I don’t know if I fully understand the kith definition but in practice it more or less fits my model when I staffed a consulting job… I either knew you and could command your loyalty (and knew you’d work hard towards success) or you were “dead to me”. It all is about getting people on your team and working towards a common goal.

Another problem with the IBM type model is that you’d have to be a FOOL to give someone a bad rating… my plan was, just get them off MY job as fast as possible, and give them an OK rating. There was no upside for me to write this person up and try to drum them out of the firm, but there sure was a down side, since I would have to spend a lot of time on process and since no one else gives bad ratings, either, I would have to contend with the fact that a lot of crappy people walk around with stellar marks. Thus I am not just taking on this person, I am taking on everyone else he / she worked for previously, as well, and they aren’t happy about this either. Thus there is a ton of downside on getting rid of bad personnel (from the firm, not from my job) but no up side at all.

I didn’t have incentive to share with others unless there was a chance I’d work with them again – the firm is too big and there were too many distractions – but I’d go way out of my way for someone I knew, especially since they could help ME later, or put in a good word when the ax was about to fall.

The plan / assumption that people are centrally trained was really a joke, too… some were good, some bad, it all depended on what they brought to the table when they started. There is no common “firm” manner, since training in that vein was a local office specialty. Central training (when you went to another city) was basically a junket.

I put it to anyone reading this that the proper model for an IP & Services economy is not heirarchical, but some form of networked and decentralized decisionmaking. I think the central management idea in an IP&Se cannot be optimized via the heirarchical model, but it needs to be something more decentralized and less structured — when it comes to IP and services, the knowledge you need, the right decisions you need, are not going to be found efficiently by filtering them through a chain of people, up the chain, then down the chain as directives. One stupid person, one limited mind, blocks the flow and spread of the “right” idea. That is, the heirarchical model places all manner of roadblocks and obstructions in the way of the knowledge and decisions/suggestions getting to where they are needed.

So some work needs to be done on optimizing that model. I don’t know exactly what form it will take, or how decisions will be made, but it does need something for dispute resolution between nodes, when one “node” (i.e., person) with relevant knowledge says “x”, and another node says “No, z!” There may already be some computer/hardware networking techniques which are applicable here.

I would also suggest a term for it which I think carries the idea of who will be in these organizations — Kith.

I think the typical kith needs to be fluid — everyone would be in different kiths attacking different problems at different times… and you might be called in to help with a solution to one narrow aspect of a problem because you know one or two people in a kith, who know you know about those types of problems, then go back off and do something with some other group you deal with more regularly.

Hence, these kith are loose organizations of people you know whose skills you are familiar with (which is why I think the term “kith” is quite appropriate).

Any individual may be in a few of them at once in substance, and dozens, if not hundreds, at once in some lesser form. There’s probably an “inner kith”, the ones mainly tasked with a problem and its solution, and an “outer kith” — associates of inner kith members who might be called upon for information on a specific aspect of the problem.

And that name highlights the problem with IBM’s approach. It’s got the idea of matching up skills right, but it fails to value the relevance of working with people you know in solving problems — I have a friend who is smart as hell, but, since anytime he walks into a room, he’s the smartest one there, he tends to be rather arrogant about what he knows. So I know from my experience with him how well I can trust his opinions — because I know what he knows about and I can tell when he’s merely extrapolating from what he really knows.

It also bears a resemblance to the local office model, as well as (via that “outer kith”) the means to approach the problem with the local office suggested above.

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I do think that the historical system of isolating and unsocializing the smart ones in an effort to “normalize” them (i.e., limit their capabilities down to the “average”) is going to bite society in the ass — we really do need to work on making the smart ones more socially able and capable of functioning in a group. They will always have difficulties because their approach to things is always going to be different from the norm, but that is the reason they are so useful, too.

Anyway, that’s my US$.02… don’t spend it all in one place ;oP

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What companies need are leaders that have a vision and a plan, not a bunch of yes boys and girls that only look on how they can save their own hide. Unfortantely the last 40 years our education system has produced mostly illuminati liberals that are afraid of tarnishing their image and looking like non-inclusive snob. We need to start cleaning up the system by giving control of the schools back to the states and maybe in 20 years we will start producing some decent workers and freethinkers.

Managers have to justify themselves to strangers (upper management, accountants, investors, government regulators etc) who know little about the details and nuances of any any particular field or unit of a company. These strangers judge a managers worth by numbers, usually monetary ones. Therefor, there is an intense desire to create a system of metrics that can measure everything about a business function in an objective manner and communicate it anyone.

Unfortunately, many vitals elements in business, such as whether person A gets along with person B, cannot be measured and thus reduced to numbers.

One of the most important lessons a scientist learns in training is to understand exactly it is they measure and whether the measurements actually have predictive value. Unfortunately, to many people believe that number generated by a hunch or an inaccurate measure is better than no number at all.