Peter Smith: Blog

One of the few blogs that I reg­u­larly read is “Jon Udell’s”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/. Jon was once an editor at “Byte”:http://www.byte.com/, which some say was the best com­puter magazine ever, so some of his columns can be a bit techy. How­ever, there is gold in them thar moun­tains.
In a recent “post”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/04/16.html#a975 he alluded to an earlier “article”:http://udell.roninhouse.com/bytecols/2001–05–24.html in which he talks about using a blog as a way to man­age some­what vir­tual team for pro­ject man­age­ment. What struck me (besides the eleg­ance of the idea) was the link to storytelling. The idea of story telling and nar­rat­ive has been quite pop­u­lar in cer­tain strands of the man­age­ment lit­er­at­ure (e.g. See “David Barry’s”:http://www.geocities.com/drdavidbarry/ and David Elmes clas­sic art­icle “Strategy retold”:http://www.geocities.com/drdavidbarry/StrategyRetold.doc).
This ideas of present­ing a coher­ent story is very potent. Whether one is try­ing to sell a strategy, man­age a team, or motiv­ate an employee, hav­ing a story — rather than some­what dis­join­ted facts — helps those involved to make sense of what is going on (might go on). This can be seen as a link here back to “R, H & G”:http://www.thereflectivepractitioner.org/ps/archives/2004/04/12/the_structuring_of_organizational_structures. That reminds me, I’ve prom­ised “PB”:http://​staff​.busi​ness​.auck​land​.ac​.nz/​p​b​o​x​all a couple of thou­sand word out­line on how R, H & G might impact on the “RBV of the firm”:http://www.stanford.edu/~jchong/articles/quals/RBV%20Data%20Table%20-%20Theory.doc.
[Mean­while, back with Jon and story telling]
So, I sup­pose I’m hop­ing that someone in any of the classes I teach will pick up on these ideas and explore them — how might a shared blog work to cordin­ate a team? What stor­ies are being used to make sense of what’s going on? What are the arche­types of the stor­ies being used (heroic? fatal­istic — I recall a sem­inar about this; I must look it up).