Tom Graves

Several people have asked me for more information about the book I’m writing at present, ‘The Business Anarchist‘, so here’s a quick summary of the themes and structure.

Who or what is a ‘business-anarchist‘? Anyone who works with inherent uncertainty in business in an intentional, disciplined way – working with the uncertainty rather than trying to ‘control’ it. Often it’s not so much a person as part of a business-role – a necessary part of that business-role. (Most of the examples in the book will come from my own field of whole-of- enterprise architecture, but the same principles apply in just about every other type of business-role.)

Why ‘anarchist’? Anarchy is about working without rules, working ‘outside the box’. When ‘business as usual’ breaks down, a disciplined form of anarchy is probably the only way through to something new that works well in the new business context.

‘Kiddies-anarchy’ and real anarchy: Anarchy has had a very bad press in the past, mainly because of what I describe as ‘kiddies-anarchy’ – an overdose of presumed ‘rights’ without responsibilities, especially in terms of causing disruption and destruction without any awareness or respect of the consequences for anyone else. Real anarchy is very different – arguably the most difficult of all political forms, because there are no easy rules to fall back on or to blame. Some entire organisations have been run on anarchic lines – the Quakers have done so for centuries – and even some businesses – such as Ricardo Semler’s Semco Group – but here we’re mainly focussing on an often-unnoticed yet everyday set of roles and responsibilities within an ordinary, everyday type of business.

What kind of business? Any business, and any type of business – for-profit, not-for-profit, government or social – from a huge global conglomerate right down to the local bridge-club or the school parent/teacher association.

Business-analyst and business-anarchist: Business-analysts deal with certainty and predictability: they refine the figures, crunch the numbers, track the trends. When your business world is reasonably stable, you need your analysts to help you optimise efficiency and maximise returns. But when your business world is not certain, not predictable, that’s when you’ll need your anarchists. And you’ll need your anarchists then, too. Your analysts can only tell you how to do more of the same, better – which is good, of course, in its own context, but it doesn’t help when what you really need to do is something different.

What’s different about how business-anarchists work? The quickest one-line answer is that analysts rely on rules and algorithms; anarchists rely on guidelines and principles.

What principles should business-anarchists rely on? Obviously this varies from one context to another, but from my work in whole-of-enterprise architecture the three most important design-principles seem to be these:

• There are no rules;
• There are no rights; and
• Money doesn’t matter.

These three principles, and a fourth follow-on principle, Always enhance adaptability, provide the overall structure for the book.

There are no rules: Rules provide a spurious sense of certainty that can let us down badly when our business-world changes around us. The real world is much messier and more complex than any system of rules that we could devise. Hence at times it’s necessary to start off from the assumption and expectation that there are no rules: instead, we have to rewrite the rule-book, by working back to the core-principles from which the rules originally arose. A simple everyday business-example of this is embedded in the ISO-9000 standard on quality-systems:  work-instructions provide ‘the rules’ that we need for real-time practice and process, but when the world changes, we need to rewrite the work-instructions by working upward to procedure, policy and, if necessary, overall vision.

There are no rights: ‘Rights’ are an important social fiction, but as with rules, they don’t actually exist in the real world, and in themselves they tell us almost nothing about how to create the conditions that such ‘rights’ would require. In practice, apparent ‘rights’ arise from mutual, interlocking responsibilities – so it’s those responsibilities, and not the purported ‘rights’, that are where we need to start. This has important implications for business-architecture and enterprise-architecture that will be explored in some depth in the book – for example, we need to ask serious questions about “What do shareholders own?” if they possess all the ‘rights’ for the business but without any real responsibilities.

Money doesn’t matter: Money is important for every business, of course, especially in a commercial context – but as with rules or ‘rights’, it’s not the place where we need to start. Money is also only one small part of the overall economy in which the business operates: reputation, trust, attention and respect all need to exist before any money will be placed on the table. And if we state – or show – that we’re only interested in ‘making money’ from our customers and community, why would anyone want to engage with us? As with other ‘rights’, money is solely a social fiction, and profit is an outcome of being ‘on purpose’ to values: to achieve the profits that we may desire, we first need to start from values, with a values-architecture that describes how we engage with everyone within the extended-enterprise of the business.

Always enhance adaptability: Change is the only certainty: we therefore need to design for that fact. Mistaken notions about rules, rights and money often serve only to slow us down, placing the business at risk as the world changes around us. This sections of the book explores how to embed the ‘business-anarchist’ principles into everyday business-practice, especially in business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

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More details to follow over the next few days, including book-cover, cover-blurb, ISBN numbers and so on. Publication-date is fixed as late-April, so I need to keep moving!

Had an interesting question come in today from one of my Dutch colleagues, Bas van Gils:

I have to write a document and I’m kinda stuck. Time to ask for some help I’d say

The issue with the document is that I want to make a distinction between ‘the organization as in: “the way in which some system / department / enterprise is organized” and “the organization as in: the legal entity”. I’ve had this issue before and I can’t figure out how to deal with this properly in documents. It just feels awkward to say Organization (with capital) for meaning one and organization (without) for meaning two…

Any thoughts?

This is a real doozy of a problem that really shows up the limitations of English as a language. It’s  hard enough for native English speakers to resolve, let alone those who only use English as a business-language…

I ain’t no linguistics specialist, but as I see it, the respective contexts for the two meanings are as follows:

• Meaning 1 (’the way something is organized’): a nounal expression of the verb ‘to organize’, moving from the present-participle (’organizing’) to the adjectival past-participle (’organized’) to the verb-as-condition (’organization’) [there'll be a proper linguistic term for this nounal form, but I haven't a clue what it is ]
• Meaning 2 (’the legal entity’): a label for an abstract entity that is structured (’organized’) in some defined way

To me, Meaning 1 is still more related to the verb, a temporary condition of something dynamic (”the act of organizing”), whereas Meaning 2 is definitely a noun, something static. In Meaning 1, the structure could change – the outcome of a ‘reorganization’ – and it would still be ‘organization’; whereas Meaning 2 is defined and delimited by its legal boundaries, so if those were to change, the previous ‘the organization’ would cease to exist.

[A quick check at AudioEnglish.net throws up a total of seven meanings: Bas's 'Meaning 1' is somewhere between their 1 ("a group of people who work together") and 2 ("an organized structure for arranging or classifying"), whereas Bas's 'Meaning 2' is probably closest to their 3 ("the persons or committees or departments etc who make up a body for the purpose of administering something"). The built-in thesaurus in MS Word isn't much help, either. Overall, it's all too obvious that English is a confusing mess. ]

I would probably try to juggle the phrasing so that I can avoid having to put the two meanings together in the same sentence, but I can see plenty of circumstances in which there’s no way to get round it.

If I did have to use both meanings in the same sentence, without any other option, I might well use Bas’s capitalisation kludge, though I would capitalise Meaning 2 rather than Meaning 1: “the organization of the Organization”. But as Bas says, it’s awkward and ugly: and whilst, to a native English speaker, the alternative uncapitalised “the organization of the organization” would probably be clear enough, it might not make sense to native speakers of other languages.

But as Bas again indicates, it gets messy when we try to distinguish the two meanings once we’ve bundled them together. And going back to the present-participle – “the organizing of the organisation” – is probably uglier still, although technically correct in English.

So the short answer is that I don’t see any easy way round this one. Sorry…

Anyone else have any better suggestions?

I’ve now published the annotated version of my film-script ‘Wombat & Cockie‘ in book-form – see the Tetradian Books website here for the book-info, and here for the free-download PDF e-book.

Set in the drug-gangs culture of present-day Melbourne, it’s an odd mixture of a cops-and-criminals black-comedy, merged with a Dreamtime motif in which all of the players enact the characteristics and character of the respective bird or animal Dreaming.

Of all my scripts, this is the one most likely to reach production: a colleague spent some time a couple of years ago developing it further, but I haven’t heard from her since. Not that it matters: it’s just a bit of fun, really, though there are some serious themes behind it, using fiction to explore the complexities of interlinked transactions of violence and abuse at a societal level.

My regular outing to make use of Lightning Source’s annual ‘free setup’ promotion, it’s technically vanity-publishing – but I spent at least six months writing the script, so it seems worthwhile to get something tangible out of all that work! It won’t be available in printed form, other than direct from me, but anyone is welcome to download the e-book for free.

Hope it helps, anyway: “Share and Enjoy”?

It’s both saddening and sobering to reach the age where close friends and colleagues start appearing in the Obituary columns in the national newspapers…

A couple of years ago it was Mike Mepham, who worked with me for some years in the Wordsmiths days, back in the mid-1980s, and went on to fame amongst puzzle-fans as the person who brought the Sudoku craze to Britain. This time it’s a perhaps more famous friend, John Michell (see the obituary in the London newspaper The Independent).

The rather gushing obituary concentrates on his writings, and indeed it was his The View Over Atlantis – the ‘rather peculiar book’ that my parents brought home from a Bristol bookshop in 1969 – that really started me on my own earth-mysteries researches, building on previous schooldays-experiments with Tom Lethbridge’s work on dowsing. I’ll admit, though, that I found almost all his later work impenetrable to the point of incredulity – with the exception of a brilliantly acerbic little poem written in the aftermath of the unprovoked assault by police (the Battle of the Beanfield) at Stonehenge in 1985:

…but here’s the subtle dodge:
Stonehenge has now been proved to be / an old Masonic Lodge
…[so] they’re not just simple coppers / spoiling other people’s fun
they’re members of the Brotherhood / out worshipping the sun

But to me it wasn’t the writings that that meant so much: it was the man. One who saw the world through rose-tinted glasses – literally so. A cultured Etonian voice; a sculptured, elf-like face; a bird-like manner, quick, sharp, like a heron; an intense scholar’s intelligence balanced by bright wit and a warm, genuine inclusiveness – I was stunned when, at a book-launch of mine a few years back, he told me that he regarded me as one of his peers, because to me he had no real equal either then or now. An eccentric in the best sense of that term: one who stands aside from the usual centre, and applies that leverage to change the world.

I last met him a year ago, at the Megalithomania gathering in Glastonbury. (Reading the Megalithomania site, I’ve just realised I’m a bit late in this – John died almost a month ago, 24th April. His obit was in The Independent only yesterday, though, and that was the first I’d heard of it.) He’d always looked older than his age – back in the 60s and 70s he looked to be in his sixties at least, though I now realise he must then only have been in his mid-forties – but he was definitely looking old by then, yet still active, engaging, aware, alert to all the subtle nuances of ideas.

Yes, and a real ‘character’ too. The obit coyly states that he “joined the civil service as a Russian interpreter”, but it was more likely the intelligence-service, either MI5 or MI6: in other words, he was, bluntly, a spy – part of the same Cambridge clique that produced the double-agent Kim Philby. Yet though he may have come from the Establishment, he was certainly not of it: there is a happily apocryphal tale of him in one of his post-Cold War visits to Moscow, chatting to the security-guards at Vnukovno airport whilst rolling up a joint literally under their noses, lighting up and waving to them as he wandered out of the door surrounded by a cloud of that so-characteristic aroma. It undoubtedly never occurred to him to be concerned about its extreme illegality, and they probably never had a chance to notice: like the best of anarchists, he harmed no-one, yet he made up his own rules everywhere he went.

Oddly, I know almost nothing about his earlier life beyond his writings and research. The Independent obituary mentions his time at university and in the Royal Navy, but no mention of parents or childhood. In a very literal sense, he seems to have come from nowhere: it certainly felt like that when, as an awed, angst-ridden eighteen-year-old, I first met him in Glastonbury almost forty years ago.

Yet there’s a quote from him in the Independent obit that seems to sum up almost perfectly his life and his work:

The important discoveries about the past have been made not so much through the present refined techniques of treasure-hunting and grave-robbery, but through the intuition of those whose faith in poetry led them to scientific truth.

Life as poetry: that was John Michell. Like so many others, my own life has been enriched by his gifts and his presence: so my thanks, and fare you well.

Following the lead from one of my TOGAF colleagues, Erik Proper, I really ought to set up a ‘metablog’ – a blog about the things I need to blog about…

Today’s example comes from a Twitter exchange with Sarah Runge about work/life (im)balance in the US, which led to ideas about mistaken notions of people as ‘assets’, and hence the theme about “the relationship is the asset”, and thence to another new idea, that every asset is also a relationship with whatever it is that the asset represents – ie. treating the asset with responsibility and respect.

But that’ll have to stay a metablog item for now, because I have to waddle off at high speed to the way-too-early train to go to the TOGAF conference in London. More later.

Delighted to say that Lightning Source have done it again with my new book Doing Enterprise Architecture: a one-week turn-round from sending in the PDF source-files to delivery of the first fifty copies on my doorstep. Very impressive.

And the print-version is now available on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk – those two links point direct to the respective Amazon detail-page. For other online retailers, or your local friendly independent bookstore – like the ever-helpful Red Lion Books in Colchester – use the ISBN book-number: 978-1-906681-18-0

I’ll also have copies to hand out at the TOGAF conference in central London next week – see you there, perhaps?

Please pass the word on for me, if you would? Many thanks!

Delighted to say that I’ve now completed the next book in my ‘Tetradian Enterprise Architecture’ series, Doing Enterprise Architecture: process and practice in the real enterprise, with the master-files now delivered to Lightning Source for printing.

The sample-version PDF is at:

• http://tetradianbooks.com/2009/03/doing-ea-ebook/

The complete e-book is now available with the others in the series, in the private ‘Review’ section at:

• http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/12/review-books (email me for the page-access password if you don’t already have it)

Physical copies should be available via Amazon, Borders and other online retailers – and your local friendly independent bookstore – from about April 21.

Comments and reviews much appreciated!

My colleague Shawn Callahan from Australian business-knowledge consultancy Anecdote kindly posted a link via Twitter to the ‘Girleffect.org’ website

Just rewatching http://girleffect.org to remind myself how to use mystery to setup a presentation

As he says in the post, the site-design is a very good illustration of how to build a story to present an idea. But unfortunately I also looked at the content of the site – and found myself quietly roiling in irritation. Oh no, not again…

Looking at it with a business-anarchist’s eye, I suppose I have to applaud its disruptive intent. But it’s what I would call “kiddies’ anarchy” rather than a true responsibility-based anarchy: the catch is that, as usual, it hasn’t been thought-through properly, and what they’re promoting as ‘the right solution’ will almost certainly cause more harm than good in the longer term.

For a start, it displays the usual rampant sexism of Western culture – best summarised by one of the old feminist slogans, “men are the problem, women are the solution”. In this case, it’s “girls are the solution”, but it comes to much the same in the end – there’s no mention of males at all anywhere in it other than one fleeting, quickly-removed reference to ‘husband’, in the same context as ‘cow’. The underlying model is a straightforward win/lose – we don’t actually have to do much to make things better for girls, all we have to do is shut the boys out of everything and it’ll magically all come out right because ‘girls are the solution’. The real end-result is that the boys, having been shut out of the society, will go off and create their own – which, yes, may well be rampantly misogynistic, and which would be no surprise at all given the way boys are treated. The only way that works is a win/win – everything else guarantees that everyone loses in the longer-term. And I must admit I find it so frustrating that would-be activists like the promoters of ‘girleffect’ still do not grasp that basic fact. Hence one reason for “oh no, not again…”.

The other is probably more subtle: the ’solution’ is that putting a girl in a school uniform somehow magically leads to that girl receiving a cow which she will then somehow transform equally magically into a whole herd, which she will sell for dollars, and she will become a rich businesswoman, which will be wonderful for everyone. There’s no grasp of even basic economics; no grasp of basic environmental issues; no grasp of where this will fit into the societal context; nothing. Just magic. What it would really do – unless there’s a full socially-grounded structure such as Grameen behind it – would simply entrap the by-now-woman into the wage-culture – in other words, yet another owned not-quite-slave of globalised business, whilst tangling everyone else around her into the same mess, and almost certainly lead to a medium- to longer-term ‘tragedy of the commons’. Oh no not again…

Feminists in Asian countries especially have routinely expressed their annoyance at what they describe as Western-feminists’ ’smug cultural-imperialist intrusions’ into their own much more complex societal contexts: judging from the content of the girleffect’ website, they certainly have a point.

Nice idea; nice sentiment and all that (if it wasn’t so damned sexist); but overall, I just wish these blasted people would think for once…

Bah.

I’m now on Twitter, if that might be of interest to anyone.

A few days ago I had a last-minute request to present at the Metageum conference in London this weekend. (Don’t quite know how to categorise Metageum: kind of an earth-mysteries focus – Stonehenge and that sort of stuff, if you like – but with a much more solid and grown-up feel than the usual ‘New Age’ end of the market. Take a look at their website, anyway.) Address is Treadwell’s Bookshop, 34 Tavistock Street, London WC2 – just east of Covent Garden market in central London; I’ll be there on the Saturday (28th March).

Aim is to give a variant of the presentation I did for the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury last year, but this time with much more of an emphasis on the underlying disciplines that make it possible to get useful results in working with ‘alternate realities’ and suchlike – in other words, to bring it into line with the book Disciplines of Dowsing: the quest for quality that I co-wrote last year with Liz Poraj-Wilzynska, and which we’re currently adapting for archaeography and archaeology.

Looking forward to being at the conference, especially as some old friends such as Paul Devereux will be there. See you there too, perhaps?