Bored?

One of the things that continually strikes me is how a lot of large companies under-use their people. Often, they don't appear to be under worked as they spend plenty of time in the office, but for many hours of the day they are bored. You're awaiting approval from the boss who is waiting for IT to sign off, IT is too busy handling something else at the moment, so you need to wait... and so on.

It happens quite often in large organizations where the getting -things-done-process is complex. The more steps involved the more potential bottlenecks and the more time you spend waiting. This downtime is costly for the company (who is paying for idle minds) and it's costly to the individual who feels frustrated by a lack of accomplishment.

Systemically, one solution could be to simply increase the company's reliance on outsourced labor. Many operational consulting shops provide those services - and beyond additional 'strategy' often are in effect contract labor for the client organization who pays just for the hours they need. This works for some companies, but there are positions that are tougher to outsource in the traditional sense for reasons of institutional memory, incentives, etc.

I'd like to propose another approach that could help keep the employees tied closer to the company. That is for large companies to outsource their own employees' down time. In effect sourcing limited jobs that can be accomplished remotely and then putting their down-timed employees to work for these other companies. I am not sure whether the solution is first driven by the individual or the company (my guess it's going to have to be the former).

This could be something along the lines of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, for example. There's a lot of possibility to make this kind of system much more robust and tailored for this kind of 'consulting' type of work. By placing the emphasis on the genius of their engineers, for example, a company could also continue to build it's image as an industry thought leader all while taking greater advantage of labor force and keeping them much more engaged.

This is still very much of a brainstorm, but I think there's is a kernel of an idea here...

Thinking in Numbers

I've started following this little start-up called Wolfram Alpha a while back, let it fall off my radar screen for a bit and now have recently started poking around again after they've resurfaced (they've also made it into mainstream press with an article in The Economist).

And I've been quite impressed with what I found. For those of you who haven't heard of them yet, think Google for all things numbers.

Founded by the creator of Mathmatica, these guys are building an engine that allows you (in a single search box) to input formulas, find statistics, track financials and all sort of other searches based on numbers. In their own words, it's a "computational knowledge engine."

And in the spirit of understanding everything in quantitative terms - Antoine (my brother) sent me this little comparison with my name vs. his name.

Comes complete with age distribution, number of births per year and the expected total number of people in the US today with our names. Talk about the epitome of putting everything into numbers - exactly what the founders hoped for, I believe.