Point of View
In 1956, Ptirim Sorokin wrote a cynical volume entitled, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences. His thesis was that in many intellectually and politically competitive disciplines, there is the tendency for "new ideas" to be uncredited and derivative from prior work. Over generations, the quality of work progressively degrades as each generation plagiarizes the previous, but incompletely and clumsily. Though many disciplines progress as the weight of evidence and logic accumulate, less scientific enterprises are often guilty of Sorokin's sobriquet, "New Columbuses", discoverers of an already colonized land.
While our world of technology progresses with blinding speed, our technology of management moves by fits and starts, and frequently sees the re-invention, and re-re-invention of methods long known and mastered in previous generations. Our brilliance in technology has a counterbalance, our hubris in managing organizations and people. The smarter we get technically, the more we seem to forget the basics of process and of human behavior.
Consequently, when technology matures to the point of enabling "cloud" computing, someone gets the idea that we can cloudly measure and manage people by tracking the minutiae of their daily work and micromeasure and micromanage them, treating professionals like production machines. While virtuosity comes from accruing lots of effort and practice, learning in human organizations often comes from the explorations and detours made that validate or improve current practices. The little excursions from the defined tasks make the connections necessary for a rich learning organization, just as good jazz is often defined by the space between notes and the explorations made in the moment. The important rigor of good process management must be balanced with the inspiration and judgment that cannot be programmed.
We have to balance people, process, and purpose, and not put all our effort into one dimension of an organization and ignore the others. You cannot manage people to outperform the limits of the processes they work in, and you cannot engineer flawless processes when the purpose of the effort is questionable. A well-intended but off-balance approach can break an organization; a balanced perspective yields the insight that each dimension requires the other two.
Our point of view is that we need to be constantly aware of the nature of the problem at hand, and bring appropriate methods to resolve it. Solving problems with inherent uncertainty using spreadsheets often gives precise and incorrect answers, just as solving technical problems with a consensus approach can put a drag on progress.
In taking a plainspoken approach, and keeping a balanced perspective, sometimes you will find that you have simpler and faster solutions that people can understand. That's our view.