Self-Governing Online Worker Communities

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Oil-services company Schlumberger is doing something unusual for a big corporation: fostering the creation of online groups of employees with similar interests and allowing these communities to govern themselves and choose their leaders. Wall Street Journal columnist David Wessel talks to John Afilaka, a geological engineer who was elected to lead the company's rock-characterization community. 'Mr. Afilaka campaigned to increase technical professionals' influence on top management's research-and-development priorities and to forge better links among various communities. He claims progress on both.' Richard McDermott, a consultant, tells Wessel such a management structure is unusual: 'People...see it as a real democratic institution in what is otherwise an authoritarian institution, a business.' Wessel notes: 'Other companies, apparently, are scared of that.'"

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Voting Your Shares

[Doc Ruby]

Professionals have organized democratic professional organizations for centuries. In fact, the high rate of "society" membership among American colonists was one way they were prepared to design the longest-lasting democratic republic to date: the USA. Americans have continued to be "joiners".

What is changing is that these organizations are now possible, with low management overhead, within large organizations, due to increasingly cheap and complex comms tech, that's also easy to use. Scientific and engineering professionals are among the most likely to join professional organizations that elect leaders, and to use these techs. And our jobs are so complicated that they need to leverage our social skills to manage productivity. While those skills are increasingly unavailable to "management specialists" who therefore aren't really scientists or engineers. So the "privatization" of these communities is inevitable.

Of course, the Wall Street Journal won't see it that way. They instead see it as the "democritization of the workplace". Which it is, also. But that's because democracy is the best way for complex groups of productive people to specialize and work together. The WSJ inability to see it that way, to see it as a source of fear for other companies, says more about their attitude towards democracy than about their understanding of professional working structures.

Check out Semco

[Anonymous Coward]

A Brazilian company that has been democratic for 20 years, and a book review (with excerpt).

Nice try...

[moviepig.com]

Turnout in early elections was an impressive 60%, but it since has fallen to 30%.

Golly, it does sound like a real democracy...

The puzzle for large corporations employing highly skilled professionals is how to tap and maintain entrepreneurial vigor. I don't see clearly whether Schlumberger has pulled this off, but kudos for a creative try.

Communities of Practice at Novell

[Azul]

Novell has very similar communities. You can read a little bit about them in this article of Novell's Connection Magazine (and, as you can see, this article is about 1 1/2 years old):

From Architecture to Secure Identity Management (SIM), Analytics to exteNd, Novell employees are putting their heads together in Communities of Practice. At Novell, Communities are more than just a group of like-minded individuals talking shop. They provide a primary information source for members, while promoting networking and fostering a culture that values and encourages knowledge sharing and collaboration.

While our communities aren't entirely self-governing, this doesn't seem to matter much in practice. Participation in them is entirely optional. Being a co-leader of one of these communities, I can tell you Novell greatly recognizes their value...

This is not exactly a new idea, but

[zero0w]

Well, this self-governing community is not exactly a new idea. Peter Drucker actually advised General Motors to do ths same back in 1946, as recorded in his first Management book Concept of the Corporation.

General Motors didn't buy this idea and even thought it was some sort of usurpation and opportunist bet. Its CEO back then, Alfred Sloan, wrote a book in response to these suggestions and requests - My Years with General Motors.

Even though American companies missed the boat in forming better corporate governance by creating such self-governance communities, the Japanese picked up the idea. Of course they had a somewhat different goal to what it means to start a business, but in general this helped many Japanese companies to rise and shine at the level of where they are today - many world class manufacturers and industrialists.