Eariler this week I went to the Cambridge Pitch & Mix. There was a great mix of people and lots of ideas stuck in my mind.
One in particular was a comment made that the tech scene in Cambridge suffered because there were to admit the cliché too many chiefs and not enough indians. I think this is something that applies in a lot of other places too. Go to any meeting and there are a lot of people who think they know how things should be run, if only people would follow their plan.
I guess that technology provides us all with so much data and information, that it encourages us to think we can see a whole picture, and delude us into thinking that everyone else should agree with us, or, horror, just doesn’t get it. It seems to me that a lot of posts get written setting out strategies for organisations to follow in social media. But these rest on some interesting assumptions about strategies somehow being centrally mandated… assumptions that I think are increasingly tenuous if you really believe in networks.
Writing for chiefs is high status, but maybe the real skill in a network is having sufficient humility to manage our own small piece of the puzzle, in all its paradox and complexity, rather than idealising how organisations actually work?
Tactics for indians, rather than strategy for chiefs. Or something like that.
