It’s time for my next set of adventures.
I’ve left Huron, although I expect to continue to work with them as a contractor. Our paths are diverging and this represents a way to continue to work together when it makes sense and not get in each other’s way when it doesn’t. They’re a great group of people and I look forward to continuing to interact with them.
I haven’t settled on exactly what to do next. I’m talking to a lot of people about the challenges of making organizations more effective and better places to work. I continue to be especially interested in how to make knowledge work more effective. Whether I work on that from inside one organization, with another consulting firm, or entirely on my own remains to be seen.
Over the last several years, I have been working primarily with knowledge intensive organizations. Although there is a rich set of thinking and research on how to address their problems, there is still a bias toward squeezing these problems into models and frameworks better suited to the industrial economy that drove progress in the 20th Century. There’s the classic observation from John Maynard Keynes:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
I think today’s organizations need better ideas and better theories. And they need better ways to merge them into their daily practices. That is likely to remain my focus regardless of the particular organizational affiliations I maintain.