I’ve just started reading Stephen Denning’s book Radical Management, and I’m starting to see a series of things that I’ve been thinking about in the past few months join up, namely:
- to be truly motivated, people need things of a higher level than just financial “compensation”
- customer-, or consumer-, or client- centricity is at the heart of what seems to be happening in the world of “apps”
- and that organisations in the age we are in need to be able to have a clear focus on their client/customer/consumer to be able to survive
What Denning argues (from what I have read so far) is that there is a virtuous circle on offer here: companies that are customer-centric (and by that I mean truly, absolutely, totally besotted with the idea of delighting their customers) are ones that will tend to give employees meaningful existence because the link between any one person’s work and the end objective of the organisation is much clearer for the person to see – the net result is a set of products or services that delight the customer. Not only that, but that the principals of scientific management first proposed by the likes of Taylor and Ford in the beginnings of the last century almost willfully mitigate organisations from fulfilling on that potential.
It feels to me that the story of technological success in the coming years will be dominated by those organisations that are able to see that the technology is just an agent to help deliver great stuff to happy people, not those that think that technology is a means to an end in itself. That story starts with having technologist who get that distinction.
(And yes, I realise. I’ve just made a prediction. Treat it as you will…
mmitII 
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