Theory X, Y & Z... Somewhere between Taylor, McGregor and..... Darwin

What is more interesting a DAG, slicing tensors, or discussion on human motivation or just taking the human out of the equation and using RPA ..... "Widgets as workers" are definitely something to look for, but I won't hold my breath for software cyborgs to raid the enterprise just yet; repetitive tasks are bound to extinction, that I wont argue. As I look for deep learning the brain of the organization, and fuzzy algorithms, an offshoot to indulge in, the fact remains that organizations are more human than machine; they are more nuanced than an exact science.

You can't motivate an algorithm, you can tune it, you can make it better, but its cold calculations can only handle tasks it is meant to optimize. Algorithms have few fixed needs and hence are boring, they are only interesting while in development. Humans on the other hand are infinitely more fascinating and just for that we will continue our discussion.

So the question is how we lead ourselves and other warm machines with their pattern recognizing cognitive processing to peak performance. Are our organizations Theory X based, or Theory Y based, or maybe they decided to have the last "letter" on it and adapted Theory Z or are a mix of X, Y and Z along with some borrowed concepts from F.W Taylor's principles of scientific management. There is much literature available in field of organizational theory but for this blog I will focus on few excerpts from the mentioned works.

Some of the assumptions in principles of scientific management such as the tendency of the average worker to take it easy and that most people in an organization are average, is a bit hard to swallow and seems a harsh assessment of human nature. I do agree that the "employers knowledge of a given class of work gets tainted by their own experience which gets hazy by age and casual and un-systematic observation of their men"....(aka MBWA and although Gemba may work on shop floors, it will fit the above statement by Taylor) but what follows after wards seems very autocratic and Victorian explanation of employees...the evolution of organization is missed since the measurement of knowledge worker is a more excruciating a task then measurement of a factory widget maker. Even if the modern worker is software widget maker the complexity of innovation, the abstraction of work and varied paths to revenue realization make management of initiative and incentive that more difficult.

On the other hand it will be too short sighted to quote and nit pick few choices from Taylor's seminal work. The premise of Taylor is employer and employee are in it together, and there is a win/win for both. It does however seem to portray the "average" worker as a more controllable form of a resource which is inclined to "soldiering". If the traditional knowledge of the workman is converted to rules, laws and formulae by data collection... productivity enhancement through AI and machine learning will make Taylor proud, and not in the least at the cost of the worker but in hopes that as repetitive work is handed off to machines to continuously improve, the worker is inevitably forced to evolve into a more thinking being as science replaces rule of thumb, and process follows a trial, and co-operation is developed based on process and eventually despite the nature of work there is equal division of responsibility between management and workman. 

By now you must be thinking where are the X, Y and Z. Theory X and Theory Y are theories of human motivation developed by Douglas McGregor. In (over) simplified terms distrust of employees is Theory X and trust in employees is Theory Y. Theory Y is where Maslow and Scanlon Plans come in and Theory X is the command and control model of military driven largely by employees' trained to accept the dictates of management. But in the age of information even military has to evolve and quoting Stanley McChrystal from Team of Teams, where he sees military as "....not a well oiled machine but an adaptable , complex organism"  pointing that the game, even for a very structured and hierarchical organization like army has changed from command and control to more empowered smaller units.

For some background on Theory Y and Z and we need to go back in time and sift through the very enjoyable papers by Maslow and the Scanlon plans, and while we will ignore the Hawthorne studies and Murray's system of needs, we will use Maslow's hierarchy of needs as encompassing similar concepts. Maslow's studies are geared towards generalization of theory of motivation based on physiological and "softer" human needs and the Scanlon plan had its origination in a more tasked organizations such as manufacturing plants, but both of them in some way influenced Theory Y. I will skip the Theory Z of Dr. Ouchi as it is based on similar principles of Theory Y and extends it to Japanese cultural ethos (and I haven't had time to really go through it in detail).

The scientific management may be able to fine tune tasks by timing and optimizing details, but humans, the predominant productivity engines of the organizations, are not just driven by monetary incentives, besides there is always a wall to financial lures. Theory X and Theory Y are specific way of thinking about organization human resources. Concepts of soldiering and loafing are usually attributed to the Theory X that pictures employees as devoid of ambition, zeal, drive and commitment. Theory Y on the other hands give employees a more positive nod. Although Theory X gets associated with Taylor's concept Soldiering and loafing, it is a very narrow view of principles of scientific management. Practically, if you feel Big brother is watching,  and employees are coerced, controlled, directed by punishment, you are in Theory X environment, If you feel you have opportunities to learn and grow with the organization, and  the other needs like self esteem, self respect, self confidence, autonomy for achievement, competence and earning deserved respect of fellow beings, are met for the individual (for now we can leave the discussion of quantifying those to the side) you are in Theory Y. I will be the first to admit these are not easy distinctions to make since there are lot of gray areas within each and most organization employ a mix of theory X and Theory Y but in the long run companies, culture does shift in one way or the other. Also both Theory Y and Taylor's principles eventually point towards bridging the gap between employer and employee needs, the mechanisms may differ in each.

Lastly what are the evolutionary effects of Theory X and Theory Y, along with Taylor's principles of scientific management on an organization. Here I will borrow, rather generously, from Darwin's basic theory, with organizations as a specie. If we think about it McGregors basic tenants of Theory Y are evolutionary. An environment where a living cell or  a being continuously evolves is a akin to an organization where it's employees grow. Each generation of employees will have individuals that will meet the rigors of business and will help sustain or grow the business, those are survivors. The interaction of individual traits of those survivors with organizational environments will produce, observable, desirable attributes and collectively the organization will become a specie on its own with company culture as its life force. If unable to collect enough "survivors", it will become extinct where by its survivors, those workers with desirable traits, will either form a new species "entrepreneurs" or will be adapted by the surviving collectives, competitors, to start their survival cycle again.

It all starts from what theoretical assumptions management holds about managing and if the collective behavior of the organization is, a consequence, a cause or a symptom. Evolution is not voluntary, it is mandatory.... now lets think where each of our organizations lie in the spectrum of cultural evolution from A to Z

Your employees are not your best asset

...the asset is your employees ability to process information specific to your business processes and making informed decisions to benefit the customers. One can argue that it is same as having smart employees, and a company can just hire intelligent people to create value. Critical here is the information specific to the company, generated through normal business workings and what portion of that information actually becomes experience and that's where the future is being defined.

            The case in point is the availability of information the power to process that information and how much of both is needed to make profitable decisions. Sane decisions can be made with relatively less information but that is at the cost of risk. In absence of accuracy the risk must increase and the processing unit, that is your employee, must rely on his/her experience. The purpose of data and algorithms is not fancy charts and stunning visualizations, it is to provide simple insights that reduce risk by augmenting experience, and sometimes even correcting it.

             It depends on use case but most non life threatening business situations require only a certain accuracy to be meaningful. The data doesn't improve the verity, but the processing and tuning the machine, whether it be the functional areas of your organization, warehouse operations, website optimization, speech in sales calls, transcripts in chats, features in your products or thousand nuances of your various customer touch points, or the effect of a light spectrum on every leaf of a plant in a hydroponic farm, does.

              When you compete at human level, it comes down to domain knowledge, experience, intelligence, creativity and endeavor to get ahead. The combination of data, if it is appropriately labeled and collected, to define the context and outcomes, with the transforming power of distributed computing and iterative algorithms can enhance employees. We already see world dominated by companies where revenue to number of employees ratio is order of magnitude greater than average. The ability of employees to create value for the company lies in their expertise to enhance its product and services, that can either command a premium or can be sold in numbers, both of which require that more is done to the product, mandating same individuals doing more of what needs to be done at faster speeds and greater quality, or leap fogging through innovation.

             The democratization of static and iterative insights and automation of required actions, build upon the scalable computing stacks in cloud and out of the box algorithms that fit various business cases, will define future competition in a different way. Yes the employees will remain an asset, ignore the attention grabber title, but as the availability of data and ability of machines to crunch and understand the data increases so will the competition and it will test the employees ability to harness data and ingest the real time recommendations. An understanding of how the organization can augment the information processing power of its employees will create scalable advantages for the long term.

Deep Learning the mind of an organization Part 2

Blogs, they are wonderful, they live and they express. The quest for knowledge is not a trivial pursuit and the magnitude of captured thoughts so huge that one can comfortably traverse the variants of their own mental pathways without a regard or concern for already tread paths. But caution must be exercised when venturing into deep forests of imagined realities as what may seem as a discovery of a new universe might have already witnessed visitations by many an earlier interpretations, but none the less the pleasure of following the flows of your own design should be done fearlessly, and maybe even just for fun as this blog.

Not to diminish the complexity of high level abstractions, it is a bit more tedious to predict the required calculations. In part 1 of the deep learning the brain of the organization I simply stated that it is possible to capture the signals and learn from those indicators how the organization can be predicted. If the organizations actions can indeed be interpreted as the manifestations of micro decisions of its people in various functions and their combined efforts as the production of one or many desired outcomes then the information flowing through those synapses has to be an order of magnitude larger than neurons firing in one brain. 

Where do we record such massive information from a single system of immense complexity. The search of that recorded complexity lead me to the black box. The black box, aka the flight recorder records every single input to a flying object for short period of time, including the sounds of the buttons, the chatter of cockpit and whole lot of other data. The BFU regular findings though interesting, I lost my interest pretty quickly. The concept though was the same, every thing must be recorded to understand the incident.

The science of understanding processes is hardly new and it drove me towards the path of DSA. The analysis of complex systems and decision processes, in the context of learning the workings of the organization, is inevitable and I really like the concept of "fuzziness" in human reasoning to summarize ideas by Lotfi. The concept "use of linguistic variables and fuzzy algorithms, .....provides an approximate and yet effective means of describing the behavior of systems which are too complex or too ill-defined to admit quantitative techniques of system analysis", and what systems can we claim are more complex and ill defined then the ones shrouded in idiosyncrasies of human interactions to come up with a "methodological framework which is tolerant of imprecision and partial truths".
My struggles with fuzzy algorithms, universe of discourse, fuzzy feedbacks and fuzzy instructions, in the limitations of time I can allocate to such explorations, are out of scope of this diary, but the ventures indeed will be recurring theme in following posts.

Digital Utility Agents and The Fabric

Web rooming and show rooming are not new concepts. Show rooming....you are right in gawking out on this as show rooming is so yesterdays news that ended with some people using Amazon's bar code scanner on brick and mortar. I think we can add to those two terms up streaming and down streaming as the online version of show rooming when visitors to one cite go some where else to transact. If you are the party creating a deliberate redirection you profit, for other cases an equilibrium is eventually reached. That equilibrium for some companies is the end of the business and, others struggle to maintain or improve status quo and yet others carve a place to thrive.

        Although humans have a natural tendency towards path of least resistance and we lean to the comfort and security of the known vs. unknown, the reality of the internet is no barrier to free roam and no shame to change loyalty. We all gravitate to more frequent as more stable and many times the benevolence of the customer towards carefully crafted and free content does not offset the lethargy of creating a new account and  the inertia of easier to deal with existing relation. As the users tolerance of ever increasing content and marketing mechanisms reduces to the point that they automatically lean on the path of least resistance, the path that is the known "eco system" owned by few companies or the path where big chunks of the e-commerce funnel is owned by few companies, the race for keeping the users engaged on their platforms heats up; the quest of large technology driven companies.
       
          The future carves its own path and there is always a chance that companies vying for internet of things, autonomous vehicles, AR, VR, AI, HRI (human robot interfaces) and BCI (brain computer interface) get their piece of the computerized commerce and that is one of the reasons why many companies are trying to capture the next phase of computer intelligence by investing in AI hoping that their intelligence becomes the core of the digital fabric or it comes to be the core of some integral part of the digital fabric. For now innovation and early entry into various important blocks like Smart devices, Operating System, Information scoring hubs, Communication hubs, Voice assistants and many of the everyday DUAs (digital utility agents) that we rely on and engage with on regular basis come from few big companies. The digital utility agents are the software and hardware widgets, gadgets, sites apps and everything in between. All of that digital abstraction that delivers us some function, task, or emotional engagement, I call it a digital utility agent.

          While larger players are on a constant quest to create product and service adjacencies in their offerings and to weave themselves as intricate part of our day, from reciting the morning news to turning off lights at night, other companies have to try to make their offerings a requisite part of the digital fabric by finding ways to either become part of the undercurrent that moves the users towards the hubs controlling the information flow or to become hubs themselves. The future will belong to the companies that are working to become part of the digital fabric not just using it.

You are the cookie

You are the cookie, and the world is the browser. In case you were wondering about privacy on the internet, I think that is the thing of the past, soon, think tomorrow, your voice will be your thumb print and your face will be your id, and may be you will not be connected to a pod supplying power to the matrix but you will definitely be a series of bits tracked across the finite space that you engage in.

The last remaining battle front for the user 360 is their life at any moment. Thanks to some of our enterprising human counterparts who are always devising ways to trade their cunning for some risk, you can't really walk into any sociable establishment without having some sort of a camera scan you. The reel that needed to be viewed frame by frame a million times over to figure out if a person was wearing glasses can now identify the antagonist or the protagonist of a frame in matter of milliseconds. The same person will leave a trace of personal attributes on voice enabled devices; from speech to speaker, the tone and the timbre of a connected you.

The good thing is that you can stroll into any location offering commerce of any desirable merchandise or service and you can simply gratify your need and go without acknowledging the trade, except that you will be deducted of your net worth automatically and remit you will. Now if you thought credit cards created a false realization of dreams, without real credit, (calculated risk is not real net worth) imagine what the "distance" of never having to think about the payment will do to saving for the future; the pig will starve.

The point is not whether your journey will be private, it never really was, since the inception of credit cards, but the dots were never as connected and as easy to cluster as today. Privacy concerns then are not to be troubled with, but the real dilemma is when you were a distant moving target, you had a chance in a world full of arrows, but when you are a bulls eye that an ad or a drone can pin point with near perfect accuracy it is a different sort of debate. Then you become the cookie in a world that you browse in and a cookie that you just can't delete.