BBC Radio 4 broadcast an ostensibly light-hearted programme that made me grimace yesterday. It was about punctuality and time management and featured a factory that docked the pay of workers going to the toilet outside scheduled breaks.

Punctuality may be important but too much oversight eliminates those informal interactions that make work more productive as well as more bearable. Who hasn’t picked up a useful snippet of work information from a colleague during a moment of impromptu down time?

I’d almost forgotten about the programme when a couple of hours later I came across an illuminating profile of Ikujiro Nonaka, the Japanese management guru, in the new edition of Strategy + Business, the house magazine of Booz & Company.

A specialist in how companies tap the collective intelligence of their workers (or not), Professor Nonaka is quoted in the piece outlining the Japanese concept of ba: a hard-to-translate notion that, in this context, appears to describe an elevated state of knowledge-sharing between colleagues.

The article elaborates:

Ba can occur in a work group, a project team, an ad hoc meeting, a virtual e-mail list, or at the frontline point of contact with customers. It serves as a petri dish in which shared insights are cultivated and grown. Companies can foster ba by designing processes that encourage people to think together.

Put another way, companies that allow their employees to think, talk and circulate a little more informally might see some good ideas float up from the bottom.

As we approach Christmas, the way forward for clock-watching bosses is clear: more ba, less bah humbug.

November 26, 2008 11:53am in Corporate culture, Managing others | Comment