My grandfather bought a Model T Ford in the 1920s, and my mother reported that when they took their usual Sunday drive, he had to be able to fix just about everything. This was not a user-friendly technology.

Today I get into my car, turn the key, and drive away. Nothing to fix, happily, because while I may be trained as a mechanical engineer, I don’t have a clue what’s going on under the hood (except theoretically). This is a user-friendly technology.

I was named after my grandfather, but I did not follow in his footsteps. I used to be a techno-Peasant. My phone was a hand-me-down, two generations earlier, from my cousin. I never even learned how to get voice mail. But then I bought an iPhone, and became a Techno-PhonePhile! I discovered what a spectacular piece of consumer technology this is, without a doubt the greatest one ever.

You see, all the others did one thing. The wheel carried loads, the printing press propagated books, the automobile took us places, the telephone brought in distant voices and television added images. The iPhone does just about everything. It is:

Ah, but is it user-friendly? Hardly more than that Model T.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there….

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth….

The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” …it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

True the iPhone has one language and a common speech, albeit scattered over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord is still hard at work, confusing that language. Welcome to the Tower of Bapple.

Do you realize how many instructions we have to know to maneuver minimally through this tower? Must be hundreds. To maneuver fully? I’ll bet thousands. To maneuver competently? Zillions. Look, I have a PhD from MIT. How do PhDs from Harvard cope?

How many ways don’t you know to delete something on your phone? Slide left, slide right, scroll up, scroll down, hit something somewhere, in fact anything everywhere…in desperation. Sure I like to collect things. But not delete-directives. To accept something looks to be easier: just hit the place on the upper right where it says “done”. Except on my calendar. When I change something, in place of “done” on the upper right, there appears “cancel”. But I don’t expect it, so I hit that place anyway, and lose what I just did. The second time around, I do find “done”, on the lower right. I hit that, and guess what? “Done” appears again for the hitting: now on the upper right! This technology is user-ferocious. 

On that calendar, I wish to know the holidays. No problem; I programmed it for Canada, where I live. This is what appeared on August 1 (and I kid you not).
1. British Columbia Day (British Columbia)
2. Civic/Provincial Day (regional holiday)
3. New Brunswick Day (New Brunswick)
4. Natal Day (Prince Edward Island)
5. Heritage Day in Alberta
6. Terry Fox Day (Manitoba)
7. Saskatchewan Day
8. Natal Day [again, this time in] (Nova Scotia)
9. Civic/Provincial Day [this time in Nunavik, Northwest Territories, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario]
10. Clean the Chimney Day. (OK, here I kid you yes: I had added this one myself.)

It’s all or nothing for this calendar. I just want to know on which date certain important holidays fall—like New Year’s Day. (I’m told it’s January 1, but in this age of Bapple, you never know.) But no, I must have Natal Day twice and Saskatchewan day once. etc. OK, so this is a Google Calendar: should I blame Apple for that? Absolutely, because of the company this company keeps in their common Tower of Bapple.

Passwords, boy do I have passwords. Actually I have only one, the Master Password. It opens the door to the 55 others. (Yes, fifty-five.) Imagine your car requiring separate keys to open each of the doors and windows, for each of the gears and windshield wipers, to fill each of the tires, to access AM and FM, etc. I received this message recently: “Installer is trying to install new software. Enter your password to install this. User name: Henry Mintzberg” Hey, Installer, Henry Mintzberg has 55 passwords! I would be delighted to have only one password, but in this tower, some passwords require a cAp, and others DoN’T; some need numb0rs (#%&%#), and others don’t; some require eigth8 letters with a number and others require eightxx letters with no number. Constructing that old tower must have been like building a sand castle compared with our tower today.

iOS. I shudder at these letters. Every time I install a new one, back I must go to fix all kinds of settings that Bapple has screwed up, with uninvited banners and bantering appearing all over my eyes and ears. When I installed a new iOS a few years ago, I lost all my contacts--forever. Someone said that this iOS was designed for a 6, and I had a 5. The nerve of me. (Why did I hit “done” when I should have hit “cancel”—everywhere, always.) Yet not a peep from Apple, hiding behind its own tower in California. Hey, the Bible never said anything about having to change the mortar in that tower every few weeks, let alone with a kind that brings down half the structure. Simon has been my trusty TWOG teammate. Simon says—so it must be true—that his productivity is suffering from having to learn so many new productivity tools. (Did you know that “empathetic engineer” is an oxymoron?)

STOP the presses, or at least hold the electrons. Marley, the daughter of my cousin, showed me a major discovery. He was trying to talk, and she turned his phone up-side down. Have you noticed all the people who speak on the phone as if the LOUDspeaker is off, when actually it’s on. (You have certainly HEARD these people.) They need to turn their phones upside-down, because now the speaker is at the bottom, not the top. Imagine if those biblical builders had started upside-down: built their tower from the top, heaven2earth. The Lord, close by, might have HEARD a different message. Who knows, they might have finished the tower and now we’d all be speaking the same language—hopefully not Bapple.

Now, DA DAM, here comes Siri, the Goddess up to whom this terrifying tower is being built. Siri in the sky with data. She actually speaks in only one language, at least at a time. This is particularly evident here in Montreal, where Siri fractures French names as never before.

The fact is that I love Siri, although not in the usual Internet way. That kind of love I could have saved for the Facebook friends I cannot have, the LinkedIn contacts I cannot con, because I never have time in this tower for anything human—which I am told still exists out there.

Siri can, however, be sheer entertainment. Once Laura, my granddaughter, was playing with my phone, and told Siri to stop calling her “Henry,” “My name is Laura, not Henry”, she said in terms so certain that my email started to come addressed to “Laura”. So I pushed Siri’s button and said: “My name is Henry, not Siri.” (I meant to say “not Laura”, but it was too late.) She asked me amiably to confirm that henceforth I was to be called Henry not Siri, which I did, and she replied promptly: “OK, what can I do for you now, Henry not Siri?” Who needs satire when we’ve got Siri?

Look, it’s not all that bad. Wheels make ruts, books foment revolutions, cars trigger rage, telephones distract and television dumbs down. This user-ferocious technology merely drives us customer-crazy. A small price to pay for its wonders. Except that, while I have a day job that pays the rent, Bapple is a full-time job that pays nothing. I checked my contract with the phone company. Not a word about having to be a prisoner in a tower, let alone with the only maiden out of sight being Siri in the sky.

© Henry Mintzberg 2017. My thanks to Simon for managing these TWOGs so well for so long, and welcome to Tanya for picking up the torch. A special thank you for Leslie also, to whom I turn for all these problems. Her shift ends each day at 11:59 pm and begins again at 6:01 am. I pay her Bapple rates.

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¹There are apps that emit some ultrasonic thing, supposedly to keep away mosquitos. (Several reviews say it doesn’t work.) And when a woman was attacked by a polar bear near Churchill, Manitoba a few years ago, she held up her phone to it and it ran away. Wouldn’t you?

© Henry Mintzberg 2017

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Mies van der Rohe, the famous Bauhaus architect, claimed that “God is in the details.” But another expression, that “The devil is in the details”, is more common, perhaps because the devil has been hard at work in the corporate world these days.

I relish businesses that get the details right. The first thing you notice about a great restaurant is how good the bread is. When you walk into a well-functioning office, you are struck by the attentiveness of the people. As a customer, you pay what they ask, because of another detail: you trust them. Even when this is substantial, you walk out feeling satisfied—it was worth it.  When the devil is lurking about, however, you notice the details even more: the surliness of a staff member, or being ripped off by some unexpected charge.

Recently we took our health care program (imhl.org) back to a hotel because last time it was so good on the details. Not this time. We brought two of our own microphones, but were forced to rent theirs: four days for $1200. (We bought our two for $400.) A server grabbed away my juice glass at breakfast, and didn’t respond when I asked for it back until I raised my voice a third time. She turned around and shot back: “You could go and get a new one.” The bathroom near our meeting room was dirty, and ran out of paper. Liz, who administers the program, said: “I did not feel like we were important to them.” What happened to this place?

Shall we look for the devil in the executive offices? A new manager, perhaps? Nope, the same one as last time. New owners? Yes, from abroad, who apparently moved into the place. Were they managing the manager? Who knows? Or maybe this was just an off week. After all, the first thing I noticed at dinner was how good the bread was. (The second thing I noticed was that the food had become less good.)

The devil in many enterprises these days may also be lurking in a book that is 100 years old. Henri Fayol, a French mining magnate, published General and Industrial Administration in 1916. It described the basic elements of managing as Planning, Organizing, Commanding, Coordinating, and Controlling. Think about them: five words for controlling!

This view dominated the managerial mindset for decades. Then along came a number of management writers, myself included, who challenged it. In my 1973 book The Nature of Managerial Work, I pointed out that managers spend at least half their time interacting with people outside their units: negotiating with suppliers, lobbying with governments, meeting customers, and so on. Where is the controlling in this? And many of us have been working hard for years to get managing past the mindset of all that controlling: toward cooperating and collaborating, in a word, communityship, beyond leadership.

Now, however, especially in many widely-held enterprises, controlling seems to have come back with a vengeance. “Owners” who are changing all the time, and many of the stock analysts who do their bidding, couldn’t care less about engaging employees, about pride and respect in work, about serving customers, about quality in products and services.  All they care about is MORE: squeezing out more revenues, more savings, more profits. Manage the enterprise the way you make orange juice.

But what happens when there is no more to be squeezed out of a place that has been run really well? The answer is easy: provide less to make more. Rip the customers off with add-on fees. Pressure the staff to cut corners. Or “downsize” them altogether so that there is no-one to replenish the toilet paper. And don’t forget to pay the CEO outrageous bonuses to drive all this.

Yes, Planning, Organizing, Commanding, Coordinating, and Controlling is back all right, except that now it has become remote controlling: detached from the operations yet determined to control them. This has become much of management in the digital age.

Did I suggest above that controlling is focussed within the organization? Not this time around. Now the customers are controlled ($1200 for microphones), the suppliers are controlled (don’t let them get carried away with quality), even markets are controlled (buy your competitors when you can’t collude with them). All except the stock market and those analysts. The devil is now in one little detail: the immediate price of the stock. Where are you God?

© Henry Mintzberg 2016. For more on some of this, see my book Simply Managing.

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If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house. Networks connect; communities care.

Social media certainly connect us to whoever is on the other end of the line, and so extend our social networks in amazing ways. But this can come at the expense of our personal relationships.¹ Many people are so busy texting and tweeting that they barely have time for meeting and reading.² Where do they get the meaning? The answer may lie in lost community—in our organizations as well as our localities.

Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the “global village”, created by new information technologies. But what kind of a village is this? In the traditional village, you chatted with your neighbor at the local market, face-to-face: this was the heart of community. When that neighbor’s barn burned down, you may well have pitched in to help rebuild it. In the global village of today, the most prominent market is the soulless stock market. And when you click on that  keyboard, the message could be going to some “friend” or associate you never even met. Like those fantasy-ridden love affairs on the Internet, this kind of communicating remains untouched, and untouchable.

A century or two ago, the word community “seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part.” In contrast, the word has now become fashionable to describe what are really networks, as in the “business community”—“people with common interests [but] not common values, history, or memory.”³

Does this matter for dealing with the global problems of this world? You bet it does. In his New York Times column in 2012, Thomas Friedman reported asking an Egyptian friend about the protest movements in that country: “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate,” he replied. Friedman added that “at their worst, [social media] can become addictive substitutes for real action.”⁴ That is why, while the larger social movements (in Cairo’s Tahrir Square or on Wall Street) may raise consciousness about the need for renewal in society, it is the smaller social initiatives, usually developed by small groups in communities, that do much of the renewing.

As for managing in this digital age, as I have written many times, effective organizations function as communities of human beings, not collections of human resources. Of course, all organizations need robust networks, to connect their parts and link to the outside world. For their managers especially, networking and communicating are major aspects of the job. But far more crucial is collaboration, and that requires a strong sense of community in the organization.

We make a great fuss about leadership these days, but communityship is more important. Successful leaders create, enhance, and support a sense of community in their organization, and that requires hands-on management. Beyond an excessive focus on the individual is recognition of the collective nature of effective enterprise.

The new digital technologies, wonderful as they are in enhancing communication, can have a negative effect on collaboration. They put us “in touch” with a keyboard, that’s all. As I wrote in a related piece, managers who rely on that keyboard can lose control of their job, while they drive their practice of managing over the edge.

Electronic communication has become essential for managing around the globe. But the heart of enterprise remains rooted in personal, collaborative relationships, albeit networked by these new technologies. Thus, in localities and organizations, across societies and around the globe, beware of “networked individualism”⁵, where people communicate handily while they struggle to collaborate.

© Henry Mintzberg 2015  For more on this theme, and on community, see my book Rebalancing Society. For more on managing in general, and in this digital age, see my book Simply Managing. A version of this TWOG appeared earlier this week on druckerforum.org and hbr.org.

¹ “…the current body of internet research indicates that the internet has not caused a widespread flourishing of new relationships”; people mostly communicate with others they already know, and when they do meet people on line, the relationships that continue “tend to migrate offline” (D.D. Barney [2006], “The Vanishing Table”, in  Community in the Digital Age, Rowman and Litttlefield, p.9, citing Boase ad Wellman) 

² See Marche’s article in The Atlantic “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” (May 2012). He claimed that, thanks largely to ourselves, “we suffer from unprecedented alienation…. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society.”

³ Giridharadas, A. (2013, September 22). Draining the Life From “Community”. New York Times.

⁴ Friedman, T. (2012, June 9). Facebook Meets Brick-and-Mortar Politics. New York Times.

⁵ J. Boase and B. Wellman (2006) “Personal Relationships: On and Off the Internet”, in The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships, A. L. Vangelisti and D.Perlman (eds.), Cambridge University Press