Comments on: Bursty

By: Andrew Boyd

Andrew Boyd — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 05:33:51 +0000

For the last time… Drucker advocating that senior managers take responsibility for their own personal productivity does not clash with Anne Zelenka or anyone else preaching collaboration… sheesh… it is not about the promotion of individual productivity at the exclusion of group collaborative productivity. You are the knowledge worker 2.0 that Drucker predicted, so is Anne, deal with it

I’ve worked with Matt, and with Steve Collins, and with a bunch of other people that have read Drucker, and trust me, we get burst work.

By: magia3e

magia3e — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:02:10 +0000

I’m afraid you’re taking my comments out of context.

Anne and Drucker are actually talking about the same thing – removing traditional organisational hierarchies, traditional ways of working, and empowering people to work in the way that best suits them (whether busy or burst).

The whole discipline of Knowledge Management is about getting these ideas into the heads of traditional managers who usually just want to manage everything, including knowledge. It is the evangelising of this message that Drucker is best known for.

By: Audrey Eschright

Audrey Eschright — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:13:23 +0000

One of the most interesting ideas I got out of Newton’s Wake (by Ken MacLeod–it’s SF, mostly Glasgowian thugs! in Space!) was the characters’ participation in an organization that operated by building small temporary teams that went out and did whatever, and if they came back successful that gave them however much more status and rank for the next gig.

Okay, so this was fiction and the organization was essentially a crime family, but the idea of small temporary teams stuck in my head. Why can’t more work be done that way? There’s the problem of finding the right people for a job, but that’s why we’re all so focused on networking these days. With the current pace of technology, wouldn’t we gain a lot from focusing on creating the team for this job right now, not a long-term empire?

By: Anne Zelenka

Anne Zelenka — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:55:38 +0000

Yes, exactly. Your restatement “Workers, organize yourselves” is exactly it.

I’m in the same place you are — not making anywhere near what I could as a regular employee. But I love what I do and get to organize myself with other people on an ad hoc basis as I like. It’s people first, organizations second, if at all.