Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 46, by Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com!JOE_PODOLSKY
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 95 11:32:36 -0800
Subject: Information Technology - Master or Tool
Last Wednesday (11/29/95), the _Wall St. Journal_ published a column called "Work & Family by Sue Shellenbarger. The headline over the column shouted, "Too Many Gadgets Turn Working Parents into 'Virtual Parents'." Shellenbarger quoted advice from several consultant and several advertisements about how to raise children in today's cybercommunity. For example: "...advice from adland: Business travelers can dine with their kids by speakerphone or 'tuck them in' by cordless phone. (If anyone suggested to my kids (says Shellenbarger) that they cuddle up with a cordless phone, they'd probably throw it across the room.) Separately, a management newsletter recommends faxing your child when you have to break a promise to be home, or giving a child a beeper to make him feel more secure when left alone." Shellenbarger is appalled by this advice. She says that, "High-tech gear fails families when they try to use it: 1) As a substitute for warm human contact...2) As a Band-Aid for too much absence...3) As a stand-in for adults...using it as a baby-sitting service." "The trick for working parents," she says, "is to find the middle ground - where technology enriches our ties with children, rather than underscoring separations." This, of course, is an excellent message on the life side of the work/life quality scale, especially appropriate for families where the parents (or worse, only one parent) have demanding, engrossing jobs. But it seems to me to be equally important on the work side also. Where's the right balance between technology-enabled virtual, global teams, and face-to-face contact? One way to test the idea is to look at an extreme. There's a new magazine out called _Fast Company_. The premiere issue has an article by William C. Taylor called, "At VeriFone, It's a Dog's Life (And They Love It!)." It's mostly an interview with the CEO of VeriFone, Hatim Tyabji. VeriFone is best known for the little box in most retail stores that verifies credit cards, and it's a player in all sorts of electronic commerce applications. More interesting for this essay, VeriFone, a $360 million company growing 20% a year, is the current archetype of a virtual company. While it's corporate offices are nominally in Redwood City, California, its real home is in cyberspace. They have projects literally around the world, from the Bay Area to Bangalore. Everything is done by e-mail; paper is literally banned. Tyabji says, "We are insensitive to distance and time...I don't give a damn where people are as long as they can access e-mail." And, to emphasize that point, one-third of the VeriFone staff is traveling at any one time. Tyabji himself, travels 400,000 miles a year. And even when VeriFone people are at home, they're not together. For example, it's CIO lives in Santa Fe, NM, and the head of human resources lives in Dallas. But, in spite of this dependence on IT, Tyabji stresses that "running...and growing any enterprise is 5% technology and 95% psychology...leadership is human. Leadership is looking people in the eye, pumping the flesh, getting them excited, caring about their families." He says, "Don't expect effective on-line communication without extensive face-to-face communication...The more we use technology, the more we need to travel." Taylor prompts Tyabji, "What you're saying is that e-mail is not just an information system, it's a social system. It transmits the values of the company." And Tyabji responds, "Exactly! Not many people think of it that way, but that's exactly what it is. I resonate with that big time." The result is that VeriFone people are always on-line, and are often away from their home as well. The tone is one of urgency, the dominant ethic at VeriFone. So, Taylor asks, "What kind of commitment do you expect from your people?" Tyabji replies, "We expect people at VeriFone to go above and beyond the call of duty - not because they are forced to, but because they want to. The people who join this company change. Their pace of life changes. Their intensity changes. Their emotional level changes...We are very clear about the quid pro quo of life at VeriFone...In return for all the freedom we offer, is a tremendous emphasis on accountability...You perform, you can do anything you want. You don't perform, you're out... "(But) in addition to being a really tough, results-oriented culture, we are also a culture of caring. We do things for employees that most companies don't even think of doing..." Tyabji describes their VeriKid program where children of employees can live for a while with other VeriFone families in other parts of the world, and the VeriGift program where employees pool their unused vacation time to donate to sick employees who would otherwise have to go on unpaid leave. Taylor then asks, "But (your company culture) raises some thorny issues. There are fewer and fewer boundaries left between business and personal life...When people join VeriFone, are they signing up for a job, or are they signing over their lives?" Tyabji answers, "It's a profound issue for us. The distinction between life at VeriFone and life outside of VeriFone, between professional and personal - that distinction in our company is blurred. We work very hard to blur it...All I can say is that every person has to come to terms with himself or herself in the context of this new environment..." This, of course, as Shellenbarger implies, is not a situation unique to VeriFone. Start-ups and consulting firms all try to create this kind of work/life stew. Even in more older, structured companies such as HP, high performance teams and customer service and support operations try to harness the energy of the whole person, not just the employee. So we are back to the age-old question, is technology our master or our tool? And the answer, of course, is that it is both, that information technology, like all other technologies, just gives us more choices. As always, how we choose is up to us. IBM publishes a monthly magazine for IT managers called _Beyond Computing_. In its November 1995 issue, Anne Coluori, president of the IBM user group Share, writes about virtual teams. She suggests that team participation and results of the team are a function of commitment. "Commitment," she says, "comes from the conviction of team members that they are making good use of their time and energy...The bottom line for teams - virtual or otherwise - is that any team in which members feel they are wasting their time is in danger of extinction. The upbeat opposite is a team in which members feel that they are learning, contributing, and working toward mutual goals." We each decide, consciously or not, how to live our lives, how to integrate all aspects of our lives, how to participate in the ever-larger society in which we live. We each decide about what commitments to make. Through those commitments , we determine how we grow and what we learn. Commitment and self-interest are inextricably linked. Information technology is here to stay. We, as IT professionals, not only should use information technology well as part of our own overall quilt of commitments, but also might well act as advisors and role models for others. It's a tough, but worthwhile task. Happy holidays, Joe