Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt as quoted in What Is Your Management Model?

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is the Theory of Obliquity.  synonym for “indirect.”  Basically, this theory, which was first articulated by British economist John Kay, proposes that if you are working with a complex system and are trying to achieve an end goal, you need to focus on the most important contributing factors.  It’s like the old saying “Count your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.”

Here’s how Eric Schmidt describes it:

When we were trying to prioritize projects, I thought, how would I articulate the four or five goals of the company?  What’s the No. 1 one goal of the company?  It’s end-user happiness with search.  No. 2: End-user happiness with advertising.  Three: The construction of the Google network of partners to effectuate the first two.  And four: to scale the business.  Then I realized that none of the things that I’m supposed to be doing as CEO — maximizing revenue and shareholder value — are the goals of the company.  So I now explain myself by saying that you will eventually get extraordinary returns for your shareholders and maximize advertiser happiness if all those goals happen.  A lot of business executives get confused on what the goal is. They think shareholder value is the goal. Shareholder value is a consequence of the goal.

Ken Thompson in an interview with Robert Scoble

Today’s whatis.com Word of the Day is bioteam.   Software engineer Ken Thompson came up with the concept after looking at how biological teams in nature communicate to achieve goals.

There’s no blamestorming in a beehive — no politics in a pelican flock.

When you see Canada geese migrating north, you’re looking at a little P2P network. The geese take turns leading the V formation because distributed leadership gets them further than following just one alpha goose. Each honking node on the network has the power to be a client and a server.

The flock itself is a living organism, just like the individual geese that make it up.  The members stay in constant communication, doing whatever needs to be done to keep the flock healthy.  There are no job descriptions in a flock. Each goose says says to the flock,  “You need someone to honk? I can honk.”  or “What, now you need me to lead? Sure I’ll lead.” or  “I think somebody needs to stay behind with old grandfather goose — I’ll do it.”

It sounds very efficient. Why can we humans be that efficient?

As Ken points out in his quote above, we usually start out software projects with good intentions.  Do we end up in survival mode just because total success is so very rare? Is every project like the beginning of tenth grade, where we start out the school year with fresh notebooks and daydreams of straight As, only to end up at mid-terms satisfied with a C?

I wonder. If the flock hardly ever made it back to Canada, would they still continue to operate in a P2P mode?

I’m not sure — but Ken became convinced that there really are lessons to be learned from this distributed leadership model in Mother nature’s repetoire — and I think he’s on to something.  To learn more about bioteams and self-directed virtual teams, I recommend you visit Ken’s blog, The Bumble Bee.

Yesterday I wrote to him to ask if it was fair to say that Wikipedia was created by a bioteam.  Here’s his answer:

I raise guide dogs, so when I’m challenged by how to work more effectively with my distributed, growing and ever-changing team here at TechTarget, I naturally think about about pack management and the role of the alpha dog — but I have to admit, Ken has extrapolated some useful management guidelines for self-directed teams, even if he does compare working with a bioteam to “herding cats.” : -)