David Sibbet

Inventing the Future of Management--Initial Insights

I have a little distance on the amazing gathering that I facilitated recently with Gary Hamel and his MLab team called “Invent the Future of Management.” McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm, co-sponsored the event along with the London Business School, and MLab, Gary’s new non-profit venture focused on catalyzing collaboration and contribution to the field which has been his life— leadership and management of organizations—businesses in particular.

He gathered 30 leaders in management development, education, consulting, and the CEOs of Whole Foods, Gore, Ideo, Google, and HCL (one of the fastest growing IT companies in India). His gathering question was “why can’t we bring as much innovation, adaptation, and engagement to our organizations as we do to our development of products and technologies?”

Back in the Flows of the "Real" World

I’m on the lip of change this week watching my energy shift from vision quest in the desert to the world of meetings. I’m leading a new finance team in a midsized company through an alignment process on Wednesday, then into a seminar called “Inventing the Future of Management” co-sponsored by the MLab (Gary Hamel’s new non-profit venture), McKinsey, and the London School of Business, Hamel’s long time base of operation. Gary’s invited a who’s who in management thinking to come to Half Moon Bay and ask why organizations can’t innovate, adapt, and engage more inventively. “We innovate with everything else – why not management?” he wonders. We’ve been helping get the agenda, templates, meeting infrastructure and everything else in place for several weeks now and it all comes to a head.

It’s been an interesting process re-engaging myself from sacred space back to day-to-day realities. It’s helped to begin each day in meditation, as I have since returning. That practice is deepening. And it’s been interesting to see with new eyes how fundamentally the world is not as it seems. One of the conditions of Buddha hood is understanding that things are not as they appear and to understand the causes of appearances. Getting caught in our representations is getting caught on the wheel of “Samsara,” the wheel of illusion. So what does this mean in common language, really?

On the Sunday of my return I woke to a dream, and wrote it down. I’d like to share what I wrote for it may have some clues:

Could "Slow Deep" be the Next Counter Culture?

In a recent post in the Future Commons, a blog supported by The Institute for the Future with which The Grove is an affiliate, Eileen Clegg asked a wonderful question about the speed of our current culture related to on-line worlds. I responded and thought the exchange was worth posting here. Eileen wrote:

It seems like most really great work happens in collaboration over a long period of time, through many cycles, as people bump up against differences (of perspective, personal style) and come to understand each other so that diversity becomes productive.

It’s frustrating that we have amazing tools to support deep collaborative work -- but instead of “going deep,” most of us are “spreading thin” --  multiple communities, frequent team changes, hundreds of online connections. Maybe we are (or at least I am) not smart enough to figure out how to engage in a steady, meaningful way across a universe of people and possibilities.

So I’ve been reflecting on loyalty, long-term work partnerships, authenticity, sticking-it-out, patience (personal aspirations...).   I’ve been thinking maybe “deep slow work” is the new counter-culture.

TED BIG VIZ Book and Movie are LIVE!!

You can download the TED2008-BigViz Book and see an amazing Movie of the 700 plus illustrations Kevin Richards and I did for Big Viz (see stories below). It's a BIG file, but amazing to see. Enjoy.

TED2008 Is Complete

650 images later Kevin Richards and I have finished our illustration of TED2008. Tom Wujec is now creating the book (and a video). All the TED talks will be posted on their web site soon. I'm exhausted,  very inspired  and wanting to share a couple photos of the Perceptive Pixel-MultiTouch Wall that we used, and some of the drawings. I plan to write a nice piece about the substance of the conference this week.

TED2008: The Big Questions

I'm down in Monterey at the TED conference about to plunge into a visualization challenge of expansive proportions. The agenda goes like this: Who are we?—What is our place in the universe?—What is life?—Is beauty truth?—Will evil prevail?—How can we change the world?—How do we create?—What's out there?—What will tomorrow bring?—What stirs us?—How dare we be optimistic? Fifty speakers will talk 18 minutes each about these subjects, in four courses of talks, with lots of networking and entertainment woven in between. Can you guess how much fun this is going to be!!!

The Grove's client Autodesk, is supporting this year's event with a BigViz project where two of us, Kevin Richards and myself, led by Tom Wujec, an Autodesk Fellow leading their visualization initiatives, will be documenting the ENTIRE conference.

We'll be doing this using the latest Wacom Cintiq tablets and beta versions of Autodesk's Alias Sketchbook Pro. Our drawings, some 5-15 for each speaker, will be saved and accessible on a huge portfolio wall using a prototype combination of Perceptive Pixel and multi-touch technologies If you've seen the movie Minority Report,or used an i-phone, it allows that kind of manipulation of imagery. You can pinch-reduce pictures, rotate them, sort them, move them around -- all by touch.

I don't know what we will produce, but it will be integrated into a book about this year's TED, focusing on the theme The Big Questions. We're calling ourselves "visual cartographers," and I'm focusing on making not only the big questions, but the patterns that connect these ideas visible.

If you want to follow the conference, it will be blogged and accessible at the TED.com web site. I probably won't be posting much during this period, but will inevitably reflect on our learning afterwards. Click on to see some of my practice warmups.

Yang Ming and The Labyrinth

New Year’s Day is a special mirror for me of what could be in the next year. This one was quite special. It began having my first South Beach Diet meal with Susan – two little onion, pepper, cucumber and egg quiches with tomato juice and three cherry tomatoes. I’m not the cook in the family, and this change is big for my wife, Susan, but we has plunged into it and both of us are learning about what our body does in response to all the highly processed carbohydrates, we like many others, have become accustomed to eating. It felt like the right thing to begin the New Year with. So what goes with right eating I wondered?

“Can we walk to the labyrinth this morning?” I asked. After a moment hesitation, for that hadn’t been part of Susan’s thinking, a smile came and she said, “YES!”

Before long we were hiking out the coastal trail at Land’s End at the northwest tip of San Francisco. It was a spectacular, crisp day. The trail is being extensively improved by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with wide walks and stone-ringed cutouts. This first day of the year there were more people than we have ever seen, of all ages and ethnic groups it seemed.

Did You Know 2.0

I was going through my back e-mails and came across a link from Lisa Kimball of Group Jazz (also the Organizational Development Network Board) to an amazing little video called Did You Know, created by a high school education project in Colorado with the help of Xplane. It's a powerful example of how simple graphics can communicate a staggering amount of information, and pose some sense shaking challenges to conventional wisdom. When I question my own attempts, at age 63, to try and understand the new media and web 2.0 environments, I'll just need to play this as a reminder. Click HERE to see it.

Seeing Patterns That Connect

A couple of days ago Chrissa Merron called from the OD Network to talk about the fireside chat that I and five other award winners would have at the upcoming Organization Development Network Conference in Baltimore. “I’m interested in topics and themes that might be interesting to discuss,” she said. The question challenged me. What do I think is the most important thing to be thinking about as a profession?

What jumped to mind immediately were the deep roots the ODN has in systems thinking and looking at organizations as organic, alive entities. I then mused on why the network would give The Grove the Members Award for contribution to the field. What does visualization have to do with OD? A lot I thought.

It's a Casino Out There

I’m flying over this country again to a client in Boston and I can’t shake out of my head a conversation I had last night with the President of a mid-sized company in the baked goods industry. His company buys millions of tons of flour, sugar, eggs, and other commodities every year. He knows the markets like a sailor knows the seas, and he’s scared.

“I used to be able to see the cycles, but its Las Vegas out there now.” He said. I asked him what he meant. “Well, last year the price of flour was about $13-14 a pound. Now it $26. Eggs have tripled in price since last year. It’s a disaster.”

“Why?” I asked. “Ethanol” he answered. The rush to look green and look like we are doing something about energy security has resulted in ethanol producers buying all the corn they can get. “There are 60 more plants on the drawing boards.”