It's quite a surprise, but the number zero -- the abstract concept of "yes, we have no bananas" -- had to be invented. What might be obvious to you and me, along with round wheels and stupid networks, is actually the result of millennia of cultural and scientific development. The Romans struggled to develop their mathematical skills without positional digits and the decimal system, for which zero was a prerequisite. Forget calculus; arithmetic was enough of a challenge. Funnily enough, "zero" had been invented (discovered?) by by the Sumerians yonks before the Romans arrived on the scene. But hey, what have the Sumerians ever done for us? It took another 20 generations after the fall of Rome before zero made its way into Western culture via India and the Arabs.
I've been reading an interesting book, Who Really Matters? by Art Kleiner. It has a simple theme: what are organisations for, and who directs their resources? But the genius inside is the business equivalent of inventing the number zero. The purpose of an organisation isn't to service it's shareholders, customers, employees, beneficiaries or suppliers. It is to service a Core Group of people who may be drawn from any or all of these.
Well, "duh!", you say. None of us truly believed that executive salaries were allocated in the best interests of shareholders, customers where #1 or the front-line employees were a corporation's prime asset. But at last someone has stated the intuitive, and given a name the those who matter: the Core Group.
At first read, you might take this to be circular reasoning. Who really matters? The people who matter, of course! But it isn't so. Who matters are those whose perceived needs are taken into consideration when decisions are made at even the lowest levels in the organization. And that's it. Forget the formal structure and written statements of stakeholding. An informal social structure is what underpins the true power and legitimacy of those who matter. These Core Group members hold "equity", i.e. other people believe their needs have to be taken into account and met.
This has some important consequences for anyone planning (or in my case, failing) to be a change agent in a major corporation such as a telco. Using this book as a lens, I have a much clearer view of why the skunkworks I was part of did not meet its goals, and how I would approach this differently in future.
Mr Kleiner gives some useful advice at the ends of the chapters on how to identify core groups, interact with them and influence them. Thus the book contains a useful mix of analysis of the Core Group phenomenon, and synthesis of personal procedures and public policies to deal with them.
Overall, I found this an engaging and revealing read. If it has any weakness, it is that it requires further refinement. To elevate itself beyond management pseudo-science it needs to more firmly state the objective criteria for Core Group membership, to make testable hypotheses and predictions. Now that would really matter.
UPDATE: This all offers an interesting twist on principal-agent theory, one of the great innovations of 20th century economics. Grossly and irresponsibly simplifying, this is about how to incentivise other people (agents) to do stuff on your behalf (where you are the principal) while keeping the costs of policing them in check. Normally we would consider things like "how to make the board accountable to shareholder", "how to make the executives accountable to the board", or "how to make employees accountable to the company". But if the principal that matters is the Core Group, and everyone else is an agent, then we've got a new pattern. So I'd like to see the mathematical rigor of principal-agent theory applied to Core Group corporate sociology. No doubt a PhD in Economics ready for someone's taking...
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