Team workRYAN REMIORZ
KARL MOORE: This is Karl Moore, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I'm speaking to Jonathan Spector, who's the CEO of the Conference Board, which is a conference board in 130 countries around the world. Jonathan, welcome to Montreal.
JONATHAN SPECTOR: Thank you. Nice to be here.
KM: Jonathan, you [wrote]a book with a co-author just a few years ago: We Are Smarter Than Me. What is your view of collaboration? Why do you argue that collaboration is so important in the economy, as it is today?
JS: Well, actually, We Are Smarter Than Me does focus on collaboration but it focuses also on collective intelligence - the fact that thousands of us can solve a problem better than one or two experts can in certain fields. This is really a phenomenon that is made possible by connectivity and by the Internet. It wasn't possible for almost all of human history. It wasn't practical for groups of people around the world to collaborate on a particular problem or on creating information or on analyzing things. And now it is. And so, we're in a completely new world. It's unknown what the role of collective intelligence can be, and the experiments that are taking place are absolutely extraordinary.
We tried to write a book - we tried to write our book - using collective intelligence. It didn't quite work, but it will, I think, in the future. There are groups that are trying to write plays and make paintings. There are groups that are trying to assess [the threat of]terrorist attacks. There are groups that are predicting product sales for companies, groups that are trying to solve scientific problems or groups that are trying to create new software applications for astronauts. There's really no limit and, in the end, it will sort out. Not everything will be done by collective intelligence, but I think it's going to be a remarkable new field and it's all enabled by the Internet.
KM: When you think about this idea of collective intelligence, does that mean that we're going even more dramatically from command-and-control [approach]to more of a collaborative teamwork approach? Is it going to have that kind of impact on the work of executives?
JS: I think, yes, it will have some of that impact and what's fascinating about this - you really hit on an important change that's going to take place - the most difficult transition that I think will take place, as collective intelligence becomes a tool, is not the behaviour of us as individuals - we participate in a discussion forum or we lend an idea or we participate in a group activity - it's the people who are managing that, the managers or the executives.
And what we found, when we tried to write our book with a collective approach, we found that we, the managers - there was a team of six of us - we couldn't relinquish control. We couldn't let the people decide what the chapters should be. We had to decide what the chapters should be. We couldn't let them decide what software platform to use. We had to decide what software platform to use. And every time we, as the executives, took a decision away from them, they disengaged a little bit from us and, by the time we recognized it, it was a little bit too late.
As so, we were a perfect experiment for how managers were not trained. We don't know how to act when there's a group out there that we can't control but has intelligence collectively. We don't know exactly what the norms are. We don't know what the rules are and, by the way, it's because it's early on. We didn't know how they would behave because they don't know how they are going to behave. It's all new to everybody.
So, I think the biggest transformation is going to be in … You know, let's say you're the head of marketing for your company: Who owns your brand? Do you let your customers own it or do you own it? And how do you manage as the head of brand management for a big company? It's something that's undefined and that transition over the next 10 or 20 years is going to be fascinating. I honestly don't know how it's going to turn out.
KM: This has been Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today I've been speaking to Jonathan Spector, who's the CEO of the Conference Board, which is the Conference Board in 130 countries.