Andrew McAffee, MIT: How do we tap into everyone’s “slice of genius” in an organisation?

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From the course by University of London

Managing the Company of the Future

568 ratings

University of London

Managing the Company of the Future

568 ratings

The aim of the course is to provide you with a comprehensive framework for understanding both the traditional principles of management inside companies today as well as the alternative principles that are becoming increasingly important. It provides both theoretical and practical perspectives on the nature of management in today’s organisations.

From the lesson

Week 3

Welcome to Week 3 of 'Managing the Company of the Future'. We're almost at the halfway point of the course in terms of content now. This week, we'll learn about traditional and alternative forms of motivation and objective-setting and we'll find out how you can experiment with some of these new ideas in your own company.

3.1.1 Principles of motivation - Managing within (Part 1) 8:58

3.1.2 Principles of motivation - Managing within (Part 2) 5:38

3.1.3 Principles of motivation - Managing within (Part 3) 6:00

Andrew McAffee, MIT: How do we tap into everyone’s “slice of genius” in an organisation? 2:27

3.2.1 Moving from Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivation (Part 1) 4:40

3.2.2 Moving from Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivation (Part 2) 5:58

3.3.1 Principles of Objective Setting (Part 1) 5:49

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University: The problem with traditional measures in large organisations 2:16

3.3.2 Principles of Objective Setting (Part 2) 7:22

3.4 Moving from Linear Alignment to Obliquity 11:38

3.5.1 Putting the four dimensions together (Part 1) 5:24

3.5.2 Putting the four dimensions together (Part 2) 7:03

Week 3 summary7:32

Meet the Instructors

Julian Birkinshaw
Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
London Business School

Okay, so my colleague Linda Hill earlier today quoted Nelson Man,

Nelson Mandela, as saying that one of the things that a leader does in

an organization is find everyone's slice of genius and I love that phrase.

And I think right now in a lot of organizations we do a poor job of

tapping into people's slice of genius, in a couple different ways.

First of all, we assume we know where it is in advance basically at the time we

hire them and we don't revisit that over time.

And we assume that it’s got to be very close, closely related to their formal job

where they sit on the org chart, what they’re supposed to be doing for a living.

We assume that the innovators hang out in the RND functions.

We assume the creative people are there.

We assume the very fastidious people probably sit in accounting and

other related functions.

And if you’re a slice of genius, for

whatever reason, isn't very tightly coupled to where you sit on the org chart,

we don't really have a good way to tap into that.

And that's absolutely not the case on the web, and especially with Web 2.0.

Your status on the web is completely unrelated to where you sit on

any formal org chart, cause there isn't such a thing on the web.

Instead it's related to the abilities and the expertise and the knowledge that you

demonstrate over time, and that attracts links and tags and votes, and ratings,

and all these interesting mechanisms we have to let expertise emerge on the web.

So inside organizations today, expertise is assumed and

on the web expertise is emergent.

And my radical remedy is not to go, do away with assumed expertise, but

to complement it with emergent expertise.

And to make a very sincere effort to bring this web approach and this web energy, and

web 2.0 in particular inside the company, create what I call enterprise 2.0,

which is a technology environment where expertise is emergent.

And in addition to whatever your formal job description is,

the rest of your organization is aware of your slice of genius and

has a great way to access it and make use of it.

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