The People Are the Company

Processes don't do work, people do. Look closely at the inner workings of any company and you'll discover gaps between official work processes -- the "ideal" flows of tasks and procedures -- and the real-world practices behind how things actually get done. These gaps are not problems that need fixing; they're opportunities that deserve leveraging. The real genius of organizations is the informal, impromptu, often inspired ways that real people solve real problems in ways that formal processes can't anticipate. When you're competing on knowledge, the name of the game is improvisation, not standardization.

We're not arguing against business processes per se. The challenge is to keep them elegantly minimal -- to underprescribe formal procedures and create "elbow room" for local interpretations and innovations. It's a point that off-the-shelf reengineering misses: you can't build processes without the practices to implement them -- and the most effective practices grow from the grassroots.

Once again, tech reps help illustrate the point. In developing Eureka, PARC sent a researcher to travel with field technicians. When problems with copiers arose, the researcher asked to see the manuals the tech reps consulted. Early on, before they got comfortable with the PARC representative, the tech reps would pull out the "official" company manual -- clean, pristine, neatly organized. Over time, though, they started showing the researcher their "real" manual. It was the standard book -- but highlighted, dog-eared, filled with scribbles in the margins and annotated with notes and reminders.

Each tech rep was keeping two sets of books: the formal and the informal, the official and the improvised. But isn't that true for work in general? Each of us, in our own way, keeps two sets of books. And too often, what is unofficial remains invisible -- except perhaps to members of our own trusted community. In the Knowledge Era, what's invisible is often what's most valuable.

Learning is about work, work is about learning, and both are social. Two ideas shape how most companies approach learning and knowledge: (1) learning means individual mastery, and (2) everything that is knowable can be made explicit. The more you explore real work, the more you appreciate the power of a different kind of knowledge: tacit knowledge. With individuals, tacit knowledge means intuition, judgment, common sense -- the capacity to do something without necessarily being able to explain it. With groups, tacit knowledge exists in the distinct practices and relationships that emerge from working together over time -- the social fabric that connects communities of knowledge workers.

Recognizing the tacit and collective dimensions of work has big implications for learning. From this perspective, learning is less about absorbing information than it is about becoming part of a community. It is a social process built around informed participation: people need information to do their work, but it is only through working that they get the information they need.

Think about product designers. At National Semiconductor, a community of engineers who specialize in phase lock loops (PLLs), a critical technology in some of National's most important products, has begun to conduct joint reviews of new chip designs. Over the last 18 months, product groups from across the company have brought their PLL designs to this group (on a strictly "off-the-org-chart basis") to solicit its advice. The more reviews this group has done, the more effective it's become -- so much so that the PLL community has earned a companywide reputation for excellence.

But these engineers can't simply publish their "rules" and teach the rest of National how to do design reviews. They can't create a library of PLL designs and urge the rest of National to use them. The practice and knowledge is embedded in the community that created it. The only way to learn the practice is to become a member. The best way to access the knowledge is to interact with the community.

Organizations are webs of participation. Change the patterns of participation, and you change the organization. At the core of the 21st century company is the question of participation. At the heart of participation is the mind and spirit of the knowledge worker. Put simply, you cannot compel enthusiasm and commitment from knowledge workers. Only workers who choose to opt in -- who voluntarily make a commitment to their colleagues -- can create a winning company. When a company acknowledges the power of community, and adopts elegantly minimal processes that allow communities to emerge, it is taking a giant step toward the 21st century.

At Xerox, for example, the goal of developing reusable software code seemed unattainable -- until a group of young engineers, working outside official channels, organized themselves under the banner of the Toolkit Working Group. These engineers weren't an official task force. They were an informal band of colleagues held together by friendships and loyalties forged during their intense collaboration on writing software for the company's 5090 copier line.

When the 5090 hit the market, it was time for this group to disband and work on new products, which meant reinventing much of the code they had already written. But they had a different agenda -- and decided to act on it. Beginning with virtually no official sanction, and while still meeting new product obligations, the group pursued its reusable software vision -- and managed to do in three years what official task forces and project teams hadn't done in five.