a distraction or leads them to second-guess themselves?
afwriter
11/29/2017 1:25:31 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
This is such a double-edged sword that I'm sure we could all go back and forth about. Anyone who has ever worked in service or retail will tell you that they have had enough of people for a lifetime. Still, there are a lot of great points on the benefits of being in the same room. I personally limit my human interaction because I have lost a lot of hope in humanity, even though I am a natural extrovert. I guess my position would be that human interaction is important, but I'm not sure how effective forcing on people is.
Ariella
11/29/2017 8:59:12 AM
User Rank Author
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
@elizabethv I think my husband would find it the same way. He thought he should even go out after coming home because he says he can't concentrate with the noise of the household. I also don't think he'd like being in the house for so long and is used to the routine of going out to work 00 though his commute is insane in my opinion.
elizabethv
11/29/2017 8:55:04 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
@ms.akkineni - That is an excellent perspective to take on moving to more flexible working environments! Our country is already seriously suffering from the lack of human interaction we receive now that we've moved online for non-work-related aspects of life. Add work-related aspects and it's going to go to shreds. Recently, my community created a Meal Wagon for a local family whose son had a fairly serious surgery that was going to require a long recovery. I volunteered to bring a meal. When I arrived at the house, the door was open, and I could hear people talking inside the house. But there was a note on the door that said, "please just place the food in the cooler on the porch." So I did. And proceeded to have zero interaction with anyone I had made the food for. By the varying voices, it was easy to tell there were 3 or more people, inside the house at the time. But they wanted me to put the food on the porch. I suppose they could have been changing bandages, or do something that required multiple people. But to me it still seemed cold. And entirely too planned. Did they always change bandages when the daily meal was delivered? If you look at online selling communities, many people have gone to a "porch pickup." And I am sure we all do it in the name of convenience. But we also do it at the cost of human interaction.
elizabethv
11/29/2017 8:47:27 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: ...and as We Are Focused on "Digital Transformation"....
@Ariella - I think remote work only increases productivity for some. I personally, excel with remote work. I love it. I have no problem turning off distractions when I need to, including a whiny 3 year-old, and I can focus and get what I need to done. My husband, on the other hand, was just offered the ability to switch to working from home 4 days a week, and he declined the offer. Because even just the noise of our kids in the house would distract him from being productive. He almost goes stir crazy. Even if he tries to seclude himself from the rest of the house, he still manages to get distracted. So while I was ecstatic about the offer for him, he was not, and had turned it down before he even told me about it. C'Est la vie.
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