On 10/27/2016 04:06 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
A professional avoids doing things outside of the stated goals of a team because their consulting rates or salary is in part a function of their productivity, and further belonging to other teams makes risks making them less potent on their primary efforts. Some teams tolerate outside interests, e.g. at one point Google let people work ~10% on their own projects), but the other ~90% ends-up being team goals.
I don't understand what you're saying, here. Are you saying that professionals don't, say, bake cookies for the PTA or their kid's baseball team? Obviously you're not saying that. So, professionals _do_ (on a constant basis) things outside the stated goals of any one of their teams. Your employer may even _pay_ you to, say, take night courses in something not directly related to your job (e.g. taking a philosophy class as part of a B.S. curriculum). To boot, when working inside an organization, people are often called on to play multiple roles on multiple teams (e.g. a machinist who also contributes to a committee on quality control). So, what you say above is clearly false. Unless you're talking about something very specific, like conflicts of interest (working for both Intel and AMD doing the same type of work). It would be nice if you could tightly specify what types of teams you're talking about.
Bottom line is that multitasking is less efficient than batch processing. Of course, what one does is find teams that best match for one's interests. Teams that lack focus tend to run out of money and disappear.
Again, that's a weird (perhaps merely incomplete) statement. It seems clear from phenomena like burnout, that pure single tasking may provide high RoI for a very short time. But over the long haul, multitasking is critical to good health for a complex individual. (Even robots have to sporadically exercise their rarely used parts, lest they rust and seize.)
So better to participate in several smaller, efficient and well-matched teams rather one big team that spends money in a careless fashion or has team members that are non-committal or insufficiently skilled.
Well, my guess is that effective and efficient team size and composition depends fundamentally on the objectives adopted. Very small teams can only accomplish very small tasks. It always requires a large team to accomplish a large task. Of course, teams can be nested, perhaps changing your assertion into something about power laws. Anyway, one can be a member of teams within teams. And when that obtains, there must be at least some individuals who split their time (laterally or between levels), which again argues for multiple memberships. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
