Working Smart

The Power of Minds at Work: Organizational Intelligence in Action
By Karl Albrecht
Amacom, 2002, $24.95

When grouped together in an organization, intelligent people tend toward collective stupidity. Although you may have already concluded this for yourself, in organizational consultant Karl Albrecht’s The Power of Minds at Work, this assertion is posited as Albrecht’s Law.

The book begins with a brief discussion of the dynamics that lead to collective stupidity—or "learned incapacity," as he politely describes it. That incapacity includes various forms of dysfunction, groupthink or denial that may result from faulty leadership or outmoded and rigid systems. This discussion turns out to be a prologue to the book’s real subject matter—the dynamics of the opposite of collective stupidity, namely, organizational intelligence (OI), which he defines as "the capacity of an organization to mobilize all of its brainpower and focus that brainpower on achieving the mission."

That sounds good, but is there any way of determining if a company has OI? Yes, says Albrecht; by scoring it using his seven aspects or "traits" of OI. Those traits are strategic vision, shared fate, appetite for change, energy or "heart," alignment and congruence, knowledge deployment and performance pressure.

Albrecht devotes a chapter to each trait and provides loads of anecdotes to illustrate his points. Although some are old chestnuts of business lore, some feel new and up-to-date, including the recent predicaments of Enron and the U.S. Catholic church.

It sometimes feels as if the author has just taken a good metaphor and turned it into a long book. He tells the reader early on that not even he has a method for making an organization highly intelligent. The best he can do, he says, is to call attention to the things that an enterprise can do—or should avoid doing—to build OI. It would have been better had he given the reader a little less food for thought and a few more recipes for action.

Slow and Steady

Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services
By John Hagel III
Harvard Business School Press, 2002, $29.95

The cover image—a snail with a box tied to its back—seems to say it all. The much-touted arena of Web services is going to force many of us to think outside the box, but since it’s advancing on us at a snail’s pace, we have some time to get ready. In Out of the Box, author and noted former McKinsey consultant John Hagel presents one of the clearer explanations of Web services available (for further enlightenment, check out The Limits of Web Services).