Thanks for your comment

Hugh as usual gets it spot-on.

Considering that many do have to work for someone else for a living, there are ways of organising that are so much more effective – good for business and for people, than the controlling parent/child relationships that exist in many workplaces.

What frustrates me is McKinsey trotting out ’soft’ stuff platitudes, which (in-capital-letters-but-I-am-too-polite-to-do-that) we already know about. To be in any way useful, they might use their influence to ask hard questions.

Like since we already know all this, including what the barriers are, which businesses are currently adopting high performance + lean work principles. Who are they? What are their stories?

“Doesn’t matter how good my book on management is. Truth is, your people would rather not be working for you and your big, dumbass company.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/business/29unbox.html?hpw

As ever, you are kind. Thanks for commenting.

Your statement “The tools and the environment are now clearly at hand” is all that needs to be said.

I hope you are only temporarily dismayed by current shenanigans. I am feeling more like my old self and determined to get some action going.

Lloyd Davis wrote this on his latest blogpost:

“We’re just realising that we can do an awful lot for ourselves – both as individuals and members of corporations and organisations.”

This has always been my hope for social computing and have to date been disappointed. I was awake in the night thinking that social networking might be the new opium of the masses. Let them throw sheep! Let them entertain themselves into a stupour.

I know I am exaggerating and being unfair. I would love to know more about who is using these tools to bring people together for conversations and self-help, especially for first-line managers with responsibility for managing people, who have not been told how to do this and therefore make mistakes, and who get kicked from the top down and the bottom up. The unions? Are they doing it?

I would also like to see grass roots, a self-organised ‘business school of the internet’, where people can access all the stuff you and I know exists and where they collaborate to try to make sense of it in practice.

I shall continue to focus on working with senior executives responsible for articulating business policies and vision. I only have the bandwidth to focus on this work.

But I would love to be part of the sort of grass roots movement I mentioned earlier.

Hope your Sunday is restful

I have begun to think that the issues you point to may never change except for in the odd organization where the leaders take the issues seriously.

Here we find an article entitled “From Lean To Lasting: Making operational improvements stick” by focusing on the ’soft’ side of lean. Listen, if there was no ’soft’ side there would be no lean. Process control is only possible because of o…