Brokers And Energizers

Some theories on work and how it “works,” and whether we can actually make it do so.

I won’t belabor this post. Let’s just get into the nitty gritty.

From MIT’s Sloan Management Review Summer 2017 issue, we’ve got an article called “How To Catalyze Innovation In Your Organization.” Approximately 59 trillion words have been written on this in the last few years. I’ve wasted a few bytes on innovation as well, including here and here.

If you get decently far in this article, which talks a lot about weak ties vs. strong ties, you will see this chart:

On surface, this seems like another business school professor-type writing about work and adding graphics. Nothing major and spectacular, right? Wrong. It kind of underscores a huge problem of most white-collar work.

Framing the problem

The inherent assumption of this chart is that an organization needs all three types of people to succeed and be innovative. Generally speaking, I would agree with that.