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From: regard@ttidca.TTI.COM (Adrienne Regard)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: The Technical Core in Computing Firms
Message-ID: <11178@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 20 Jun 88 16:17:57 GMT
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Re your technical core and women in computing:  I studied something of a
tangent in "Leadership, Motivation and Power" at UCLA during my MBA
studies there.  We read, among other things THE ORGANIZATION TRAP and
THE INVISIBLE WAR, both written by Sam Culbert (the instructor) and John
McDonough.

Basically, their arguments are for a more "human" workplace, and how one
can design a work environment one can survive in while allowing the
corporate entity to thrive.  However, I went up to Sam after one class
and pointed out that many of the changes he was advocating are the same
kind of 'human' values that women have been socialized to value.
Therefore it would make sense for him to investigate the changes that
_can_ come about when women infiltrate a heretofor all (or almost all)
male organization.  He looked at me blankly for a moment -- the idea had
obviously never crossed his mind. . .such an enormous resource,
overlooked.

In large organizations, it is obviously 'easier' to deal with a bunch of
John Does than to deal with individuals.  It is also easier to deal with
specialized, well defined problems than whole complex systems.  The
isolation of the technical core is one manifestation of a drive for
economy.  But, as most organizations have discovered, this much isolation
is not reflected in the world they hope to sell to, and the strain of moving
from a disintegrated production environment to an integrated market is often
too great for the organization to overcome, and the products are overlooked
by the customers, and the company fails.

It is, of course, a chicken-or-egg problem.  Which comes first?  The inte-
gration or the integrators?  And what is success?  Teaching integrators to
become specialists?  Or benefitting, unwittingly, from their integration of
issues before the company manages to mold them into the wrong thing?


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