- “The hyperactive hive mind” - unstructured and unproductive ongoing digital conversation that distracts us - Cal Newport wrote a book called a world without email - E-mail ushered in a new era where things could be figured out on the fly, as you need them - At first, this seems flexible,easy, and cheap - Unfortunately, it also leads to a lot of context-switching which does not help us concentrate - It makes us miserable and worse at our work - Slack is just better at implementing the hyperactive hive mind than email - Peter Drucker discovered that knowledge work requires autonomy in execution – you can’t tell knowledge workers how to do their job - ==Newport’s idea is that we have also built autonomy in organization, which isn’t turning out well== - When we leave organization up to the individuals, you end up with a hyper active hive mind because it’s the simplest implement as an individual - Often, enterprise software is sold through employee demand instead of what’s best for the organization - The hyperactive hive mind blurs the lines between fun, social, and work - One countervailing example is extreme programming - Two programmers work shorter days, all they do is code, their manager controls all the communication - We need more experimentation around productivity within companies - When Henry Ford was making the assembly line, there were many experiments, most of which failed. The costs at the factory went way up for a while, but there was a 10 to 100 X improvement at the end - This shift is coming in the next 5 years - the next big moonshot - The diminishment of intellectual specialization - People are wearing more hats, less able to do primary things that produce value - Managers can’t do their jobs when they turn into human routers - Leadership activities like coordination and organization fall by the wayside - Seeing issues down the road, giving support to individual team members - Solutions - Minimize unscheduled back and forth communication - Process-oriented thinking - Separate execution autonomy from prescribed organization - Cal Newport is a big believer in sync, real-time interaction - Meetings need to have processes - scrum stand up is a good example #podcast #theezrakleinshow