Some trends on change

Recently I have been spending lot of time and energy to understand the new form of organization structure. The question bothers me a lot because at some point I want to have my own StartUp and I want to know the 'ideal' for my own setting.

First I would like to mention some of the influence which I have been picking up from other people.

1. Clay Shirky:
Talks about Collaboration vs Institutions: Shirky predicts that in 50 years the current form of hierarchical organizations will go away. 
Talks about cognitive surplus: Decreasing work hours and increasing leisure time over the years with new 2-way technology we have immense possibilities with people's time. 
2. Nasem Taleb: argues about being big and complex.
3. Fritjof Capra: In hidden connections book, relates that how organizations are lively through their informal networks and Communities of Practice. How living social systems (organizations) cannot be changed but disturbed and they take only the message which is meaningful to them.
4. Christensen Clayton: tells us how a company built by innovation is killed by innovation and also a possible remedy to it.
5. Robert Burgelman: About innovating within a company. He talks about the role of middle management (variation) and the role of top management (selection) and role of strategy in it. 
6. Paul Romer: with his concept of Charter cities.
7. Muhammad Yunus: On building Social Business.
8. Some other talks on Change and new trends:
a. Sridhar Vembu on teaching school kids
b. Creating cultural change.
c. Malcolm Gladwells books like "The Tipping Point" and mention of a company which has only 150 employees per office.

Based on the above mentioned links and borrowing from my other practical experience probably I can qualify to think of a proposal. (I have always been interested in volunteering for student chapters and other adhoc setups. Like the one in which I was involved recently has fared quiet well. The setup is mostly non-hierarchical and voluntary basis )

Although I am not yet able to completely systematize the understanding of such setups, which are decentralized and voluntary contrary to the setups of the organizations we have now. However, it seems that there is an emerging new order to it!

You could argue that, why even ask these questions of change and new organizational structures and why not do things the old way! 

I have my explanation for it: I read news on daily basis about tech-companies, recently many have failed to respond to the competition and it seems big part of the reason is that they are not able to change. (so understanding change will help a lot!) and the world which we live in now is very different (our current understanding of it seems outdated)

To me it seems that there are certain elements which are needed for this new kind of organization (which I would like to implement at some point of time)

Coming from an old school way of doing organizations, I list some of the points here which I think is one of the possible way. 

a. An old school way of hierarchical organization reduced to just as the container/skeleton/facilitator of new ad-hoc, voluntary, decentralized and informal networks.
b. For these ad-hoc, voluntary, decentralized and informal networks (Let's call it AVDI Net) there might be some properties similar to that of a startup/voluntary movement etc

1. Presence of functions like problem owner to bring accountability.
2. a strong community of volunteers around the problem.
3. Presence of community of practices (CoP) and identification of them in the network.
4. To get the dialog going in the group several functions residing either in separate individuals or all in one individual would be needed. Like: Devil's advocate- A person to act as critic, Synthesis - A person to distill the conversation to make sense, Moderator - a person to facilitate the conversation etc
5. Very efficient communication tools for the network.  
6. Ability of network to regenerate itself.

c. Co-presence of different stakeholders in and around the organization: Like Society, Academia and Customers etc. This will help to achieve user driven innovation and shorten the feedback loop  for product life cycles and improve other processes of organization.
d. Network (AVDI Net) owners as Entrepreneurs (replacing middle management) to make the evolution of organization possible and making organization leaner. (linked to point a.1.)

Maybe I will add more to the list but I also invite the readers to comment/suggest and criticize the post :)

Fighting Corruption: Wiki way!

Few weeks back when I watched this http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html , I relaized that there is lot we can do in fighting corruption. Just today I was attending a session about data collection tools, one is from Google ODK and another startup from Finland mGeoS.

And I was connecting the dots, How about a corruption reporting service. why not a data collector for mobile where the citizens report corruption, the data collector can record already location, but one can also feed how much bribe they paid and to whom.

At the backend we can collect the snapshot of corruption in realtime who is getting the bribe and where and how much.

Unused human computation in India.

If you do search on your popular engine about number of Indian engg graduates per year, you might not get a very precise estimate but some vague idea that India produces some 600K engg grads per year. This must be growing atleast for some years to come.

There are other interesting things you might find in those results, like 30% of them are computer science graduates or only 25% of them are employable by MNC's (source some McKinsey report). Number of AICTE apporved engg colleges around 2000 (maybe less than that), which means per college a batch is around 300 students. (which kind of verifies the big figure)

If I start running the numbers on the part I am interested in is the B-Tech project. I seriously think as a B-Tech graduate from India, that BTP (B-Tech Project) was 6 months of time to do some hands on, which with some proper mentoring could have done wonders. So, if I try to guesstimate the Indian BTP human computation worth. It must be straight forward :

Worth = BTP Project Time * Number of Engg Grads * Per month salary which one can give to them
           = 6 (months) * 600,000 * 200 $ (say it 200 $, which is below than what they might get in industry)
          ~ 720 Million USD (did you start biting your nails already). But maybe that is the ideal case, but it gives an idea of the scale.

Recently on my Indian trip, I gave a small motivational talk in my B-Tech college department about  doing interesting projects, which can be shaped as Startups. I started a google group to engage people in conversation but not very sure how far we can take it. We only have a handful of students on it as of now.

I also went to my other friends (who are a bit active in industry both in North and South) asking them the same question that, why startups/MNC's are not engaging with university students in the way it happens in west.(atleast it happens in Finland, which might pass on as a representative of west for this claim) I could not get a satisfactory answer. But, it seems there were two main points

1. We (industry and students) do not have the right mindset in India.
2. Our students are lacking a process/platform to engage with industry.

A very helpful person whom I met in Bangalore, Akash Mahajan helped me to connect with Rahul Jha (a DCE grad) who is also trying to do some initiative in trying to tap this opportunity. Their initiative is known as Step2 (for which they also have a website). I managed to have a chat with Rahul and it seems that our ideas have synergy.

Now my head is boiling with a platform concept which can tap into this opportunity and help connect the two parties. Industry and Students, and as a side effect can give India more tech startups and over all quality improvement for Engg students.

Please contact me if you think you have some suggestions/criticism for the same. Or leave comment on the blogpost.