Work Ethos, Purpose and Productivity in the Enterprise

Editor's Notes

1. I’m going to talk about the past, present andfuture of work. What we have in place, what we are still improving, and in particular what is looming ahead of us yet to address.At its heart, this talk is about why we work and how we approach our work.
2. WHAT HAPPENED to the Work EthosWhat happened to the multi-disciplinary man of the Renaissance What happened to the inventors who would keep trying to work on a problem thousands of times over and again until they figure it out?What is behind that drive, that attitude that helped to turn a small fishing port into Modern-day Singapore?We know it as the drive, the passion, the commitment, that sense of purpose that helped people to achieve such greatness.Work Ethos - Characteristicsand Attitudes that a person considers of importance and merit to theirwork Work ethos is part of the secret to greatness. In Greek, ethikos and ethos are very different meanings, but unfortunately in English it has become one word. So I use the word EthosThis isn’t the same as ethics – which is used to describe how we make moral decisions. Those with a strong work ethic place a positive value on doing the job well. They consider it as having intrinsic value of its own.============ADD: Driving High performance…
3. As a concept, we accept the need for Learning, Skills and Expertise quite extensively. We have many approaches to them but the systems to develop, detect, and apply skill and learning have been in place for quite a while. In software, we have employee records, knowledge and expertise management systems. The recent past has exploded with social expertise management and sharing systems. We are still struggling with understanding tacit knowledge, compared to the solidity of explicit codifed knowledge, -- knowledge is growing at a rate faster than can be codified -- but most of us understand and accept that we need such systems for organizations to function.We continue to develop and evolve our understanding of expertise but it is a recognized and accepted part of the work environment in almost every organization today
4. Where we are at the present is our collective attempts to understand and support collaboration. Far more companies have skills databases and employee records out of sheer necessity, but collaboration is a newer aspect of organizations.Following technological innovation, collaboration has moved into the software realm and we now haveDigital Workplaces with social networks, mobile devices, digital business cards, collaborative spaces, and moreAccording the recent 2013 NetJMC survey, 97% of organizations observed are at least thinking about the Digital Workplace, And 33% have already begun implementing this. The momentum is there to make it part of the average organization. There is still much to do in this area. While we are getting the technologies in place, we know what we need are the cognitive frameworks, And how to guide people and communities to collaborate in this medium
5. McKinsey Quarterly recently published an article “Increasing the ‘meaning quotient’ of work” where the authors describe their analysis of a questionAsked to 5000 executives over a decade what creates peak productivity and flow of work, and their answers were consistently in three groupsClear understanding of objectives, Knowledge & Resources to get it donein other words, Learning and Skills masteryUnderstanding each other, Trust, Respect, Constructiveness, Humor, Getting Along, Collaborative Drive in other words, CollaborationMaking a difference, Every individual matters, Personally challenged or PurposeWhen they asked the executives where the bottlenecks to peak performance lies, more than 90% said is was in area of PurposeThis is also very similar to Daniel Pink’s findings on what motivates us: Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose
6. Stoos Network – www.stoosnetwork.orgSteve Denning, Daniel Pink + 1000s of participantsTapscott Group – www.dontapscott.comDon Tapscott + consultantsManagement Innovation Exchange - www.managementexchange.comGary Hamel, Polly Lebarre + 30,000 participantsInternational Society of Service Innovation Professionals - www.issip.orgUniversities worldwide, IBM, Cisco, HPService-Dominant Logic – www.sdlogic.netUniversities in USA & EuropeGlobal Drucker Forum – www.druckerforum.org
7. But we are still quite in a fog about PurposeI am not talking about company missions, organization goals, or business targets, but purpose first on a human and individual level,And how organizations guide, understand and deliver purpose. More than that, what creates that sense of purpose that generates the Work Ethos I spoke of earlier? that level of intensity, commitment, execution, and constant striving in the face of challenge. ============ADD: Productivity hit
8. Discover – ask people to describe 3-5 things that drive them and give them purpose, even things they can’t do yet or unrelated to their jobRefine – ask if their past/present working peers can affirm their passions Weigh – map readiness to work on their purpose and where it may fitHelp – Pair people of similar purpose as mentors or mentees to get them to readinessOffer – Make offers to move to a new role, or even offers to leave entirely
9. What about:-- sharing Interest Maps – what are people interested in , explicit and inferred-- GTD and Personal activities, activity groups – --
10. Hungarian Psychologist, Mihaly Csikzentsmihalyi pioneered the study of this state of mind and attitude. …when you become fully immersed, energized, and enjoying the process of the activityHe described this as being in a state of Flowintense and focused concentration on the present momentmerging of action and awarenessa loss of self-consciousness or worry about what people think of what you think or are doinga sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activitya distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is alteredexperience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experienceIn Zen philosophy, and in martial arts, you become the action, ultimately do not have to think about the steps needed to achieve it. Csikzenktsmihayli observed the same state of mind whether in athletic sports, art, or work activities