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Henrik MrtenssonBusiness Management Consultingwww.henrikmartensson.org

Why cities liveand companiesdie

The LESS!book project

The storybehind thepicture

Perspectives:

How to choosea contentmanagementsystem

This is a PDF version of Tempo!. An

interactive eBook version is

available via Apple's iBookstore at

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/

tempo!/id580506736?mt=11&uo=4

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i

2012 by Henrik Mrtensson

Articles and article illustrations are copyrighted by their authors ex-

cept where noted.

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EditorialBy Henrik Mrtensson

As a business strategist, I like it when one thing can serve

more than one purpose. The Tempo! newsletter does that:

First, this and the following three issues of the newsletter

supports the bookLESS!: Essays on Business Transformation.

Second, eBooks are the future of book publishing. An interac-

tive eBook is much better than a traditional book for learn-

ing. For a management book author, this is a fantastic oppor-

tunity. It is possible to integrate text,pictures, audio and

video to create management books that are actually usefulto readers!

The drawback is the learning curve. Producing an eBook is a

complex matter. There are a lot of things to learn, and a free

newsletter is a great way to start.

In this issue of Tempo! you will find two audio interviews:

Katherine Kirk, talks about how growing up among Australian

aborigines gave her experiences and perspectives she uses

in her work as a troubleshooter and project leader.

Herminia Dosal, the Mexican photographer, talks about the

painter Frida Kahlo. This is an excerpt from a much longer

interview. There is more to come in future issues.

Why Cities Live and Companies Die provides insight into how

your company can adapt to become more resilient.

Perspectives shows how different perspectives can lead to

radically different decisions given the same circumstances.

I hope you enjoy reading this issue of Tempo! as much as I

enjoyed putting it together.

ABOUT THE COVER

The cover photo was taken by

Herminia Dosal, a Mexican pho-

tographer. You can read the story

behind the picture or listen toHerminia talking about the fa-

mous painter Frida Kahlo.

Tap the photo!

http://books.henrikmartensson.org/LESS/buyless.htmlhttp://books.henrikmartensson.org/LESS/buyless.htmlhttp://books.henrikmartensson.org/LESS/buyless.htmlhttp://books.henrikmartensson.org/LESS/buyless.htmlhttp://books.henrikmartensson.org/LESS/buyless.html

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Why cities

live andcompaniesdieBy Henrik MrtenssonCompanies have short lifespans. Cities live thousands of

years; Cities can survive plagues and nuclear bombs.

Companies croak when there is a slight downturn in the

economy.; People want to live in large cities, but they

want to work in small companies.

Why? What is the difference? Why does it matter?

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If we understand why cities are so resilient, can we use thatknowledge to build better companies? Companies that are

more resilient and better places to work?

Physicist Geoffrey West believes so. West has studied cities

and found a very simple mathematical relationship between

city size and productivity: When a city doubles in size, each

person in the city becomes about 15-20% more productive.

The astonishing thing is that everything that has to do with

the city infrastructure follows the same power law. Accord-

ing to West it holds for wages, supercreative people per cap-

ita, and patents per capita. (On the flip side, the power law

also holds for crime per capita, and flu per capita.)

The productivity increase in cities is in stark contrast to

what happens in companies. According to an article in the

CYBAEA Journal, when a company grows, productivity per

employee drops.

For comparison, I have plotted the power rules governingcity and company productivity in Figure 1.

When cities grow larger, productivity per person increases

by about 15% each time the city population doubles. In a

company, productivity per person drops when the company

Why cities live and companies die

4

AGEOFFREY WEST PRIMER

You can find out more about Geoffrey West and the

math of cities and corporations here:

TED Talk:The Surprising Math of Cities and

Corporations

Geoffrey West profile page on TED

TED Blog post:The sameness of organisms, cities, and

corporations: Q&A with GeoffreyWestSanta Fe Institute Geoffrey West page

http://www.cybaea.net/Blogs/Journal/employee_productivity_sector.htmlhttp://www.cybaea.net/Blogs/Journal/employee_productivity_sector.html

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grows. The fundamental difference: Cities are networks,

most companies are hierarchies.What this graph shows is that a city is much better organ-

ized than the average company. But why?

Cities are networks. They are to a large extent self-

organizing. Nobody tells you where to live, where to shop,

which friends to spend time with, or where to work, or

whom to vote for. You figure all that out for yourself, based

on the knowledge you have about the city.

Companies are very different: You are told where to sit,

what to work on, whom to work with, when to take a break,and who your boss is. You have comparatively little latitude

to exercise your own judgement.

What companies are missing is the power of self-

organization.

Donella Meadows's Scale of System Interventions is another

way to look at it.

Company leaders usually focus on the low end of the Mead-

ows scale: They set targets like "increase sales by 20%", or

"reduce costs by 10%". They make budgets and set project

deadlines, which is saying they allocate money and time buff-

ers. Sometimes they make a reorganization, which means

they mostly mess around with stock and flow structures.

Cities leave most of that to its inhabitants. City planners are

concerned with overall system structure, but they mostly let

people make their own decisions, and that is what makes cit-

ies resilient, productive, and powerful.

5

Figure 1 Productivity per size increment in cities and

corporations.

When cities grow larger, productivity per person in-creases by about 15% each time the city population dou-bles. In a company, productivity per person drops whenthe company grows. The fundamental difference: Citiesare networks, most companies are hierarchies.

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Why are companies so much more vulnerable to damage

than cities? There are several reasons, but most have to do

with the way companies split in order to manage growth.

Companies divide into functional departments. This causes

problems when information or physical material is moved

from one department to another. Hand-offs are difficult to

manage, and you can have many value streams that interfere

with each other. this problem becomes worse the more cost

6

Figure 2 Donella Meadowss scale of system intervention points

Constants,

parameters,numbers

Buffer sizes

Stocks and flow structures

Delays relative to change rates

Balancing feedback loops

Reinforcing feedback loops

Information flow structures

System rules

System structure/self organization

The System Goal

The paradigm used to design the system

The power to shift paradigm to deal with new challenges

System

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7

Figure 3Value streams in functional hierarchies vs. value streams in networks. From my book Tempo!

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effective an organization is, because increasing cost effective-

ness means reducing the capability to absorb variation in the

value streams.

Add to that, that if a single node in a functional organization

is damaged in some way, it may affect all value streams run-ning through that organization.

For example, if the IT department suffers from work over-

load, you can't do anything but wait until they get to your re-

quest. I have worked at companies with waiting times of 9-

18 months for simple requests like setting up a server.

On the other hand, in a city, if you can't get the service youwant when you want it, you go someplace else. If the gro-

cery shop closest to where I live closes, I won't starve. I just

shop my food somewhere else.

According to the book Creative Destruction by Richard Fos-

ter, the lifespan of large companies is shrinking steadily. In

1938 the lifespan was about 75 years. In 2010 it was about

15 years.

It is when you link the productivity figures with company Re-

turn On Invested Capital and life expectancy numbers that

the results get really scary. According to the 2010 Shift Index

by Deloitte, ROIC has dropped from 6.5% in 1965 to 1.3%

in 2010.

Steve Denning has pointed out that a study by Richard Fos-

ter, using data collected by McKinsey, shows that the life ex-

pectancy of companies have been shrinking steadily. In 1938the life expectancy of an S&P Fortune 500 company was

about 75 years. In 2010 it had shrunk to about 15 years.

The amazing thing is that we do have plenty of blueprints for

building companies that are as resilient as cities, but with

rare exceptions, we don't. There are signs that things are

looking up though. We may have a phase shift, a rapid transi-

tion from the old hierarchies to network based organiza-

tions pretty soon.

8

MORE ABOUT NETWORKS

The Connected Company by Dave Gray and ThomasVander Wal

The Power of Pull: How small moves smartly made can

set big things in motion by John Hagel III, John Seely

Brown, and Lang Davison.

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The LESS!

book projectBy Henrik Mrtensson

The LESS! project was an exceptional experience:Twelve authors working together to write a

management book in only six months.

This is the story of why and how we did it.

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It was Katherine Kirk who came up with the idea! BothKatherine and I were speakers at the LESS 2011 manage-

ment conference in Stockholm.

Katherine had made an exceptional presentation. Her talk

was named Kanban and the Importance of Equanimity: Navigat-

ing politics and data aversion at the BBC, and it had blown me

away completely.

At the time, I was (and I still am) collecting interviews with

exceptionally gifted managers and leaders for a future book.

I talked with Katherine about interviewing her, and she

agreed.

Katherine has an interesting back story. She grew up in the

Australian outback, adopted by an aboriginal tribe. As you

can imagine, this gives her a very interesting perspective on

Western civilization. As it turns out, this perspective is very

useful in her work.

It was too good an opportunity to miss. I asked Katherine ifI could interview her, and she said yes. One of my standard

interview questions is which topic would you really like to

see a management book about?

This conference, Katherine said. That wasnt quite the an-

swer I had expected, but it made perfect sense. I had

wanted to write a collaborative management book for

years, and thanks to Katherine it suddenly dawned on me

that the LESS conference gave me a perfect opportunity to

find co-authors.

I got Katherines permission to use her idea, and then talked

to Vasco Duarte, a LESS conference organizer,

about it. He and the conference board liked

the idea, and gave me the email addresses I neededto contact the other conference speakers.

I set up the LESS Author Group at Linkedin,

contacted the other authors, and we were

off.

The LESS! book project

10

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I wrote a set of writing guidelines, and also used my own

chapter as a sample chapter. The idea was that each author

should write a book chapter on the same theme as their

presentation at the conference.

When draft chapters began to trickle in, I proceeded todrive the other authors nuts by demanding rewrite after re-

write, never being satisfied with diagrams and other illustra-

tions, and by insisting that each author must provide a high

resolution portrait, to be put at the beginning of each chap-

ter.

The rea- son for beginning each chapter with a por-

trait was that I wanted readers to be able to

meet the eyes of the author before read-

ing. We LESS! authors are asking our read-

ers to do a lot: To think very deeply

about how they do business, and how

their organizations work, to learn things

that are new and different from what

they are used to. This requires a lot oftrust, and it is easier to trust someone

whose face you can see.

11

Audio Clip 1 Katherine Kirk: How growing up with anAustralian aboriginal tribe gives a different perspective.

Audio Clip 2 Katherine Kirk: Seeing patterns is about sur-vival.

Figure 4 Katherine Kirk came up with the idea of a book

based on the LESS 2011 conference while I interviewedher for another book.

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RUNNING THE LESS! PROJECT:ALL OF US

ARE SMARTER THAN ANY ONE OF US

There are fundamental assumptions about how the world

works that underlie everything we do. Business is no excep-

tion. Our assumptions shape our behavior. In business, ourassumptions shape how we structure organizations, how we

distribute power in the organization, strategies, tactics, and

culture.

In 1960 Douglas McGregor formulated a model for the basic

assumptions underlying almost all business organizations.

The model is called Theory X. A consequence of Theory X

assumptions is that organizations must be hierarchical, that

workers must have limited authority and be closely super-

vised, and that you need to punish failure. As you can imag-

ine, Theory X assumptions are not conducive to happiness

at work.

McGregor also formulated a different set of assumptions,

Theory Y. According to Theory Y, under the right conditions,people are capable of taking responsibility. They are eager to

learn, creative, and enjoy working. Theory Y assumptions are

conducive to happiness at work.

McGregor also showed that Theory Y organizations can be

vastly more effective than Theory X organizations. They are

12

The assumptions underlying Theory Y lead to network or-ganization, individual responsibility, and rapid learning.

Figure 5 Theory Y

Failures thatresult in

learning shouldbe rewarded.

Failures areopportunities to

learn andimprove.

Failures are theresult of factors

outside thecontrol or

understandingof the worker.

Workers must beencouraged to

communicate laterallyand vertically

(No organizational silos.)

Most workinvolves manyprocess stepsperformed by

different people.

There is noneed forelaborate

hierarchies ofcontrol andauthority.

Managers, bydefinition, are

responsible forthe organization

as a system.

There is noneed forelaborate

controlstructures.

Workers shouldhave great

latituderegarding howto accomplish

missions.

Workers shouldhave a say indecisions thataffect them.

Workers areresponsible

decisionmakers.

Workers havefirst-hand

informationabout their

workingconditions.

Managers areresponsible forcreating a workclimate where

workers can dowell.

Worksatisfaction is

strongmotivation to do

well.

Under the rightconditions,

most workerswill do their best

at work.

Workers aremotivated by

intrinsicrewards.

Workers arecreative under

the rightconditions.

Workers enjoytheir work under

the rightconditions.

Workers canexcercise self-

control.

Workers areself-motivatedunder the right

conditions.

Workers areambitious under

the rightconditions.

Theorganizationmust be anetwork.

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much better at adapting to changing business conditions.

They are also much more innovative, and capable of driving

change. To top it off, they are also more fun to work in than

Theory X organizations.

Because X organization are so common, setting one up, ormaintaining it, does not require much thought. There are diffi-

cult problems, yes, but the problems are fairly well defined. If

you want to set up a Theory Y organization, you do not have

as many role models to learn from, so you have to think a

bit more.

For the LESS! project we did of course want a Theory Y

based organization. That way, we could produce a better

book, and do it cheaper and faster, while having more fun.

Plus, using an X type organization to produce a book based

on Theory Y premises would have been embarrassing.

There are of course major differences between The LESS!

Author Group, which was formed for the express purpose

of writing the LESS! book, and a Theory Y based business or-ganization like Gore & Associates, Semco, or the Virgin

Group. Nevertheless, the basic ideas are the same.

To begin with, no one ordered anyone to participate in the

project. I simply wrote a brief, outlining the project goal, and

the basic rules for how to get the work done. Then, I

13

1 of 12

Bjarte Bogsnes is the chairman of the Beyond BudgetingRound Table Europe, the author ofImplementing BeyondBudgeting, and VP of Performance Management Develop-ment at Statoil.

Gallery 1 Meet the LESS! Authors

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pitched the project to the authors.

The act of pitching the project serves as a nice selection

mechanism. If the project is worthwhile, people will want to

do it. If it isnt, they just wont commit.

The LESS! Author Group is a group of highly skilled experts,

but there is also a wide range of skills. The authors have di-

verse backgrounds, belong to different social groupings, are

from different countries with different cultures and different

languages.

When a group this diverse decides that something is worth

working on, they are very likely to be right. This is a classicWisdom of the Crowds mechanism. The idea is that all of us

are smarter than any one of us.

I wanted to make it as easy as possible to contribute, and to

collaborate, so I set up a LESS Author Group on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is not a very good collaboration platform, but every-

one had accounts there, which made it easy to join. If I did it

all over again, I might pick Google+ or Facebook instead.

Both Facebook and Google+ makes it easier to share pic-

tures and other files.

The LinkedIn group was open to all conference speakers, so

they could have a look around and decide for themselves if

14

Figure 6 How the LESS! project team used online serv-

ices.

LinkedIn Box Lulu

Many to many

messaging

Files

(Drafts, pictures)

Prototype and

final printed

books, PDF

and ePub files

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowdhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowdhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

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they should join the project or not. I tried to make it very

clear that it was OK to join later on, and that it was also

OK to drop out. The assumptions were that everyone in the

project would do their best, but also that they had limited

time and attention to spend on the LESS! project.

I also set up a Box account for uploading large files, like pre-

view versions of the LESS! book. I chose Box because Box

allows files to be downloaded by people who do not have

Box accounts. I did not want to force anyone to create a

new account to be able to participate in the project.

Recently, DropBox has added similar capabilities. Google

Drive also allows sharing with people without Google ac-

counts. The next time I coordinate a project like this, the

choice of services might be different.

Note that a Theory X organization would be likely to have

rules preventing a project team from deciding to use Inter-

net services in this manner. The decision would be taken

higher up, not when the need arises, but when someone atthe top gets around to doing it. It would also be impossible

to adapt to changing circumstances.

In a Theory Y organization, teams would retain this level of

freedom regardless of the size of the organization. For exam-

ple, Business Network International has more than 140,000

members, but if you suggested to the core management

team that they should tell their members which services to

use while working on BNI related matters, they would think

you are a bit funny in the head. (And rightly so. Core manage-

ment has more important things to do.)

VALUE STREAMS: CO-EXISTING RATHER

THAN COMPETING

Assuming that each author has a life outside of work, and at

least one, maybe two or three, projects at work, the LESS!

project would have to co-exist with 25-50 other value

streams.

The Theory X way would have been to compete for capac-

ity, and try to push everyone to commit as much time as pos-

sible to the LESS! project. That would not have worked. Peo-

ple would simply have quit. Even if it had worked, the results

would have been bad. Several other value streams might

have been congested, people would have been unhappy, and

in the end, the book would have suffered. This is what rou-

tinely happens in Theory X organizations. In such organiza-

tions, sub-optimization is a way of life, and few people think

about it. Its just the way things are.

It would be quite ridiculous for me to schedule the other

authors, when:

15

http://www.box.com/http://www.box.com/http://www.box.com/

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16

In the LESS! project, we used simple pictures to communicate effectively. Text is an efficient way to communicate when eve-ryone starts out with roughly the same idea. It does not work nearly as well when communicating new or unfamiliar ideas.Combine text and pictures, and youll get much better results.

Figure 7 Using pictures to communicate.

Readability

Difficulty of

topic

The chapter

is here

The acceptable

for publishing

area is here

Difficult topicsrequire more

readable text.

Easy topics can be

understood even if the text is

a little less readable

We need to move

the chapter to this

position

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they know more about their workload than I do

at least some of them know more about efficient

scheduling than I do

the greatest source of delay is likely to be unknown at

the time of planning, and is likely to be outside the

control of the team members

Instead, I asked the authors to tell me when they were likely

to be ready. We actually did have a deadline at first, but we

whizzed past that at a point when there were still plenty of

white pages to fill in the book.

It is worth pointing out that despite blowing a deadline, the

LESS! project was extremely fast. A book project like this,

run by a traditional publishing company, could easily take

one to two years from inception to publication. We did it in

about six months. If we had been a book publishing company,

working according to the principles and ideas in LESS!, we

could easily have optimized the process, bringing the lead

time down to a single month.

PREDICTIVE VS. ADAPTIVE PLANNING

Traditional planning is designed to be predictive: Estimate

how long various tasks will take, and use that information to

make a plan that is little more than a schedule.

A problem with that approach is that a schedule, even if ac-

curate, would not help us increase the Return On Invest-

ment of the project.

Adaptive planning, on the other hand, would help us decide

what to do under different circumstances.

17

Reading ease

0 25 50 75 100

The Flesch-Kincaid readability index made discussing re-writes and improvements much easier.

Gallery 2 Use concrete measures

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For example, it was easy to figure out that the main project

bottleneck was likely to be me. In addition to writing a chap-

ter of my own, I would also edit each chapter at least twice,

coordinate the efforts of the other authors, do the internal

layout, design the cover, set up the print-on-demand project

at Lulu, manage communications with 3rd parties, and build

the book support website.

This is not as much work as it sounds, but it is still enough

to delay the project quite a bit. However, we could alleviate

the problem:

We set up a buddy editing system where authors could part-

ner up to proofread each others first drafts. Duarte Vasco, a

LESS conference organizer, also worked tirelessly as an edi-

tor. This left me free to focus on second drafts.

It did of course help that we had some very good writerson the project. More than one author submitted a first draft

that had final draft quality. This is quite a feat.

Working with top people paid off big time in terms of qual-

ity. I believe it is a general truth that you get much better

payoff by going for high quality than you get by going for low

production cost. It was certainly true for the LESS! project.

WHEN DEADLINES DONT MAKE SENSE

Deadlines make sense when you need to coordinate your

activities with other activities. In our case, we did not com-

pete against any rival publisher. Nor did we need to coordi-

nate internal project resources. Thus, deadlines made little

sense, and we made little use of them. Instead of having a

fixed deadline, we had threshold parameters. For example, Iknew the book had to be at least 120 pages. Less than that,

and the book would lose reader appeal. I also knew that

management books start to lose readers when they go over

200 pages, so that was the upper limit. That gave me, as the

project coordinator and acceptable range to work with.

18

Figure 8 The first thing you

see when starting on a chapteris a picture of the author and ashort biography.

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I worked out scenarios for the edge cases of the range, so I

knew what to do if there were to few chapter submissions,

or too many.

There were plenty of variables I could play with to stay

within the mission parameters. For example, I could changethe book layout and the page size to adjust the page count.

Gallery 2 contains a simple breakdown of variables affecting

page count.

Of course, changing the format to reduce the page count

does not make logical sense. The word count remains the

same. However, buying decisions are rarely entirely logical.

LESS! was designed using the Cialdini influence model as aguide. The payoff is that LESS! is physically way more attrac-

tive and enticing than most other management books.

(There will be an article about the design of LESS! in a fu-

ture issue of the Tempo! newsletter.)

I also used automated Flesch-Kincaid readability testing to

identify problem spots. One advantage of that approach is

that you get a common frame of reference for readability.

Automated readability testing is far from perfect, but it is a

very useful tool.

In the beginning of the project, my concern was to get

enough high quality content. When we hit the 120 page

mark we had enough content for publication, so the burden

shifted to the authors. They had to keep up or their material

would get left out.

Of course, this left a strong possibility that very good mate-

rial would fall by the wayside. This eMagazine was intended

to solve that problem.

The Tempo! magazine also made it possible to publish inter-

esting material that for one reason or another could not be

published in the book. For example, in this issue we publish

audio clips with excerpts from the interview with KatherineKirk, which provided the igniting spark for the LESS! project.

As it turned out, most delays we had came from external de-

pendencies, so we never got a problem with material coming

in to late to make it in the book.

Now that we know what kind of delays that may crop up un-

der various circumstances, they are easy to mitigate or elimi-nate in future projects.

19

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_testhttp://www.amazon.com/Influence-ebook/dp/B002BD2UUC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342258637&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+cialdinihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_testhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_testhttp://www.amazon.com/Influence-ebook/dp/B002BD2UUC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342258637&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+cialdinihttp://www.amazon.com/Influence-ebook/dp/B002BD2UUC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342258637&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+cialdini

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The story

behind thepictureBy Henrik Mrtensson

Most business people, whether entrepreneurs with a

brand new startup or seasoned C-level executives,

underestimate the value of a good photograph.

This is the story of a good photograph, of the value it

brought, and ofHerminia Dosal, the photographer who

took it.

http://www.herminiadosal.com/http://www.herminiadosal.com/

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The obvious value of a photograph lies in how you use it.For example, I use the first photo in Gallery 3 on my busi-

ness card. The value is obvious: The purpose of my business

card is to help the receiver remember who I am, and what I

do. A portrait makes me easier to remember. Considering

that whether I am remembered or not, can make the differ-

ence between getting a business contract or not, there is no

question that there is value in the portrait right there.

I also use the photo on the Internet, as a profile photo on

various networking sites. My company website is in for a bit

of refurbishing. When that happens, Ill use this photo, and

one or two others from the same photo session.

These are obvious uses for anyone who is an entrepreneur

or in a position to represent a company or other organiza-

tion. With a bit of creativity, you can use a good photograph

to create more value. A lot more value.

If you flick through Gallery 3 (Go ahead! Try it if you havent

already.) you will find an example: When I worked on the lay-

out for the LESS! book, I had the idea that the first thing areader should see, before reading an essay, was the face and

the eyes of the author. I believe that is important. In the

book we write about new ideas, necessary ideas, and we ask

you to do a lot: We ask you to trust us. Trust us enough to

closely examine ideas everyone else take for granted. Trust

us enough to go against the herd, to think for yourself, and

reshape your beliefs about how the world works.

That is a lot to ask. I believe you and other people we ask

to do that have a right to see the people who are asking.

Hence, there is a lot of value in that photograph, for you,

for me, for everyone who will benefit if you decide to read

LESS!, examine your beliefs, and act.

THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE PICTURE

Most of the value in the photograph is not in how I can use

it, but in what it represents. I could use another photograph,

but what it represents is uniquely tied to this one. To show

The story behind the picture

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you what the photograph represents, I must tell you the real

story behind the picture.

I met the Mexican photographer Herminia Dosal for the

first time a couple of years ago, when she was visiting Swe-

den. I was a member ofBusiness Network International(BNI) at the time, and Herminia was a guest at one of our

business meetings. Since I live in Sweden, I was a member of

a Swedish BNI chapter.

BNI business meetings are conducted according to a rigor-

ously followed agenda. Part of the procedure is that mem-

bers get 60 seconds to present themselves. Guests get only

30 seconds. The only time I have seen the 30 second rulebroken at a BNI meeting, was when Herminia held her pres-

entation. Her presentation was a lot longer than that, and

she held her audience captured throughout. Sometimes you

got to break the rules, and that presentation was one of

those occasions.

Herminia used a PowerPoint presentation to show her pho-

tographs, but she did much more than that. She showed the

difference between what she, as an expert photographer

with more than 30 years of experience can do, and what an

amateur photographer does.

Herminia did this by showing two versions of several por-

traits. First, she showed a good looking photograph. Then

she showed a second photograph of the same person,

where she had brought all her skill to bear. Everyone could

22

This is the picture the story is about. Flick to the follow-ing pictures to see how it helps create value.

Gallery 3

http://www.bni.nu/http://www.bni.com/http://www.bni.nu/http://www.bni.nu/http://www.bni.com/http://www.bni.com/http://www.herminiadosal.com/http://www.herminiadosal.com/

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see the difference. Side by side, two photographs, a good

one and a great one.

Herminia made it very easy to see the value of her services

as a photographer. I was deeply impressed, partly with her

skill as a photographer, but also with her ability to markether skill. There was a very valuable lesson there. A lesson I

have done my best to take to heart.

Herminia and I talked a bit after the meeting. It was an enjoy-

able conversation, but at the time, nothing more came out

of it.

Fast forward to the autumn of 2011. I sat working in a cafin Halmstad, a city on the Swedish West Coast. The rain was

pouring down outside. The sky was dark grey, and the rain

showed no sign of letting up.

I took a break from working and checked my mailbox. Her-

minia had sent me an email, inviting me to a vernissage at

ArtPhotoCollection, an art photo gallery in Gothenburg.

I accepted of course. I went to Gothenburg for the vernis-

sage, and it was great.

Herminia is active in a Design Thinking group in Mexico, and

I am interested in photography, so we did have a lot to talk

about. We decided to meet and talk at a a caf in the Goth-

enburg city library a couple of days later.

When we met at the caf, we had a blast. Towards the end,

Herminia asked me if she could take my photograph, and I of

23

Herminia Dosal and I having coffee at the Gothenburghcity library. I learned a lot by talking to her. It got methinking about the photographs I take. In the other pic-tures in this gallery, you can see how talking to Herminiaaffected my own style as a photographer.

Gallery 4

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course agreed. I had one condition though, that I should do

something in return. That is when we hit on the idea of me

telling the story behind the picture, to show the value of a

good photograph. So, now you know, I wrote this article be-

cause I promised a friend.

A couple of days later, we had the photo session. As you al-

ready have seen, it turned out very well.

We did a bit more than just a photo shoot. we also had a

long talk about about a range of subjects from Design Think-

ing, Systems Thinking, and management, to art and child rear-

ing, . And, we recorded it, just in case we might find a use for

it later. We did! I have included parts of the talk in this issueof Tempo!.

As an entrepreneur, I am keenly aware that everything I can

do to hone my presentation skills is a great help. I like to use

my own photos in my presentations as much as possible.

Herminia certainly helped me do that.

CONTACT HERMINIA DOSAL

email: studio@herminiadosal.com

phone, mexico: +(5255) 5659-4657

web site: www.herminiadosal.com

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Audio Clip 3 Herminia Dosal talks about Frida Kahlo.

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PerspectivesBy Henrik Mrtensson

This is a sample chapter from the forthcoming book

Perspectives.

Perspectives focuses on the ultimate power in

management and leadership: The power of having and

using multiple paradigms.

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Choosing a content management system

I changed my mind because of the the design of the

Content Management System I used to find

information!

From Perspectives, by Henrik Mrtensson

In the Introduction we had a look at two different ideasabout how disease spreads, the Miasma idea and Germ The-

ory. The shift in opinion from the Miasma idea to the Germ

Theory caused a small change in the behavior of doctors.

Doctors started washing their hands before examining a pa-

tient. This small change made a very large difference in the

mortality rate of patients.

We can have a look at the Germ and Miasma ideas from

other perspectives, and gain a completely different kind of

insight: We can figure out what kind of information manage-

ment system your organization should invest in.

The decision to buy a content management system crops

up only rarely, but you have to live with the decision every

working day. The decision had better be a good one. Every-

thing anyone does in your organization that involves using

the content management system will be affected by that buy-

ing decision.

Brace yourself, because this time we will use four different

perspectives:

Taylorism

Strategy

The Cialdini decision model

Network science

Depending on which perspective you use to make the buy-

ing decision, the decisions will be quite different. Different

perspectives may lead to the same buying decision, but for

entirely different reasons.

Perspectives

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TAYLORISM

Information structure must reflect the needs of the organiza-

tion. The organization is divided into a hierarchy of func-

tional units. Each unit needs information pertinent to the

function it performs. Providing more information than neces-

sary would slow the work down, reducing cost effectiveness.

It would also increase the risk of information leakage, both

within the organization, and to entities outside the organiza-

tion.

If the organization is large, it is quite natural that different

functional units have their own content management sys-

tems. The most cost effective solution is if all documents arewritten using the same type of word processor, and stored

in the content management system for easy retrieval.

StrategyInformation structure must reflect the needs of the organiza-

tion. Two basic strategic principles immediately stand out as

useful guides:

The Interaction/Isolation principle tells us that

the value of information increases when different pieces

of information interact. That is, the links between different

pieces of information is what makes information useful.

The Reduce Internal Friction principle tells us

that retrieving pieces of related information must be as

quick and easy as possible.

It is impossible to predict when and where a specific piece

of information becomes useful. Therefore, information must

be easily accessible by default. Information access is re-

stricted only when there is a danger of information damag-

ing the organization as a whole.

The organization must be structured to make as good use of

information as possible. This is especially important if infor-

mation changes rapidly.

It is natural to have a common access point for information.

Each piece of information must have live links to other

pieces of relevant information. Information in the system

must be easy to update for anyone with pertinent informa-

tion.

THE CIALDINI DECISION MODEL

Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and mar-

keting at Arizona State University is a leading expert on hu-

man decision models. According to Cialdini, humans tend to

simplify decisions, especially stressful decisions, according to

a set of simple rules1:

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Reciprocity - People tend to return a favor.

Commitment - If people commit to an idea or goal, orally

or in writing, they are much more likely to follow through

with their commitment.

Social proof - People will look at what other people aredoing, and do the same thing.

Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures,

even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts, or

have grave personal doubts.

Liking - People are more easily persuaded by people they

like. People tend to like people who are physicallyattractive, or who have views like their own.

Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will increase the perceived

value of an item. For example, natural diamonds are

perceived as more valuable than synthetic diamonds.

Buying a content management decision is a complex prob-

lem, just look at all the features they have, and how many dif-ferent systems there are! It is impossible to evaluate them

by reading feature lists, or listening to long and complicated

sales presentations, which probably arent accurate anyway.

Lets do something simpler:

Reciprocity - If we owe a sales person a favor, buy from

her if possible.

Commitment - We have already invested in office

software from a certain vendor. It stands to reason that

their content management system is the best fit with

their word processor, their spreadsheet program, their

project management program, and their diagram drawing

program, so lets buy that.

Social proof - Buy the system everyone else buys. Even if

it goes wrong, you can hardly be blamed for it.

Authority - Look at the market leaders. Buy what they

have. Didnt the CTO mention that system anyway?

Liking - Sarah is definitely the nicest sales person Ive met.

Easy to talk to. Beautiful too. If I buy from her, I have a

reason to keep in touch

Scarcity - Yes, it is pricey, but that has to be because it is

good. Dont even talk to me about an open source

system. If they are giving it away for free, it must suck.

Because Cialdinis decision rules are hardwired into our

brains, we can save considerable time and energy using

them. It should be mentioned that the reason we have these

rules built into our brains is evolutionary pressure: They

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have worked very well most of the time throughout human

history. However, we have had Content Management Sys-

tems for a comparatively very short time. The Cialdinis deci-

sion rules have been built into the human brain for at least

50,000 years. Rules that kept us alive on the African savan-

nah may not be the optimal rules for making buying deci-sions.

The Cialdini decision model teaches us caution! We cant

trust our gut feeling, because the parts of our brain ruling

our guts knows nothing about Content Management Sys-

tems. Nor does it understand knowledge work.

NETWORK SCIENCE

Information structure must reflect the needs of the organiza-

tion. The body of information owned by an organization can

be viewed as a network of information. A piece of informa-

tion can be considered a node in the network. To a large ex-

tent, how useful a piece of information is, depends on how

well connected it is to other pieces of information. This is

know as node centrality. The centrality of a network node

can be evaluated along three dimensions:

Degree - The number of connections a node has to other

nodes. For a document, this would be the number of

references to and from other documents. A document

with a high degree is potentially very influential in the

network.

Closeness - A measure of how easy it is for a node to

connect with other nodes. The easier it is to connect

with a node, the more influential the node is in thenetwork.

Betweenness - Indicates the degree to which a node

forms a bridge between other nodes. For example, a

document containing references to many other

29

Betweenness indicates the degree to which a node partici-

pates in transactions between other nodes. In the figure,

node E is an intermediary in six different transaction

paths. None of the other nodes are intermediaries intransactions, and have a betweenness of zero.

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documents would have a higher betweenness than a

document containing references to only a few. On the

Internet, Google is probably the node with the highest

betweenness rating in the world.

A piece of information is more valuable the higher it scores

in degree, closeness, and betweenness. A body of informa-

tion, such as the information owned by a company, is more

valuable the higher the scores of the pieces of information

in it.

Looking at the problem of buying a Content Management

System from a network science perspective, we can tell

quite a lot about how we want the system to work:

Degree - We want a piece of information, such as a

document, to contain as many references to other

relevant pieces of information as possible. How many

references we put in a document depends a great deal on

how easy it is to find those other pieces of information.

Therefore, the degree of one document will be higher if

other documents in the system score high in degree,

closeness, and betweenness.

Closeness - Imagine pointing to a reference with a

pointer. Your computer immediately shows what the

reference points to in a small window. This makes it easy

to decide whether to jump to the referenced document

or not. This is an example of closeness. You may have

noticed Facebook uses this type of links. As an example of

greater distance: Imagine reading a document reference in

a word processor document. To see if the referenced

document is interesting you must copy the reference,switch from viewing the document to accessing the

search function of the Content Management System,

paste the reference into a search field, then choose from

a list of search results, click on the link you chose, and

wait until the chosen document opens in your word

processor. We obviously want as high closeness as

possible.

Betweenness - If many documents we read have a high

degree of betweenness, finding and accessing related

information is comparatively easy. If a single node, such as

a search engine, is the sole gatekeeper to many nodes, we

will have to visit the gatekeeper node time and time again

in order to traverse the information network. Having a

single gatekeeper node also introduces a single point of

failure: If the search engine returns the wrong results, too

many results, or to few, the usefulness of the entire

information system will be reduced. We want many nodes

with a high degree of betweenness.

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We can conclude that we want a Content Management Sys-

tem that supports documents with active hyperlinks. It must

be easy for whomever has the information to update a docu-

ment. Because the system is likely to contain many pieces of

information, a search system is necessary, but searching or

hierarchical structures must not be the sole means of linkinginformation.

IMPLICATIONS

Most Content Management Systems bought today store tra-

ditional documents: Word processor documents, spread-

sheets, and presentations. These documents do not have ac-

tive hyperlinks to other documents in the system. It is actu-ally easier to create a hyperlink to a web page on the Inter-

net than to another document in the same system. Thus, De-

gree, the potential for having a powerful system is low. Trav-

ersing the system from one document to another involves

searching or traversing a document hierarchy, thus Close-

ness is also low. Finally, Betweenness is low, simply because

the potential (Degree) isnt there.

Three of the four perspectives chosen, the strategy perspec-

tive, the Cialdini decision model, and the Network Science

perspective, all point to the same conclusion:

Most business organizations buy the wrong kind of Content

Management System!

The reason for buying the wrong kind of system is simple:

The organization wants to store and access the wrong kind

of documents: Documents with low scores in Degree, Close-

ness, and Betweenness.

Can this really be true? It is for you to decide whether you

believe Network Science is applicable. For example, if you be-

lieve a single book can tell you all you ever need to know

about management, then, clearly, you do not need that book

to contain references to other books. If you believe a single

source document will tell you all you need to know to de-velop a software system, then you do not need to make it

easy to access any related information.

Put in the light of other perspectives, such ideas may seem

ridiculous, but the fact is they are the dominant beliefs. We

all know it isnt true, but most of us try to behave as if it

were.

What would a really good Content Management System

look like?

I will tell you one about an experience I had while writing

this book.

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When I wrote the Introduction, I wanted to introduce the

idea that by looking at an issue from different perspectives,

we can make better decisions than if we have only a single

perspective. My original intent was to compare the Germ

Theory with the idea that witchcraft causes disease. The

idea of witchcraft is very old, and there are still corners ofthe world where witchcraft is a crime punishable by death.

As you know, if you read the introduction, I ended up com-

paring the Germ Theory with a much more direct competi-

tor instead, the Miasma idea. Making the Germ/Miasma com-

parison enabled me to use a very simple and easily under-

standable example of a difference in behavior: a doctor wash-

ing or not washing hands before examining a patient. It also

enabled me to point out why the Miasma idea was pretty

much a dead end. Airing out hospital rooms was just about

the only thing that could be done for patients. The Germ

Theory, on the other hand, lead to vaccines, sterilization of

surgical instruments, and a host of other things that help pa-

tients survive and get well.

Why did I make the change from Germ/Witchcraft to

Germ/Miasma? Because of information I got while making

background research. I knew of the Miasma idea before, but

it wasnt at the top of my mind.

I changed my mind because of the the design of the Content

Management System I used to find information!

I used several articles about 19th century medicine as

source material when I wrote the introduction. If this infor-

mation was in the knowledge base of a typical business or-

ganization, the articles would be stored in MS Word or

Adobe PDF format, and the information about Germ Theory

would be linked like this:

That is, there would be no active hyperlinks at all. There

might be a hierarchical structure for storing the documents.

There would almost certainly be some sort of search func-

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i A d i h i l d li f l d i l b I did h f h i d i i Wiki di

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tion. A document might include a list of related articles, but

these would be textual references, not active links. With a

system like this, I would most likely have done what I origi-

nally set out to do, and looked up the following:

I would not even look at the other articles, because the ef-

fort involved in doing so would be too great. From a tayloris-

tic perspective this is a good thing, because you should al-

ways do what you originally set out to do, with as few dis-

tractions as possible. First you make the plan, then you exe-

cute the plan.

Cialdinis decision model indicates you are likely to choose

this type of Content Management System, not because ofthe way it handles information, but because lots of other

business organizations have chosen this type of system. In

other words, what the Cialdini model teaches us is that the

decision is likely to be made for the wrong reasons.

I did my research for the introduction using Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a very large Content Management System, but

it is quite different from the systems dominating the world

of business. In Wikipedia, documents are HTML pages, and

the information in the Germ Theory related articles was

linked using active hyperlinks, like this:

The Germ Theory article I started with has active hyperlinks

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t ll th th ti l I d t th Fili P hi i

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to all the other articles I used except the Filippo Pacchini ar-

ticle. However, two other articles, the Miasma Theory article

and the Robert Koch article have links to Filippo Pacchini.

This means I was quite likely to see the Paccini reference

once I started researching. Five articles link to the Miasma

Theory article, so I would probably have found it even if Ihad missed the reference in the Germ Theory article.

I am of course showing only a small portion of the Wikipe-

dia information network. For example, according to a Goo-

gle search I made, Wikipedia has 848 articles referencing

Germ Theory. Many of these have hyperlinks to the Germ

Theory article. That means you have a lot of different ways

to find the Germ Theory information.

If it is important to be able to relate different pieces of infor-

mation to each other, then a Wikipedia type Content Man-

agement System is much more valuable than the systems

most companies are buying and using today. Here is a pic-

ture showing my research path: Note that the very act of researching Germ Theory, gave me

three things:

The information I needed to make a substantial

improvement to the introduction

The idea of writing about choosing and buying a Content

Management System

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An example to use in this chapter Are there other perspectives that would be of use when

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An example to use in this chapter

This was not planned. Rather, it is an example of serendipity,

fortuitous circumstance. Of course you can stack the odds

of good things happening in your favor. In the case of infor-

mation management, whether the chips are stacked in your

favor or not, depends a lot on which kind of Content Man-

agement System you use.

FURTHER THINKING

Modern strategic thinking is heavily influenced by

Network Science. Thus, conclusions drawn using strategic

principles can be expected to match conclusions drawn

using network analysis to a large degree. Is this a good

thing or a bad thing when using these perspectives to

make decisions?

This chapter discussed Content Management Systems

from the point of view of information retrieval. If the

discussion had been about creating information, and

updating existing information, would this reveal otherimportant aspects of information management? What

would those aspects be?

Are there other perspectives that would be of use when

making the decision to buy a Content Management

System? Which ones?

I have referred to the Miasma idea and Germ Theory,

even though the Wikipedia article I mined for information

about Miasma is named Miasma Theory. Why is the idea

that germs cause disease a theory, while the idea that

poisonous gas cause disease is not a theory? Is the

difference important? Why?

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