Spero Consulting

Is Twit­ter the New Qual­ity Circle?

Like most Mon­days, L. Gor­don Crovitz has a col­umn in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal about infor­ma­tion: Infor­ma­tion Over­load? Relax. We gen­er­ally enjoy what he writes but don’t always agree with him.

Today, we have only a minor quib­ble with his col­umn: what he refers to as “infor­ma­tion” are, in fact, mere details, and as we like to point out in a vari­ety of con­texts, includ­ing when we dis­cuss infor­ma­tion sys­tem design and cost sys­tem design, Details Are Not Infor­ma­tion. (See these search results for other inter­nal links, too.)

Mr. Crovitz writes about the anx­i­ety that many folks expe­ri­ence when they are “unplugged,” and don’t have access to e-​mail or text-​messaging or someone’s lat­est post or what­ever. We attribute those feel­ings to their per­sonal inse­cu­rity and their desire not to be “left-​out” rather than any true and insa­tiable need for infor­ma­tion. (We ask: what exactly will one do dif­fer­ently with the details.) Be hon­est, very few folks are mak­ing that many real-​time, tac­ti­cal deci­sions in which they need minute-​to-​minute updates about anything.

In our mind, the signal-​to-​noise ratios of such chaff are not much dif­fer­ent than the ratios for most text mes­sages sent by teenagers, i.e., close to zero.

More­over, the higher a per­son rises within an orga­ni­za­tional pyra­mid, the less crit­i­cal – and less valu­able – such tac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion should be. (If you are at a rel­a­tively high level within your orga­ni­za­tion, and you find such minu­tia cru­cial, then it it it highly likely that you are a busy­body, and very likely that you are a nui­sance to your sub­or­di­nates and oth­ers. See Com­mon Man­age­r­ial Mis­takes in Decen­tral­ized Orga­ni­za­tions for a primer.)

Of course, senior man­agers are usu­ally the first ones to get the new toys, but at a level of man­age­ment where long-​term strat­egy and care­ful thought and con­tem­pla­tion should be one’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, inse­cure man­agers often fix­ate on reports of minor, if not com­pletely triv­ial, details. Now, that’s one way to fill the long, cor­po­rate days and it may seem like proper work to some and it may give the appear­ance of work to oth­ers, but there’s lit­tle value that derives from such fix­a­tions and fascinations.

As a senior man­ager, your right­ful – but pos­si­bly ignored – role is to deter­mine the strat­egy and con­trol mech­a­nisms – like infor­ma­tion sys­tems and incen­tive schemes – needed to suc­cess­fully imple­ment that strat­egy and achieve the organization’s objec­tive. More­over, if your orga­ni­za­tion lacks those poli­cies and sys­tems and mech­a­nisms, it’s not your sub­or­di­nates’ fault. It is yours whether they’ll tell you or not; they prob­a­bly won’t.

Like­wise, the fix­a­tion on Twit­ter and such sites com­pletely escapes us. Per­haps it’s our wordi­ness, but we can’t imag­ine say­ing much worth read­ing in the equiv­a­lent of a text mes­sage other than things like, “By the way, your hair is on fire.”

So, while such sites may pro­vide enter­tain­ment for the eas­ily amused, they’re not infor­ma­tive in any mean­ing­ful sense of the word. There is value in enter­tain­ment. If an oth­er­wise nui­sance is enter­tained elec­tron­i­cally, he or she is less likely to annoy oth­ers and reduce the organization’s out­put. That’s why the reader is less likely to see chain e-​mails from that friend that always sends them when that per­son is actu­ally busy or on vaca­tion. The truth be told, it is one of the rea­sons why we blog (and it’s why the Chair­man per­mits us to do so). How­ever, other than in those cir­cum­stances, con­sum­ing (free) enter­tain­ment rarely cre­ates eco­nomic value or gross domes­tic product.

That’s why we don’t view Twit­ter and most of the social-​networking infra­struc­ture to be par­tic­u­larly valu­able. Has some­one ben­e­fited from one or more of them at some time by con­tact­ing some­one they may not have oth­er­wise known about? We’re sure the answer is yes. How­ever, does that jus­tify the cost and time com­mit­ment? We doubt it.

Another way to ask the ques­tion is: how much busi­ness is trans­acted that would not oth­er­wise have been trans­acted with­out the pres­ence of such sites? Our answers remains: we doubt that it is very much, par­tic­u­larly if the time wasted at those sites had been used con­struc­tively. (We’d argue that auc­tion sites that bring together geographically-​diverse buy­ers and sell­ers of small-​volume prod­ucts and ser­vices like com­puter pro­gram­ming are very dif­fer­ent in nature and that such sites are valu­able to both sides of those transactions.)

A third way to answer the ques­tion is to ask: is it eco­nom­i­cal? Do the ben­e­fits jus­tify the costs? That’s some­thing that will take a few years to deter­mine, but the reader knows how we’d bet on the proposition.

Finally, as the post’s title alludes to, it’s quite pos­si­ble that we are merely and crankily aging and turn­ing into a slim­mer, less green ver­sion of the Grinch who stole Christ­mas – prior to his epiphany and mirac­u­lous heart enlarge­ment, that is. (As you may recall, it grew by three sizes that Christ­mas day while ours remains quite small and black.) Why we even have a dog that we dress like a rein­deer in hope of prof­it­ing from all of the who’s in Whoville (and any­where else for that matter).

So, while we may be miss­ing out on extra­or­di­nary oppor­tu­ni­ties that being “net­worked” pro­vides, we think most of these ser­vices will go the way of qual­ity cir­cles and total qual­ity man­age­ment and activity-​based account­ing and zer0-​based bud­get­ing and (the broad appli­ca­tion) of just-​in-​time inven­tory and the mis­use of overly-​general per­for­mance mea­sures and the secu­ri­ti­za­tions and double-​securitizations of things that no one quite under­stands and many of the must-​have hedg­ing activ­i­ties that don’t quite immu­nize one from uncer­tain events and on and on. We imag­ine that in a few years, we’ll be able to update the post and include most things “green.”

So, per­haps it is just us, but we doubt it.

By the way, shortly we’ll pub­lish a post on the sim­i­lar­i­ties between teenage girls with low blood sugar and daily and intra-​day changes in equity prices. It’s the exact same notion as we crit­i­cize above, i.e., the over-​reaction to noise, rather than information.