Lina Echeverría: An interview by Bob Morris

Lina Echeverría spent twenty-five years inspiring creativity and accelerating innovation at Corning Incorporated, one of America’s leading technology companies, that provided the world with everything from the optical fiber that enabled the Internet to the tough glass used for iPhones. Echeverría led teams of scientists and researchers that developed everything from ceramic filters for car exhausts, glasses for TV screens, optical glasses, and dinnerware.

At Corning, Echeverría created an environment where scientists were creative and productive; and teams balanced the ability to explore the edges of possibility, while delivering critical new technology on time and on budget. Echeverría was known not just for her ability to effectively lead and manage (and keep happy) creative scientists, but also for her ability to teach those skills to others. During her career, she led teams and organizations in the US and in France.


A native of Colombia, Echeverría was the first woman to seek admission and graduate in engineering geology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia at Medellín, inspiring a generation of women who followed. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in geology at Stanford.

Echeverría stepped aside from the corporate world to help create cultures of innovation inside companies and organizations. The mother of two children, she is fluent in English, Spanish and French, and lives in upstate New York with her husband, a research scientist. Her last book, Idea Agent: Leadership that Liberates Creativity and Accelerates Innovation, was published by AMACOM (November 2012).

Here is an excerpt from my interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing Idea Agent, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? How so?

Echeverría: With a start point of learning about providing constructive feedback, the guidance and dialogues with Dasarath Davidson opened the door to rich concepts on the spirit of leadership, empowerment and, mostly self-awareness. He understood my approach to leading groups and growing people and gave me the tools so the experience would be fulfilling, not frustrating, enriching, not draining. He was deep, demanding, and relentless and taught me much about commitment and courage and, importantly, the practice of balancing passion and detachment, the only way to face tough situations.

Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development? How so?

Echeverría: My advisor at Stanford, Bob Coleman, had a great impact in giving me wings, while raising the bar for every thing I did. He would put me on center stage of interesting challenges and opportunities, new to me and significant to him, and never failed to trust in me. He gave me a sense of empowerment that is still priceless—and terrific approaches, like his demand for “three options” for every challenge one faces.

Morris: To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?

Echeverría: I believe the greatest value of a formal education is that it surrounds you with people who are sharper than yourself, forcing you to bring out the best in you; it opens doors to fields and people and ways of doing things that enlarge your own. One has no idea if the field that you train for is going to be applicable to future activities. For many that is indeed the case: they keep and going deeper and deeper to become the world’s experts in one fields. But not for all. I went into geology because I fell in love with rocks, in the field and under the microscope with the puzzle of mountain building. I had no idea that it would lead me to glass chemistry and on the corporate world.

Morris: Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First, from Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

Echeverría: Funny you should start with one of my very favorite quotations, from the sixth century BC Lao Tzu—though I have known it in a different form:

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists,
not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
worst when they despise him.

“Fail to honor people,
they fail to honor you.”
But of a good leader, who talks little,
when his work is done, his aim fulfilled
the people will say, ‘We did this ourselves’ “

It is a timeless and compelling description of authentic leadership. It talks about things that are essential to authentic leadership such as empowerment and leadership as service (as opposed to self-aggrandizement).

Morris: Next, from Voltaire: “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”

Echeverría: This one takes us back to the previous one, as often those who “have found the truth” believe themselves to be superior, hence the fallacy of their own position.

Morris: And then, from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

Echeverría: The genius of Oscar Wilde is hard to match. So is his sarcastic humor. And in this one, he pairs them both.

Morris: From Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Echeverría: An earlier version of the need for “out of the box” thinking. Or “paradigm shift”. Too bad the concepts have become clichés, rather than understood and truly used, as Einstein extols us. Perhaps this is simply proof of how hard it is to break old habits.

Morris: Finally, from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Echeverría: Efficiency is often the great enemy of significance. But it has a lot of clout, and often takes first place in initiatives.

Morris: In Tom Davenport’s latest book, Judgment Calls, he and co-author Brooke Manville offer “an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance”: organizational judgment. That is, “the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader’s direct control.” What do you think?

Echeverría: I read this as a call for empowerment, a concept that I resonate with, that I have relied on, and that I have seen produce amazing results. Empowerment is about distributing authority in a group, it is about encouraging accountability to release the full power of its members, and about delivering BIG. Rather than weakening and debilitating the influence of a leader, as may be feared, in reality this commitment between organization and leader has compelling sway in unleashing and driving high performance.

Morris: Here’s a brief excerpt from Paul Schoemaker’s latest book, Brilliant Mistakes: “The key question companies need to address is not ‘ Should we make mistakes?’ but rather ‘Which mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?’” Your response?

Echeverría: I would have a hard time predicting which mistakes one should aim for. It is just as hard as predicting which ideas will succeed and which will fail. They are both exercises in futility. What I would advocate is that space for mistakes be made, the safety nets below the tall branches where the daring need to climb. If one needs to test the organization’s and leader’s deeply held assumptions, just give space to the members of the organization to define best practices; to think the un-thought of, to come up with ideas and push them through. As they do so, give them space to question. Their questioning will uncover those deeply-held beliefs and assumptions that, as your Peter Drucker quotation suggests, often point in directions better left untouched.

Morris: In your opinion, why do so many C-level executives seem to have such a difficult time delegating work to others?

Echeverría: Delegation is an important component of empowering others. The empowering stand of leading to bring out the best in others is about believing in people and being committed to their success and well-being. It is about seeing their potential—even before they do—and developing it, creating opportunities for them to walk into and grow, raising the bar and challenging people to stretch and expand. But it is also about raising the performance of an organization to achieve unprecedented results. Unfortunately, empowering is often interpreted as lack of authority and inability to control.

As to their reasons for not delegating, leaders are often beleaguered by desires identified with leadership—success, acclaim, influence, authority, control, fame, fortune, relationships, status—and their leadership experience becomes one of repeating actions that result in the pleasing reaction. Furthermore, at other side of the coin of desire appears the fear of not having what we desire. The mirror image of what we desire is what we often fear. If we desire authority and control, we dread delegation and empowerment. Leaders who desire control and authority are seldom those who are willing to delegate and empower.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Lina cordially invites you to check out the resources at her homepage.

Morten Hansen on “How Great Leaders Make Their Own Luck”

Morten Hansen is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and at INSEAD, France. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School for a number of years. Prior to joining Harvard University, Hansen obtained his Ph.D. from the business school at Stanford University. In addition to his academic career, Hansen was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in the London, Stockholm and San Francisco offices. He was part of the research teams for the international best-selling books Built to Last and Good to Great. Hansen’s research on collaboration has won several prestigious awards, including the best article awards from Sloan Management Review and Administrative Science Quarterly, the leading academic journal in the field. Several of his Harvard Business Review articles have been bestsellers for a number of years. He regularly consults with companies on collaboration and gives keynotes at leadership conferences. His new management book is Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results (Harvard Business School Press, 2009) and, more recently, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, co-authored with Jim Collins (HarperBusiness, 2011). A native of Norway, Hansen holds a Master’s degree in finance from London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Stanford University where he was a Fulbright scholar.

To watch an interview of Morten during which he shares his thoughts about “How Great Leaders Make Their Own Luck” please click here.

To read my interview of Morten and Jim Collins, please click here.

 

 

 

Was Steve Jobs a Good Decision Maker?

Jobs holding a white iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010

 

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tom Davenport for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The world continues to honor and mourn Steve Jobs weeks after his death, and there is plenty to praise. His legacy lives on in today’s iCloud and iOS 5 availability, and in the new iPhone 4S being praised by several prominent technology reviewers. David Pogue, my favorite technology writer, is so enthusiastic as to call the new phone’s features almost magical.

I’ve long admired Apple products, too. By my count there are six Macbooks, two iPads, and three iPhones—not to mention a few iPods—in my family’s possession. If you judge only by the product outcomes or by Apple’s market value, Jobs seems the best decision-maker in the history of consumer products.

But of course, like every other human, his decisions weren’t all great. In the 1980s he hired John Sculley to succeed himself as CEO of Apple, and Sculley presided over a period of slow growth and product missteps in the ensuing years. Jobs commented about Sculley: “What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for, starting with me.” Jobs’ major startup during his hiatus from Apple, NeXT Computer, was largely unsuccessful — at least in the hardware business. His decision to sell all of his Apple stock when Sculley pushed him out cost him billions. And when he came back as CEO, he allowed the backdating of stock options.

In terms of decision processes and style, Jobs was famous for being a tough micro-manager, at least where product design decisions are concerned. As a Fortune magazine article on Apple’s culture put it: “He’s a corporate dictator who makes every critical decision—and oodles of seemingly noncritical calls too, from the design of the shuttle buses that ferry employees to and from San Francisco to what food will be served in the cafeteria.”

He also didn’t believe in analytical decisions based on extensive market research. From The New York Times‘ obituary: ”Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Based on the evidence, I will grant that he made some fantastic design decisions, but not that he was an expert on effective decision processes.

Granted, there is some evidence that even Jobs came to realize the shortcomings of one man’s intuition as the only source of decision wisdom. In a summary of a 1997 interview, a New York Times article published earlier this year noted: “In his early years at Apple, before he was forced out in 1985, Mr. Jobs was notoriously hands-on, meddling with details and berating colleagues. But later, first at Pixar, the computer-animation studio he co-founded, and in his second stint at Apple, he relied more on others, listening more and trusting members of his design and business teams.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and has taught at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago. He is a widely published author and speaker on the topics of analytics, information and knowledge management, reengineering, enterprise systems, and electronic business. He has written over 100 articles for such publications as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications, and has been a columnist for Information Week, CIO, and Darwin magazines. His latest of a dozen books is Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right, co-authored with Brook Manville and published Harvard Business Review Press (2012). To check out Tom’s other blog posts, please click here.

 

 

Tom Davenport explains the five ways Pixar executives make better decisions

Tom Davenport

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tom Davenport for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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I’m writing a new book with Larry Prusak and Brook Manville. If we had to name it today, we’d call it Judgment Days: How Great Organizations Make Great Decisions. It’s about how organizations — rather than individuals — build their capacity for good judgment and decision making. We’re going to try to show how individual decisions, made on particular “judgment days,” were shaped and succeeded by activities to improve organizational judgment. We hope to describe a variety of organizations — from companies to schools to hospitals to foundations — that make consistently great decisions over time. In order to surface some of the ideas and get feedback from readers, I’m going to start blogging about the book and plan to get Larry and Brook involved in that activity.

We think that organizations with good judgment have a number of typical attributes. One is that they involve a number of different people in making important decisions. Their senior executives keep in mind that they don’t have a monopoly on knowledge and judgment and therefore involve multiple people in decision processes.

Let me give you an example. Pixar (btw, I really enjoyed Toy Story 3) has a phenomenal track record for making great animated movies. (Ed Catmull, the studio’s president and co-founder, recently wrote an article for HBR called, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.” Click here.) We don’t have access — at least yet — to details of the particular decisions made at Pixar, though some must have been difficult: for instance, the decision to make the movie Up about a 78-year old man who loses his wife and rides his balloon-floated house to South America.

How did Pixar make that and other good decisions? There seem to be several factors going on:

Its managers give its directors a lot of autonomy. The studio prides itself on being “director led” and gives them a high degree of autonomy. “Managers like to be in control,” but Pixar fights it, according to an interview with Catmull at an event The Economist put on in March. [Click here.]

Even though directors have autonomy, they get feedback from others. “Dailies,” or movies in progress, are shown for feedback to the entire animation crew. In The Economist interview, Catmull also describes a more extensive periodic peer review process:
“We have a structure so they get their feedback from their peers…. Every two or three months they present the film to the other filmmakers…and they will go through, and they will tear the film apart. Directors aren’t forced to respond to the feedback, but they generally do — and the films are generally better for it.”

Pixar uses a process for “postmortems” on the major aspects of movies after they’re completed. Ed Catmull described it as “like taking cod liver oil,” but the company insists on it anyway. During the postmortems, the team involved in the film is asked to come up with five things they’d do again and five things they wouldn’t do again. Postmortems not only surface the information but also help to prevent the problems from festering among team members. Catmull comments that because people are starting to game that postmortem process, Pixar is thinking of alternative approaches.

Pixar admits mistakes in other ways. Sometimes, when a movie project isn’t going well, Pixar will “restart” it. Toy Story 2, for example, wasn’t going well and had to be restarted. Catmull points to that restart as a catalyst for the articulation of several key values at the company.

Pixar has an extensive education program at Pixar University, with more than 110 different courses. That’s got to improve organizational judgment. And even there, employees are encouraged to make and admit mistakes. Randy Nelson, the director of Pixar University, says, in the book Mavericks at Work: “It’s the heart of our model…giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together.”

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. Over many years he’s authored or co-authored nine books for Harvard Business Press, most recently Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (2007) and Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results (2010). His byline has also appeared for publications such as Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Financial Times, Information Week, CIO, and many others. For more from Tom, visit his website [click here].

John Sviokla on the Netflix Prize

John Sviokla

Here is a brief excerpt of an article from the Harvard Business School blog. If you wish to sign up for a free subscription, read the complete article, and/or check out all the resources available, please visit http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org.

Can You Design an Internal Netflix Prize?
John Sviokla

As my friend Tom Malone, over at the MIT Center for Collaboration, has noted, there is no magic to crowdsourcing — but you need to design what you want from it. I believe that there are many problems in companies that look a lot like the problem Netflix faced — such as insurance underwriting, oil exploration, or evaluating an employee’s probable success. As long as the problem has lots of structured data and clear outcome variables (and the company can successfully design a way to keep customer and proprietary data safe) it makes sense to design a competition that uses the market in ideas. Then you just have to decide how much it is worth to you to have a 10% advantage over the competition on a key issue.

If it is just too hard for your organization to create such a prize, there are ways to unlock internal talent on important opportunities. Internal competition is the lifeblood of improvement. When I was an MBA student, I remember reading about succession planning at GE. At the time, Reg Jones was the outgoing CEO; to find a successor, he split the company into three “sectors” — which had a hodge-podge of businesses in each of them — and Reg put a different management team in charge of each one. As a student I could not see any coherence in the products and services in each group until it finally dawned on me that Jones was creating three mini-GEs, each with a broad range of businesses, and he was having a horse race among the three management teams. The winner? Jack Welch and his team. And of course, Jack used a similar strategy upon his own exit.

Is there a vital part of your business that you can create an internal competition around? Do you have ten call centers, say, which could be portioned out to different management teams to find new ways of driving satisfaction and productivity? Could you modify your website for segments of incoming customers and let different management teams experiment with the customer experience? Do you have different territories in which different senior executives can experiment with new sales and service models? Set the goals and ground rules — remember that clarity was a key component of the Netflix Prize’s success — and see who wins.

Often, the biggest challenge in mobilizing the talent inside your organization is learning to live with different solutions to the same customer problem. You need to ask yourself whether your current approach is designed to deliver what customers really want from you, or designed to keep employees comfortable. There’s a lot of improvement to be had — if you can get over the fear of ruffling feathers.

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Sviokla is vice chairman of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, Inc. (NASDAQ: DTPI). Prior to joining Diamond, Sviokla researched and taught at the Harvard Business School for twelve years in Marketing, MIS, and Decision Sciences. His extensive writings have appeared in books and journals including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a frequent speaker at executive forums worldwide and earned his BA from Harvard College, and his MBA and DBA with a major in management information systems from Harvard University. He can be found at www.sviokla.com.

Scott Anthony on “promiscuous” innovation

Scott Anthony

Here is a brief excerpt of an article from the Harvard Business School blog. If you wish to sign up for a free subscription, read the complete article, and/or check out all the resources available, please visit http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org.

My Best Innovation Advice? Be Promiscuous
Scott Anthony

Netflix now plans to replicate the contest approach, creating a $500,000 prize for a team that develops the best algorithm to turn demographic and behavioral data into a “taste profile.”

The seemingly low success rate of Netflix’s first contest — less than 0.2% of teams hit Netflix’s goal — carries a hidden lesson. If you are inside a company, and you have a single team working on a tough problem, what are the odds that you can beat the dozens or hundreds of groups working on related problems outside your company?

Many companies will tell me they just don’t have sufficient resources for innovation. My first reaction to this statement is to ask the company to carefully assess how it currently is allocating its results. Further investigation often highlights that a scarily high number of resources are working on “zombie projects” that really have no hopes of succeeding in any meaningful way. Reallocating those resources can dramatically increase a company’s innovation capacity.

The second recommendation is to do what Netflix did and find ways to spread the innovation load. This isn’t just about running contests. It is about involving customers in the innovation process in new ways; finding creative ways to collaborate with erstwhile competitors, and tapping into individual experts wherever they might be.

This isn’t a new idea — Hank Chesbrough, Don Tapscott, and others have written very eloquently about the power of more “open” forms of innovation — but it is even more important when times are tough and internal resources grow increasingly scarce.

Companies shouldn’t go to the extreme of outsourcing innovation. Complete outsourcing builds dependency and leads to internal innovation muscles atrophying. The very process of innovation — even unsuccessful efforts — can teach companies important lessons. And some tasks can really only be done by internal innovators. As always, balance is critical.

I believe in promiscuity when it comes to searching for new ideas. Look in every possible direction. You’ll be surprised by what you find.

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Anthony is the Managing Director of Innosight Ventures, a venture building and investing business with offices in Singapore, India, and the U.S. He has written three books on innovation: Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change with Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Guide to Growth with Mark Johnson, Joe Sinfield, and Elizabeth Altman, and The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. He has written articles in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Sloan Management Review, Advertising Age, Marketing Management, and Chief Executive, is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Online and serves as the editorial director of Strategy & Innovation.

Interview: Thomas H. Davenport

Thomas H. Davenport

Thomas H. Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College and is responsible for the overall management of the Institute for Process Management. He and Larry Prusak also manage the Working Knowledge program. His published works include Process Innovation, Thinking for a Living, Working Knowledge and What’s the Big Idea? with Prusak, The Attention Economy co-authored with John Beck, most recently Competing on Analytics co-authored with Jeanne G. Harris.

Note: This interview was conducted in 2007. Davenport is now in the process of completing another interview.

Morris: In your various books and articles, you offer excellent advice as to how to manage knowledge. Let’s begin with a more basic challenge, one which Carla O’Dell and Jackson Grayson examine in If Only We Knew What We Know: First determining what your information needs are and then what necessary knowledge already exists within an organization. Your views on that?

Davenport: I certainly agree that it’s better to start with the knowledge your organization possesses already. It’s somewhat surprising that relatively few organizations have done either of the two steps above. They don’t examine their strategies and decide what information and knowledge are critical to achieving them, and they don’t have a good inventory of what they know already. Those two steps in that order would be a great boon for knowledge management.

Morris: In What’s the Big Idea? you and Larry Prusak explain how ideas are linked to business success, who introduces ideas to organizations and how they do that, why “content counts,” where the best management ideas come from, how ideas interact with markets, where to find ideas most appropriate to a given organization and then how to sell them, and why idea-based leadership is essential to any organization’s success. These are admirable objectives. Why do so few organizations achieve them?

Davenport: People get very excited about business ideas, but they don’t manage them to fruition very well. There are a variety of problems in this regard. Most companies take on too many ideas at once. They don’t have any sort of process for monitoring how the idea is being implemented within the organization. GE is the primary exception. Under Jack Welch they developed a management system for making new business ideas a reality, and they were very disciplined about which ones they took on. Then there aren’t usually enough idea practitioners around to make it all work.

Morris: Also in What’s the Big Idea?, you and Prusak assert that “Idea-Friendly Culture” which (a) has open dialogue between and among all levels, (b) supports “boundarylessness” to maximize individual and collective intellect from both within and outside the organization, and finally, (c) encourages trust and responsibility which will “allow people to learn effectively from each other and provide motivation for putting ideas to work.” That said, what role could and should senior management have to expedite and support such initiatives?

Davenport: They control the organization’s resources, and each idea that an organization adopts consumes resources. So it’s very important that they decide which ideas enter the portfolio that the organization will try to implement. They’re really setting the idea strategy—“what ideas are we going to pursue?” They also have to put pressure on the organization to make things happen. At GE, Welch would call business unit managers who would be moving a little slowly on an idea, and say, “Why aren’t you doing more with digitization? This is really critical to our success and your long-term future here.” That’s obviously very powerful.

Morris: As you indicate in Thinking for a Living, what do you consider to be the appropriate relationship between knowledge workers and various technologies provided to them?

Davenport: In most cases thus far, knowledge workers have been the victim of the technologies. A lot of tools have been thrown at knowledge workers, and nobody’s given them much help in thinking about how it fits their jobs and their objectives. Now we all have a lot of technologies—laptops, desktops, PDAs, cell phones, pagers, etc.—but they don’t integrate very well, and everything is very fragmented. The result is that only a small percentage (less than 1% in my informal surveys) of knowledge workers feel that they are very good at managing their personal information and knowledge environments.

Morris: In the same book, you suggest that individual knowledge work improvement initiatives have two attributes. With regard to the first, why should they be focused on improving the performance of knowledge workers as individuals, not as members of a larger group

Davenport: I did some work with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon. I realized that they had figured out something important. If you want to improve how an organization gets better at software development, you need to address the problem on multiple levels: the company, the team, and the individual. I think the same thing applies to knowledge worker productivity and effectiveness. We really haven’t done enough at any of these levels for knowledge work.

Morris: Why should individually oriented initiatives be directed at improving some skill or capability, rather than instituting a new process?

Davenport: I really believe in both. Again, we should be working on multiple levels. Of course, you can’t do that for every job. You have to pick one or a few knowledge work roles that are very critical to your organization’s success, and focus on those.

Morris: In Chapter 7 of Thinking for a Living, you pose a very important question: “What’s more important to improving knowledge worker performance: technological networks or human networks?” For those who have not as yet read your brilliant book, what is the gist of your response to that question?

Davenport: Well, I try to go with the data, and when we asked high-performing knowledge workers how they get the information they need to do their jobs, they generally said they got more useful information from their human networks than from technological ones. Consider the implications of that.

Of course, you don’t really have to choose—you can try to improve both types of networks. The problem is that most organizations spend a lot more time and money on the technological networks, and ignore the human ones altogether. Knowledge workers are well aware of that neglect…and resent it.

Morris: In your opinion, what are some of the most common misconceptions about the practices of high performance knowledge workers and how they get their work done?

Davenport: I guess the biggest misconception is that you can’t do anything with knowledge workers, as I suggested above. Organizations just leave them alone. I think it’s possible to impose a bit more structure on knowledge work and measure and improve it in almost every case. Of course, you can go too far, and alienate these unique and very valuable workers.

Morris: Before concluding this interview, please tell us about your next book, Strategic Management in the Innovation Economy, which you co-authored with Marius Leibold and Sven Voelpel.

Davenport: That book is really a textbook about how to pursue multiple forms of innovation in the contemporary world. I don’t generally do textbooks, but Marius and Sven did most of the work. Right now I am most excited about my next book, which is about how companies compete on their analytical capabilities. It should be out in early 2007. I’m not a terribly quantitative person myself, but I see the world moving in that direction. I wrote an article on this topic entitled “Competing on Analytics” in the January (2006) issue of Harvard Business Review, and it’s gotten a more positive reaction than just about anything else I’ve written. So I’m excited about it.