Harvard Business Review 2007 Everything Is Miscellaneous Featured Guest: David Weinberger, fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of _Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder_ (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Miscellaneous-Power-Digital-Disorder/dp/0805080430) . ANNOUNCER: Hello, and welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Online. In this week’s episode, Steve Singer talks with David Weinberger, author of the new boo. Everything is Miscellaneous, The Power of the New Digital Disorder. And in our HBR In Brief segment– cracking the code of change. STEVE SINGER: Hi, I’m Steve Singer. And I’m here today with David Weinberger, the author of the new book Everything is Miscellaneous, The Power of the New Digital Disorder. David is also a fellow at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Welcome, David. DAVID WEINBERGER: Hi. STEVE SINGER: You have a few books out, The ClueTrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. And your new book Everything is Miscellaneous seems to take it to the next level. I was hoping that you’d talk to our audience about what exactly you mean by “everything is miscellaneous.” What is miscellany? DAVID WEINBERGER: Well, normally the miscellaneous is the category into which you shove everything that doesn’t fit into the rest of the categories. Whether it’s some type of chart on paper of how you diagram things, or it’ s just your kitchen drawer, or your office folder. That traditionally is the receptacle where things that are not like anything else, and not like each other, are stored. And it’s not quite what I mean by the miscellaneous. The book is a recommendation of the miscellaneous. So I mean something a little bit different by it. The book looks at the ways in which we have traditionally organized physical objects, which we have gotten very, very good at in the past 10 thousand years or so. We have very complex, sophisticated ways of doing that, all the way up to the Library of Congress, which has millions of objects that it needs to store physically. But when information, and works, and stuff starts moving online, the principle that we’ve used for organizing physical things just makes no sense. It’ s terribly constricting. You would never think of just re-instituting those principles. The new principles that we use and that we are rapidly inventing which makes this a very exciting period, because you don’t get to invent new principles of organization all that often. Now we are. The new principles, in my view, frequently lead up to see the miscellaneous as a new type of category, and a really important one. In fact, digitally, the miscellaneous– as I use the term, anyway– is the question of everything. But unlike the old miscellaneous, where things that are not like one another are put together, in the new miscellaneous, this new, huge, unbelievably large collection of stuff that we’re building for ourselves online, things have so many different ways that they’re alike in potential. That we can now, at the last minute, when a user comes by and says, I’d like to find all of the whatevers, we can organize on the way out. We can look at this huge pile of stuff that has links and connections and relationships there waiting for us. And we can use that potential to pull out an organization, a set of stuff that is related in really important ways, that address the user’s needs right at that moment. STEVE SINGER: And that might be if even to the point where it’s only useful or important just to me. Right? DAVID WEINBERGER: Frequently, we share our interest and we do the same sorts of searches. And that’s something we may want to take account of, as we offer to our users more and more ways in which this stuff can be sorted through. But frequently also, it’s your own idiosyncratic interests and tastes, and the project at the moment that you can satisfy in a unique way. Whereas before, you would have had to rely upon experts to go through the material ahead of time, to figure out what material are to be included, to exclude everything they think isn’t interesting, And then to rely upon these experts to organize it into categories that make sense to them. And they have to come up with a single set of categories. In the physical world, you simply have to do this when you’re organizing the stuff in your office or your warehouse. Things have to go on a shelf. You have to come up with a single way of organizing it. And we’re very good at coming up with good single ways of doing it. But that single way simply cannot address everybody’s ways of thinking, and everybody’s needs. STEVE SINGER: You talk about how people are coming together to do tagging. And I was hoping that you’d actually dive into that a little bit more, just the social aspects of organization that you see happening now. DAVID WEINBERGER: So tagging is a particularly good example. But it’s just an example of one of the ways in which we are doing exactly what you say, which is to organize things socially. Because there’s too much stuff for any one of us to figure it all out. We just can’t do that. But it turns out that socially we can make a lot of sense of this huge collection of resources that we now have available to us. So we do this in a variety of ways, and tagging is one of them. When you tag, you attach a word or phrase to an online object. It could be a picture, it could be an article, it could be an account, or a customer, whatever. You attach a phrase or a word, that will be helpful to you when you go back and try to re-find that information.
Though frequently a tag may be something that other people can make sense from, it may also be something that only makes sense to you. We’re doing this for individual retrieval reasons. We’re just keeping track of stuff. Tagging happens to be a particularly good way of doing it, because it organizes based around our way of thinking about things, our way of categorizing. But because tags and many of these systems that are available now, are public – whether they are public to everybody on the web, or simply to everybody in the organization or corporation, we can start using this collection of tags, created by individuals for their personal needs. As a way of demarking the miscellaneous, finding stuff socially, the ability to use the efforts made by individuals to take these together, to aggregate them, to look at them in terms of social networks, turned out to be a tremendously powerful way of unearthing resources of information that otherwise you simply would never ever have found. For example, if you’re in a company that has a division that’s doing research on chemicals. You have a bunch of chemists. Let’s say they’re distributed around the world, because you’re an international corporation. These chemists may decide, especially if you give them the tagging system, that as they’re doing the work over the course of the day, they come across an article here or there. And somebody tags it with long chain polymer, or whatever. Simply because she wants to find it again the next day. It was an interesting article. If the tagging system allows the tags to be public to everybody in your corporation, then all the other chemists can subscribe to that tag. That is, they can see all of the pages that anybody in the organization has tagged long chain polymer. And so, the chemists now across your organization internationally are doing research together without even knowing it. And they’re all benefiting from it. STEVE SINGER: Right. And so how do managers and business leaders get a grasp of what you see going on here? DAVID WEINBERGER: Well there’s, I think, two levels of this. And one’s useful and comforting. And the other is disturbing. [LAUGHTER] So at the useful and comforting level, you should be looking at how you’re organizing information. The old way of doing it, as I said, we’re very good at it. But it’ s not good enough anymore. It doesn’t scale. For example, the Library of Congress has people who do nothing but decide which categories the 7 thousand books a day that it gets go into. And that’ s manageable. And that’s a huge collection. It takes a lot of catalogers with a lot of skill to do it. It does not scale through anything like the size of the web. Seven thousand entries a day? For the web, that’s what– one blogger. That’s nothing. So those ways of organizing, traditional ways, don’ t work in the large-scale world that we’re now in. And so, we need to be thinking about ways in which we don’t categorize on the way in, but rather ways in which we allow our users to find what they need, even though it is not characterized on the way in. Allow them to categorize on the way out. Those users are both your customers, to whom you want to surface more stuff that they might find useful, but that’s also your employees, your entire organization, which is a knowledge-based organization. There’s so much to know we cannot rely upon experts sifting and cataloging for us anymore. So we just have to be looking at these new ways of finding, surfacing, and releasing information. That’s the useful and comforting part. The disturbing part is that all of this has a direct effect on the nature of authority, and who counts as an authority. Because built up around this notion– it’s not simply a matter of categorizing and cataloging, which is sort of a dry topic. In fact, in doing that every categorical scheme, every way of classifying, there are explicit assumptions about what the world looks like, how it’s structured. And also, power goes to those who get the filter and categorize. You can see this instantly in newspapers or any of the broadcasting media, where a small handful of people make decisions– and we hope good decisions– about what’s worth our time and attention. What makes it into the newspaper? What makes it into the front page? And what the lead story is? Well, there’s no possibility of applying that technique across the board on the web cause there’s too much stuff. And furthermore, the authority that goes to those who decide what the lead story is slips away when, in fact, there is no single lead story. When we together, as social groups, decide what’s interesting to us and what’s important to us. So in business, the ability of managers to set the agenda for their employees, and the ability of businesses to set the agenda for the customers, is slipping out of the hands of business. STEVE SINGER: Right. So it’s how well you can manage giving up control over things. DAVID WEINBERGER: That turns out to be, in many cases, crucial. STEVE SINGER: And so do you have any advice for managers to be able to do that? DAVID WEINBERGER: Well, there’s a psychological problem of ceding some degree of one’s authority and expertise and recognizing that many– not all, but many– instances social networks are smarter than any one individual can be. There’s also a structural issue within companies, which is that we still, by and large, reward employees for individual effort. Whereas the knowledge that we want to generate and share, more and more is coming through groups. And we don’t have good ways of compensating and rewarding people for doing that. That’s an obstacle that can get in the way, that can work against the company being as smart as it possibly can be. And there are no easy and obvious answers to that except to be aware of it, and to work towards encouraging and rewarding the sharing of knowledge, rather than trying to coagulate it into single, individual experts. STEVE SINGER: And is that one of the things that you see happening more? DAVID WEINBERGER: Inevitably, yes. I think it’s going to have to because companies that succeed are going to be the ones that make the maximum use of these new ways of pulling together lots of voices, enabling them to together be smarter than any individual voice. People are getting used to that outside of the corporate world. So the notion that there is an in-house expert, and that this is the person who gets rewarded and compensated for expertise, and we all go to her, and we simply listen to her– sometimes that happens, but less and less. Instead, the expert may come out of anywhere in the organization. This is part of what it means to make things miscellaneous. People are not staying in their boxes. It may turn out that the person in a completely unrelated department happens to be a hobbyist, who knows a great deal about something else, or may have the insight. Or may be a contributor, not because of her great content, but because of her ability to ask the right questions, to come at it in a way that somebody else doesn’t. Or it may be that she maybe isn’t the, totally full of content, can answer any question, but is an amazing resource of links. She knows where to look. I certainly know people like that. The ability to use everybody in the organization to pull them in across boundaries, to enable, encourage and reward contributions to social knowing is going to be a competitive advantage. And the old way of assuming that you only need to know what you know within your box, that’s the only contribution that we care about, that’s going to be a hindrance. STEVE SINGER: Well, this has been great, David. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time this afternoon. DAVID WEINBERGER: Oh, sure. Thank you very much. ANNOUNCER: Up next in our HBR In Brief segment, Cracking the Code of Change. First, the idea in brief. Here’s the brutal fact– 70% of all change initiatives fail. Why? Managers flounder in an alphabet soup of change methods, drowning in conflicting advice. Change efforts exact a heavy toll, human and economic, as companies flail from one change method to another. To effect successful change, first, grasp the two basic theories of change. Theory E change emphasizes economic value, as measured only by shareholder returns. This hard approach boosts returns through economic incentives, drastic layoffs, and restructuring. “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap’s firing 11 thousand Scott Paper employees and selling several businesses, tripling shareholder value to $9 billion is a stunning example. Theory O change, a softer approach, focuses on developing corporate culture and human capability, patiently building trust and emotional commitment to the company through teamwork and communication. Then carefully and simultaneously balance these very different approaches. It’s not easy. Employees distrust leaders who alternate between nurturing and cutthroat behavior. But done well, you’ll boost profits and productivity and achieve sustainable, competitive advantage. Next, the idea in practice. The UK grocery chain, ASDA, teetered on bankruptcy in 1991. Here’s how CEO Archie Norman combined change theories E and O with spectacular results– a culture of trust and openness, and an eight-fold increase in shareholder value. When the change dimension is goals, one can combine theories E and O by embracing the paradox between economic value and organizational capability. The example from ASDA– Norman started his tenure by stating, our number one objective is to secure value for our shareholders. And we need a culture built around common ideas, and listening, learning, and speed of response from the stores, upward. When the change dimension is leadership, one can combine Theories E and O by setting direction from the top, and engaging people from below. The example from ASDA– Norman unilaterally set a new pricing strategy and shifted power from headquarters to stores. His forthright Tell Archie Program encouraged dialogue with all employees. He hired warm, accessible Allan Leighton to complement his own Theory O leadership style, and strengthen emotional commitment to the new ASDA. When the change dimension is focus, one can combine Theories E and O by focusing on both hard and soft sides of the organization. The example from ASDA– Norman set out to win both hearts and minds. He boosted economic value through hard structural changes, e.g. removing top layers of hierarchy and freezing all wages. He paid equal attention to the soft side by spending 75% of his early months as HR Director, creating a more egalitarian and transparent organization, a great place for everyone to work. When the change dimension is process, one can combine Theories E and O by planning for spontaneity. The example from ASDA– Norman encouraged experimentation, setting up three risk-free stores where employees could fail without penalty. Managers experimented with store layout, product range, and employee roles. A cross-functional team redesigned ASDA’s entire retail organization and produced significant innovations. And when the change dimension is reward system, one can combine Theories E and O by using incentives to reinforce, rather than drive change. The example from ASDA– ASDA applied Theory E incentives in an O-like way. It encouraged all employees to participate actively in changing ASDA, and it rewarded their commitment with stock ownership and variable pay, based on corporate and store performance. We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s program. To learn more on these and many other management topics, please visit our website at _www.harvardbusinessonline.org_ (http://www.harvardbusinessonline.org) . ============================================= The Quarterly Conversation EVERYTHING IS MISCELLANEOUS BY DAVID WEINBERGER Review by Megan Keane I have a love/hate relationship with my digital camera. On the one hand, I love how easy it is to snap a shot, see it, and take another if I’m not satisfied. On the other hand, once I’ve taken the pictures there’s the daunting task of uploading them to the computer and searching through them to find ones to print and place online. And once those photos are online, there’ s still another step if I want to tag or put descriptions of the photos. More often than not, I find myself just uploading the whole batch and intending to go through it later. Meanwhile I take more pictures. In his new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger uses the pileup of digital pictures as just one example of how managing the influx of information is a problem we all face. “We’re just never going to catch up,” he writes, both of me with my pictures and the Library of Congress trying to keep on top of categorizing the millions of items they receive every day. With increasingly smaller limitations on bandwidth and hard-drive space, the vast amount of digital information available to us is quickly becoming mind boggling. Complicating the issue of quantity is the problem of how to organize it all. Weinberger traces the history of classification systems, exploring how they were created and used and how they’ve evolved over the years. He also explains that, given the quantity of digital material, applying any existing system of order to the digital world is problematic. As Weinberger writes of the Library of Congress, its carefully engineered, highly evolved process for ordering information simply won’t work in the new world of digital information. Not only is there too much information moving too rapidly, there are no centralized classification experts in charge of the new digital world we’re rapidly creating for ourselves, starting with the World Wide Web but including every connected corporate library, data repository, and media player. With too much information to keep track of and no uniform, accepted classification scheme, how do we go about organizing the digital world? Weinberger believes we start by thinking of knowledge as messy and get away from the idea that there should be a single, orderly method of organization. Without the binds of physical matter, digital information can be jumbled but continually re-ordered as each individual seeks out specific information. In what Weinberger calls the third way of order, every bit of knowledge is miscellaneous, non-hierarchal, and intertwined. Weinberger embraces the idea of multiple methods of categorizing and connecting information. He uses the analogy of “smart leaves” to describe bits of information that are easily found through multiple routes, or branches, if you will. Although a physical book can only be in one place on a shelf, digital “leaves” can be hung on numerous branches, and, as Weinberger points out, it’s advantageous to do so. From a business perspective it makes more sense to make products and services more findable by placing them on any logical branch that a customer might think of searching. Oddly, However, Weinberger barely mentions search engines as a way of connecting users to data in this new order. No matter how high the level of organization, I still need a way to, well, search out info. User-created content and classification are a big part of this new order. People now tag articles and news with self-described terms that help retrieve this information later on. They also rate information, lending credibility through sites like Digg or Amazon, or generate their own through a site like Wikipedia. Weinberger argues that these social ways of knowing are changing the way our minds understand and group information, seeing it as an ongoing collaborative process. The paradox of user-constructed information is that while it takes control away from organizations, institutions that restrict people from organizing knowledge for themselves risk losing users. Weinberger believes that “the paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information.” Everything Is Miscellaneous opens the door for more conversations about the political aspects of information management in the digital world. The current debate over Net Neutrality—the idea that certain sections of the Internet should not be accessed via inferior “pipes,” leaving premium address to those who can pay for them—has huge implications as to who has access as both knowledge-makers and knowledge-seekers. Or look at digitization projects like Google Book: Who decides what materials are put in digital format and what technologies are used to do so? Although collective input gives people the ability to create, describe, and classify information, they can only do so to the degree that access to information is democratized. My virtual stack of digital pictures is still ever-growing, but I’ve accepted that I may not ever catch up. Instead I’m taking a cue from Weinberger and focusing on making it easier to find the pictures I care most about. And while my digital photo spread may not be as carefully organized as a physical photo album, there’s a miscellany about my pile of photos that lends it to new connections and meanings. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. 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