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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
An Ode To Corporate Friction
by Jaffer Ali
As is my habit, I like to begin each of my articles with
a quotation that goes to the heart of what comes after-
wards. Today we borrow from the 18th Century poet, William
Collins, who said: "That willingness to slow down and
examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives, that
is the poet's interest."
I'm not suggesting that every organization hire a poet
tomorrow (though that may not be such a bad idea), however
it seems clear ? at least to me ? that weneed to find a
way to reintroduce more mystery and more wonder into our
corporate cultures. After all, great marketers are ? like
great poets ? sharply intuitive first and foremost. But
what does this have to do with the digital ecosystem?
I have spent the last twenty years trying to reduce
friction in my companies. It made perfect sense on one
level. Reducing friction meant automating, lowering
costs and saving time. Speed became all important.
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But something unintended happens when you force unchecked
momentum on a frictionless environment, something
disastrous. Permit me to clarify: the stock market has
become a virtually frictionless exchange in which millions
of trades are executed daily with digital, nanosecond
efficiencies. What happens when frictionless automation
on this scale collides with investor attitude (momentum)?
Huge, wild swings, margin calls, and ? ultimately ?
disastrous market collapses of unfathomable scale and
consequence.
We are we so hell-bent on automating systems and creating
digital efficiencies (reducing friction), that quantifi-
cation becomes the fanatical means to its own misguided
end -- a technological imperative utterly divorced from
the holistic goals of a company and culture.
We need to introduce a means to throttle our irrepressible
urge to accelerate faster and faster. We need to know where
we're headed and why we want to go there before we rev up
our engines and hit the road at hypersonic speeds. While
this may seem obvious, it becomes increasingly critical
once we understand that instability accrues as a natural
byproduct of unrestrained digital acceleration. Few of us
have the vision, let alone the desire to know what lies
ahead, yet the imperative to get there ever-faster seduces
us like a siren's song.
It's clear that what we need to do is slow down and impose
purposeful friction on the system. We need time to catch
up with our tools. We need time to deliberate over and
decide what's important to us in our changing environment
so we no longer consign ourselves to a permanent state of
crisis management and reactionary foolishness. Deliberate
restraint is critical in an age of such immensely powerful
tools of scale, and needs to become the number one job
function of all senior executives.
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There are undoubtedly some misguided critics and otherwise
lazy people out there who will misinterpret my call to slow
down as an excuse for inaction. But quite the opposite: I
merely call for deliberate action to counter a digital
culture of almost pure reaction. Imposing friction and
slowing down, while simple in theory, is by no means easy
in practice. It requires a rare and judicious blend of
deliberate thought and the courage to challenge our assump-
tions. Slowing down is hard work.
Unfortunately there's no scientific way to determine the
right combination of friction and momentum for a company,
no magic algorithm. Indeed, these dynamics change within a
company as the environment changes.
Deliberately slowing down affords us the time and space
to find new patterns in our environment; patterns that
our brains are innately wired to seek out. These patterns
inspire our hopes and dreams and give purpose to our
actions. Try it for yourself. The next time you feel
compelled to pursue speed for speed's sake, take a deep
breath, slow down, and think about adding a little healthy
friction to your life.
Our corporate culture columnist says we need to slow down
a little bit and take a look at where the digital content
and advertising business is headed. Deliberate restraint,
he says, is critical in an age of such immensely powerful
tools of scale, and needs to become the number one job
function of all senior executives.
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