Hey Paula, Thanks for visiting and commenting my post!

Thank you for your kind comment on both Jon and myself. Jon and I met in Paris recently after digital conversations. We have similar views on many topics to a point that we entered the friendship zone

I agree with you on many things here. We don’t use the same words, but we are on similar lines. I just cannot cope with your vision of Management and I think this deserves a post of its own. You write:

“Management is the antithesis of creativity, serendipity, and adaptive. That’s why 2.0 efforts are so foreign — they’re too squishy to relate and seem anti-management: they are.”

I perfectly understand why you write this, but I cannot agree with you on that. For me management is how you manage people to have things done efficiently. A lot of people would agree to this definition. Where things differ is how this is being implemented. For me this calls for an ability to listen and lead as well as an ability to implement efficient processes in order to create wealth (profit for private, social return for public). It is pretty demanding - it’s not about collecting more money and have its things by others - and not everyone has the same goal. This is what you call management. This is what I call “Lazy Management” and I am fighting against it as much as I can, online and offline.

It is lazy Management because:

1 - Managers implement or follow processes routinely; they don’t question them. As a result, they take recipes for methods. Ross says in substance that with Enterprise 2.0 enterprises will be less similar. Of course because at that stage there is no one “best” way for it so that methods are not confused with recipes, so that you don’t end up with one-size fits all organizations.
The best example (with the worst results) is Taylorism. If you seriously read Taylor and not stick with common-sense bul@%$t, you’ll find out that the approach is smart and still makes sense today. The search for inefficiency, the attention to details, the focus on measurement (for transparency, objectivity and performance tracking), the introduction of a direct employee-employer contractual relation (the basis for individual appraisal and modern recruitment) and the systematic and holistic approach to process and operations is a useful approach to tackle issues and have people execute more and better. This is exactly what we are looking for. Now, what happened is that business owners took the way of doing things (recipe) but not the spirit. They sticked to their vision of the world, by systematically overlooking what was not meeting their commonsense. Take for instance this idea of employees are uneducated and soldiering. In Taylor’s America and with his early position in the organization this was a fact, not a judgment. Directors made this type of judgment (very similar to the one nobility has over people). The result is that while Taylor was trying to systematize the good work of employees (we call this best practices nowadays) and built a rewarding system that help people live better and why not climb the scales of the company too, Business owners understood that employee has to fit to a position (annihilating at the same time any humanity in people), implemented indecent cadences and tweaked the incentive system to pay less.
And as usual, instead of condemning people with wrong sense-making and disastrous decision-making, we throw away the method itself and the rest of people endure. Rings a bell these days of Word Financial Crisis, no?

2 - Managers confuse themselves with the position they have, which tends to create authoritarian relations and is a basis of conflicts. The reason for this confusion is that climbing up the scales or starting high in the hierarchy keep you away of day-to-day operations and have you miss the real sense of business. They consequently have to develop strong monitoring systems, that divert a lot of resources from revenue generating business. But capturing financial data dries up knowledge and makes you irrelevant. You need more, but lazy managers don’t go for insights and stick to figures. Lazy managers consequently seat on legality rather than legitimacy. This undermines leadership (where is the vision?) and opens door to a lot of disturbances.

As a result and back to the topic, YES “Enterprise 2.0″ also is a management consulting thing and people like Luis Alberola, Ross Dawson, Jon Husband, Dominique Turq and likes are most welcome to play the ball! Their input is very valuable. However there is still some road ahead to build “Enterprise 2.0 consulting” actors.