Managers:  get out of the house

In a Ubiquity interview on the occasion of his new book “What’s the Big Idea: Creating and Capitalizing on the best Management Thinking” (Harvard Business School Press, coauthored with Thomas H. Davenport), management consultant and researcher Laurence Prusak gives managers their marching orders if they hope to keep current. What does he think they should do? “Oh, I’d read all the time, and go out there—go to conferences, go to meetings, talk to people, join consortia, and do things that aren’t in your own domain. Don’t talk to yourself. Don’t talk to just your peers. Get out. It’s astounding to me how little communication there is between the functions and departments in organizations. If you look at the classic textbook on human resources, you won’t see any reference in there to technology. If you take a technology textbook, you won’t find any reference to HR. These two things have a lot to do with each other, but the people doing IT and the people doing HR don’t know anything about what the others are doing. So my advice would be: Get out and meet people and talk to them! Go to different things, try different things, expand your mind a bit, and get some new ideas to think about.”

Ubiquity 15 Jul 2003