Although it may seem overly broad to broach—
New Media has had a incalculable impact on the shape of corporations– creating a workplace that’s looking more and more like a blown-up version of Creative Commons. And, as this mode trickles down to the individual worker, he finds himself caught in a crossfire of (as Steve mentions) “not being paid to despecialize” but also having an infinite knowledge-sharing world at his fingertips.

It’s the “wiki-effect” to a degree: as in, “my company needs me to hone in, but my tools (and online environment) are telling me otherwise.”

As our online environment seeps more and more into “First Life,” (in a strange reversal of the birth of the web) only then might we see some real dead-end battles between what corporations want employees to do… and the tools they’re asking them to use to perform them.

There are two problems with supposing that innovation requires breaking down the division of labor. First, the division of labor and the division of knowledge are not the same thing. An architect and a contractor may have fixed tasks, but some architects know a lot about construction and others don’t. When trying to build an innovative structure, it may be that the architect needs to have more overlap with the contractor’s knowledge set (that is, to be less knowledge specialized), but he still performs the same task.

Second, in terms of the division of knowledge itself, much of the time it doesn’t pay to despecialize people. If the contractor has enough specialized skill, then she can handle what the architect throws at her even if the architect is pretty ignorant of her problems. So when a challenging building innovation problem comes along, the team is faced with a choice between a) having the contractor spend her time explaining construction problems to the architect or b) spend her time learning about new construction methods, so she doesn’t have those problems. Since it’s usually easier to learn within one’s specialty than across specialties (that’s why they’re specialties!), the cross-functional learning plan will usually be inferior. It’s only in special cases where it turns out to be sensible to invest in cross-functional knowledge sharing, and those are precisely the cases where management is really important.

There’s a formal discussion of all this in my 2002 paper in Organization Science on “Islands of Shared Knowledge” (for all the masochists out there).

The problem corporations have with innovation is long term relationships. A corporation is a maze of long term contracts. Innovation requires bringing together a different set of people than made the old thing, now out of date. The new group is made up of specialists just as much as the stodgy old corporation, just a different set of people with different specialities.

you wrote about wholefoods here. i live in spain and i know quite some people who are in the business of artisan wine or olives oil. and now there is simply no limit to what people are willing to pay for a bottle with that extra bit of a more daring cultural experience.

as result of the global economy it looks as if the middle classes will be eroded and that the rich are getting richer in economical wealth and are gaining a big appetite for the real and sometimes also simple things in life. … a real wonderful apple, that true olives oil, nice hand crafted boots in this special rural tradition… at the moment it almost looks like the world does not hold enough real (=royal) treasures to cater to the demand. … but luckily designers, architects, artists and my friends on their precious little vineyards are working on that.