Do you seriously believe something could appear to one group of people as an April Fool’s joke and another group resonates enthusiastically and concludes (to quote Mark), “any other conclusion is specious”? That there is nothing debate-worthy here? I am pretty egoistic, but even I don’t kid myself that I can pull a fast one on smart people that easily. So no, I am not merely pushing buttons or stupidly/perversely mis-framing things.

What makes it hard to drive popular discourses to more nuanced and rarefied places is only partly the time/patience required to effectively problematize something. The big reason is that popular definitions tend to be roughly right for a practically useful scope, and the marginal value of a refined set of concepts is low until you tease out very subtle examples.

Point being, I follow the advice of a friend of mine who said I was being too academic. Paraphrasing: “round off gray assertions to the nearest roughly true black or white one.” The reason this works in blogging is that the comments section is where you tease out the nuances if you need to.

Like we just did :)

My background involves conducting research in qualitative data analysis software (I’m married to an anthropologist). As a result, I still think that much of the debate here stems from an imprecise definition of culture. However, I now understand why (within your narrowly defined constraints) this particular theoretical lever is useful in addressing the issue of E2.0 adoption.

I look forward to reading your treatment of Geertz.

Venkat

Further: I agree with you completely about the need — on occasion — for some healthy conflict. Shying away from that is not something associated with my brand, in general. ;)

@Trib: agreed about both dinner and conversations. I dunno if I will make it to Boston this year either, but if I do, you (and Luis Suarez, Susan, Lee Bryant and a few others) will be a hard act to follow. :)

Off to read about Taylorism and thunderclouds…

While I do bound my argument to the 10K plus in its specifics (HR, petty bureaucrats and other story details), even smaller organizations have similar dynamics mutatis mutandis. The banishment/exile of culturally-alien DNA just happens a lot quicker. There is an awesome worked example at the end of Gareth Morgan’s “Images of Organization” in which the “founder” culture of a hypothetical small ad agency gets displaced by a newbie culture, resulting in a split. In his example, both are on the ’soft’ end of the spectrum, which should warn us NOT to just assume that there are 2. Arbitrary levels of splitting is possible. Apache license culture is different from GPL. Apple culture is different from Google.

Venkat

My work is mostly in small to medium (certainly less than 10K staff) organisations, where you arguably can address “culture” as something attributable to the entire group.

I’m now kicking myself even more that I can’t make the trip again this year. I had dinner or lunch with Mark almost every day and they were extremely stimulating times. Indeed, it was over our views on the failings of Taylorism that we came together. So, Venkat, yes, I look forward to your post on the markets and Taylorism. I think we’ll agree on that one!

Damn it all.

You’ve raised “Taylorism” a couple of times. Dunno if you’ve seen my piece about that: Allenism, Taylorism and the Day I rode the Thundercloud.

It is framed around GTD as the antithesis of Taylorism-inspired management philosophies.

Like this post, that one attracted quite a lot of commentary (though not as polarized). The same thing happened when I did my 2-part “social media vs. KM” posts on this site.

Somehow, on this topic, a lot of interesting debate seems to happen whenever I avoid the goody-two-shoes win-win framing, and go for the zero-sum jugular framing.Since I do try to avoid baiting-for-the-sake-of-traffic, this tells me there is genuinely some deadwood to be burned down here; a legitimate need for conflict and winner-take-all on some fronts, rather than compromise. “Culture change” most broadly, is a conflict-avoidance framing.

There are at least 5 things going on here: a) the periphery-victimhood/self-other discourse within the “management 2.0″ world b) the genuine structural issue of small scale vs. large scale operations (as well as s/w and non s/w industries) c) unwillingness to let pragmatism influence vision d) Difficulty of separating value debates (openness/collaboration/leaderlessness) from operational issues, since the two have the “medium is the message” connection and e) conflict avoidance, which is why it is “wild-eyed hippie” rather than “wild-eyed anarchist.”

Not that I am recommending anarchism and coup d’etats.

Definitely a whole lot to explore, and as a meta-comment, I agree partly with your idea that one part of that is design and synthesis (where my cloudworker series hopefully contributes). But the other part is more pitchfork-armed open debate where the niceties of consensus-seeking discourse don’t steer us away from asking tough questions.

One big provocative topic I’ve been dancing around is: can the financial mess be partly attributed to the failings of Taylorism? Is the “2.0 would have prevented this” counterfactual sound?

Venkat

But seriously, Venkat’s got it right. “Culture change”, in the sense you and Trib mean it, is only possible at a certain scale. Beyond that scale, what remains possible is changing sub-cultures — pockets of the larger organisation. Whether or not, and to what extent that has any effect at all on the larger organisation is entirely context dependent.

Worse than that, lots of people — either dumber or less honest than you or Trib — use the term in precisely the sense that Venakt starts off his post with. And those people piss me off, yes. That’s because they put the whole concept at risk — they’re selling snake oil, and their existence threatens to obscure the first serious alternative to the evils of Taylorism to emerge in my lifetime. You bet — that riles me up.

You know me — I’m the first to pick up a torch and a pitchfork and storm the bastions of E1.0. In the circles that I normally move in, *I* am the wild-eyed hippie. But increasingly, as the hype wave around the E2.0 buzzword accelerates, I find my efforts undermined by the snake oil sellers. Worse, as some of the early mover vendors get established, and begin to become addicted to the crack-cocaine of a steady revenue stream and rising share prices, *they* begin to mutate into snake oil sellers.

These are serious problems. They aren’t new (in nature), and old folk like me sigh in weary recognition of them. But by that same token, old folk like me also know what to do about them — and the tactics of counter-attack include calling a spade a spade.

“Culture change” is a meaningless, and counter-productive buzzword in the context of Really, Really Gigantic Enterprises ™.

And really, seriously — beyond a certain point, the debate is a waste of time, anyway. Those of us who really believe in this stuff have better things to do — we need keep building the infrastructure for the cloudworker economy, to take a page out of Venkat’s writings elsewhere. Something that is quite feasible by changing small pockets of Really, Really Gigantic Enterprises ™ — and exposing those changes to the cloud. But calling that “culture change” is an abuse of the English language — and ultimately, dishonest.