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WORK TITLE: The Conversational Firm
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http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/detail/?id=51750 * http://leadership.mit.edu/author/cat-turco/ * http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/a-look-inside-a-conversational-firm/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2016019523
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016019523
HEADING:
Turco, Catherine
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__ |a The conversational firm, 2016: |b eCIP t.p. (Catherine Turco) data view screen (the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management; her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Harvard College, B.A.; Harvard Business School, M.B.A.; Harvard University, M.A., Ph.D. (Presidential Scholar).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Ethnographer and economic sociologist. MIT Sloan School of Management, Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Organization Studies. Previously worked as a technology investment banker at Morgan Stanley and at an enterprise software company, where she managed the company’s corporate venture fund. She has consulted to a number of organizations, including the Boston Red Sox.
WRITINGS
Contributor to American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology.
SIDELIGHTS
Catherine Turco is an ethnographer and economic sociologist. She is the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor and an associate professor of organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Turco previously worked as a technology investment banker at Morgan Stanley and at an enterprise software company, where she managed the company’s corporate venture fund. She has acted as a consultant to a number of organizations, including the Boston Red Sox baseball team. She hold an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she was a Presidential Scholar.
In 2016, Turco published The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media, a study of the ten months she was embedded at TechCo, a rapidly growing media marketing company. TechCo promotes open communication channels across all levels of its corporate hierarchy and encourages all its employees to have a voice in company decision making. Because of that, the company has become known for its ability to adapt to change. Turco studied the company on an intimate basis to learn what was working and what wasn’t. She reported that growing into a company that promoted dialogue wasn’t always easy, and certain levels of bureaucracy had to remain in place despite the TechCo’s attempts to modify or do away with them.
In her book, Turco also discusses the effects of social media on companies and of hiring employees who have grown up using social media and don’t want to relinquish them in the workplace. Among the conclusions that Turco reached was that despite the open dialogue policy, TechCo’s employees were still afraid of reprisals from their managers, and many rejected the added decision-making responsibilities.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer appreciated Turco’s insights but had reservations about the structure of the book, calling The Conversational Firm “an interesting case study. . . [that] is neither entertaining enough to be a story, nor educational enough to be prescriptive.” In an interview with Kara Baskin on the MIT Sloan Management School Web site, Turco commented on her approach to the book: “What most excited me was the realization that there is a new organizational model that companies can shoot for today. I believe this model has become possible—and perhaps even necessary—on account of the communication technologies now available and the habits and expectations that today’s employees bring into the workplace. I call the model the ‘conversational firm,’ and it’s the idea that organizations can have far more open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy than we ever before thought possible.” Turco then elaborated: “The key insight underlying this idea is that hierarchy can be deconstructed in ways we haven’t previously seen or thought about. In the past, it was generally assumed that a firm’s formal communication and decision-making structures were tightly linked. Just think about how an organizational chart is taken to be a visual mapping of the formal lines of communication and decision-making authority.”
In a review at the London School of Economics Web site, Michael Warren observed: “One of the great strengths of Turco’s book is emphasising the understated power of having a voice. One may not always have demands respected, but to have a voice, be listened to and consulted before a decision is made is important to people. Social media has given the opportunity to do this in the workplace, and in the wider world if used correctly.” Warren, however, was also quick to point out how social media can be misused. “On the other hand, it can be a tool to buttress power and not engage, a prime example being Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a broadcasting tool instead of engaging in conversational democracy. TechCo’s iconoclasts give some hope that conversation does not need to fizzle out, and that now more than ever there are more opportunities for it to occur – all that is required is the will to speak and listen.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2017, review of The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media, p. 66.
ONLINE
London School of Economics, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (February 28, 2017), Michael Warren, review of The Conversational Firm.
MIT Leadership Center Website, http://leadership.mit.edu/author/cat-turco/ (May 14, 2017), brief profile.
MIT Sloan Management School, http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ (September 1, 2016), review of The Conversational Firm; (May 14, 2017), faculty profile.*
Catherine Turco
Biographical Info
Catherine J. Turco is the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Turco is an ethnographer and economic sociologist who studies cultural dynamics in organizations, occupations, and markets. She is the author of the 2016 book The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media (New York: Columbia University Press). Turco’s research has been published in the American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology and has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association. Her work has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, CNN, and Fortune.
Catherine J. Turco is the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Turco is an ethnographer and economic sociologist who studies cultural dynamics in organizations, occupations, and markets. She is the author of the 2016 book The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media (New York: Columbia University Press).
Turco's research has appeared in the American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology and been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association. Her work has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, CNN, and Fortune.
Prior to entering academia, Turco worked as a technology investment banker at Morgan Stanley and at an enterprise software company, where she managed the company’s corporate venture fund. She has consulted to a number of organizations, including the Boston Red Sox.
Turco received her BA in economics from Harvard College, where in addition to her studies, she was president of Harvard Student Agencies/Let’s Go Inc., a 1,000-person company. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She received her MA and PhD in sociology from Harvard University, where she was a Presidential Scholar.
"A New Era of Corporate Conversation." Turco, Catherine. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 2016.
The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. Turco, Catherine. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016.
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Print Marked Items
The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media
Publishers Weekly.
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p66. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media Catherine J. Turco. Columbia Univ., $35 (256p) ISBN 978-0-231-17898-3
Turco, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, spent 10 months studying the pseudonymous social media marketing firm "TechCo," a 600-person company in an urban area; this thoughtful but ultimately disappointing book-length case study is the result. TechCo knew it needed to undergo some major changes; "The old ways of doing things," the CEO said, "don't work anymore." Turco launched a major study of the company, focusing on its efforts to adopt values popularized by big tech companies (Facebook, Google, etc.) such as openness and transparency. They implemented some of the familiar trappings of an open office--a wiki, an open-plan space--and worked on replicating a digital-native culture in which open communication and employee autonomy were highly valued. Investigating what had worked and what hadn't, Turco made some unexpected findings: employees pushed back on getting more decision-making responsibilities and had difficulty getting past fear of management reprisal when encouraged to speak honestly about problems. However, she concludes that ongoing, open dialogue is worth striving for--as long as leadership can check its assumptions at the door. This is an interesting case study, but the book is neither entertaining enough to be a story, nor educational enough to be prescriptive. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p.
66. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285551&it=r&asid=d0097fee170c9619f1f4ac8530534724. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
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A LOOK INSIDE A “CONVERSATIONAL FIRM”
NEW BOOK FROM MIT SLOAN’S CATHERINE TURCO EXAMINES ONE COMPANY’S QUEST TO UPEND CORPORATE BUREAUCRACY.
By Kara Baskin | September 1, 2016
Is there room for more open corporate communication than ever before? Will the old guard let it happen? Should it?
Catherine Turco
Catherine Turco. Photo: Philip Borden
In her new book, The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media, Catherine Turco explores how one software firm upended traditional bureaucratic hierarchy by giving all employees a voice.
Turco, an associate professor of work and organization studies at MIT Sloan, spent 10 months inside “TechCo”—the actual company name is kept anonymous—documenting daily activity, shadowing workers, sitting in on hundreds of meetings, and conducting interviews with 76 employees. What she found is a new way of communicating across old management structures, what she calls a “conversational firm.” And it may guide other companies through the shift in workplace culture as millennials grow in the workforce. In an interview, she explains her findings:
What new approach to communication did you find inside TechCo?
What most excited me was the realization that there is a new organizational model that companies can shoot for today. I believe this model has become possible—and perhaps even necessary—on account of the communication technologies now available and the habits and expectations that today’s employees bring into the workplace. I call the model the “conversational firm,” and it’s the idea that organizations can have far more open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy than we ever before thought possible.
The key insight underlying this idea is that hierarchy can be deconstructed in ways we haven’t previously seen or thought about. In the past, it was generally assumed that a firm’s formal communication and decision-making structures were tightly linked. Just think about how an organizational chart is taken to be a visual mapping of the formal lines of communication and decision-making authority.
However, I found something quite different when I looked carefully inside TechCo. There, I saw a firm that was leveraging a wide range of social media tools and platforms and that was responding to its millennial workforce’s expectations for voice by opening up the company’s communication environment quite dramatically. And yet it was doing so without destabilizing or disrupting a conventional decision-making hierarchy.
The Conversational Firm
When it came to communication, executives shared with the entire workforce detailed business information that other executives might pore over in senior leadership meetings but not distribute. The company’s executives also extended voice rights to everyone in the company by encouraging employees to speak up and weigh in on major business issues, not just those that concerned an individual’s specific job.
Meanwhile, the company still retained a fairly conventional hierarchy when it came to decision-making authority. It was as if voice rights and decision rights had been pulled apart from one another. Voice rights were delegated broadly, while decision rights were organized in a more conventional, hierarchical fashion. In fact, in a few cases when executives tried to delegate certain decision rights more broadly, employees used the voice rights they’d been given to speak up and note the problems this might cause. I was fascinated by what I was seeing, and I was also influenced by some brilliant work on the nature of hierarchy that my colleague Ezra Zuckerman has done.
Most interesting to me was the fact that this company, which was so vocal about rejecting conventional bureaucracy, ended up adopting some bureaucratic practices over time—but this happened precisely because employees used their voices to speak up and say when certain conventional practices that had been rejected would not be useful. It struck me that a whole new model was emerging, one in which cross-hierarchical conversation was a central mechanism for confronting business challenges.
How can an organization become a conversational firm?
For starters, it requires leveraging today’s communication technologies. TechCo had a very active corporate wiki on which executives and employees constantly communicated. It also had an enterprise chat system, and it was constantly adopting new tools to foster even more dialogue. Moreover, it had created a physically open communication environment to complement its digitally open one. People worked in wide-open workrooms with no offices or cubicle walls to separate them. Executives didn’t have offices, either; they sat with everyone else. Employees told me that this was especially important to them because it symbolized the sort of access and free-flowing communication they valued.
That said, building a conversational firm involves a lot more than just adopting a corporate wiki and taking down some cubicle walls; and it’s not easy to do. You need corporate leaders who really mean it when they say that they’re delegating voice rights and want to hear employees’ opinions. You need leaders who appreciate that the whole point of having a conversation is to surface a range of opinions. It won’t work if you tell people that you want their thoughts and then punish them when they speak up. Also, with open dialogue comes a lot of noise that many corporate executives might prefer to do without. But for executives who want more engaged employees and who want to be able to tap into the organization’s collective wisdom to confront business challenges when they arise, I think it’s well worth it.
How did this work at TechCo?
I think it’s easiest to explain by way of example. At one point, the company experienced a spike up in its customer churn. The executives could have hunkered down and tried to solve the problem in closed-door meetings among just themselves. But they didn’t. At the same time as they were thinking through the issue as a senior leadership team, they used the wiki to share over 100 pages of data on the issue with the workforce, and they encouraged employees to speak up and weigh in with questions, comments, and ideas. Then they took the conversation offline and held a “hack night,” where employees were invited to come and share their thoughts and work in small groups to “hack away” at the problem. Those groups continued to work together in the weeks that followed, using the wiki to update the rest of the organization on their progress and collect ongoing feedback. By promoting dialogue in digitally and physically open spaces like this, the company was able to turn the problem around quickly. In my opinion, that sort of rapid learning and adaptation is a unique strength of this conversational model.
What is the work relationship between millennials who came of age with social media and older generations of workers who did not?
From my conversations with millennial workers, I came to see that what they wanted most were voice and access. In reality, I think that’s what almost all of us want. Millennials are just particularly useful for revealing this desire because they display an extreme version of it in some sense. They were raised on social media tools and platforms that gave them more voice and access to information than prior generations had, and as a result, they have come to expect those things.
Describe “openness” in the workplace. Should we aspire to it?
Openness is a slippery concept because it’s so multi-faceted. It can mean participatory democracy. It can mean free-flowing communication. It can mean an organization without clear boundaries between itself and the external world. It can even mean surveillance.
Even though TechCo’s executives talked in terms of openness, I quickly realized that the word wasn’t the central metaphor for what I saw as truly unique about their evolving project. “Conversation” was more apt. Just like bureaucracy, openness solves some problems but creates others. At different stages of an organization’s life, different combinations of formal bureaucratic practices and more informal open ones might be necessary. The key is to have an open enough communication environment so that the organization can collectively surface the needs of the current moment and thoughtfully approach the next.
Book Review: The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media by Catherine J. Turco
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In The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media, Catherine J. Turco offers a ethnographic study of a fast-growing social media marketing company, anonymised as ‘TechCo’, that has sought to foster a different corporate culture through its use of social media to facilitate dialogue between employees across the hierarchy. The book offers an empathetic and nuanced understanding of the benefits and challenges of ‘the conversational firm’ that underscores the value of being seen to have a voice, whether in the workplace or the wider world, writes Michael Warren.
The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. Catherine J. Turco. Columbia University Press. 2016.
Find this book: amazon-logo
‘Empowered workforce’, ‘flat organisation structures’: we’ve all heard the empty buzzwords and latest fads to improve office productivity. When new initiatives are implemented there is often little change at the coalface for employees and minimal rewards to a company’s bottom line. Refreshingly, Catherine J. Turco’s study of a US social marketing company (which retains anonymity throughout the book as ‘TechCo’) reveals a business operating in a radical manner through its use of social media to discuss decisions and plan work. Building on ten months of fieldwork diligently interviewing and observing workers both in and out the workplace, Turco vividly writes in The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media about the unique problems of pursuing radical openness, such as not having a Human Resources (HR) department and publishing details of executive pay packages.
What does it mean to be a ‘conversational firm’? TechCo uses multiple communication channels (chat forums, a wiki, large open meetings) to leverage collective wisdom from its hundreds of employees to confront market and internal challenges. A vocal culture pervades TechCo, in which employees feel emboldened to speak out. This is most notably demonstrated in employees posting ideas and critiquing others’ thoughts on the company’s collaborative web-based forum (the wiki). There, the lowest-rung employees comment on executives’ posts and proposals, whilst high echelon employees reciprocate.
It is critical to understand nonetheless that in a conversational firm such as TechCo, communication rights do not correlate to decision-making rights, and employees at TechCo in general understand and are happy with this arrangement. As one employee states: ‘Ideally, I want a decision to come from the top down but with input having been encouraged and elicited from throughout the chain.’ Interestingly, Turco proposes that this could be a quirk of middle-class millennials brought up to be vocal on instant messengers, but with a ‘highly structured upbringing designed to advance their personal and professional development’.
Image Credit: (verlaciudad CC BY SA 2.0)
Desire for structure is also the backdrop to an engrossing chapter in Turco’s study: the pursuit of operating without a HR department. When Turco met Eric and Anil (TechCo’s founders) for the first time, Anil declared, ‘I have a visceral hatred of HR.’ About six months before Turco commenced her fieldwork, TechCo hired a professional HR manager to build much-needed HR functionality. Eric and Anil did not compromise on their post-bureaucratic vision easily: TechCo operated until it was five years old with nearly 400 employees without a HR manager, department or formal processes. This meant employees were plagued by issues such as a lack of standardisation in performance reviews and no consistent maternity leave policy. TechCo’s open culture of surveys, meetings and wiki discussions eventually won the day in persuading Eric and Anil of the need for HR.
Although not fully acknowledged by Turco, there are areas where communication and decision-making rights can significantly overlap. This passage is particularly powerful as Turco explores different perspectives of TechCo’s growing pains. While ethnographies of workplaces can become hamstrung by focusing on one segment of a workforce (frequently either upper management or workers) in a bid to not appear as a ‘double-agent’, Turco avoids this false dilemma well in giving understanding to the hopes and fears of TechCo’s founders, management and general employees.
A particularly intriguing mode of distributing decision-making rights is the policy of ‘use good judgment’. Shortened to ‘UGJ’, this means the distribution of broad freedoms and avoidance of micro-management. UGJ has become applicable to many areas of employees’ work, whether it be answering calls from clients (usually a receiver of a call in a normal company would be given a script; instead, at TechCo, it is UGJ that is the defining mantra), taking as much holiday time off as desired or smaller (but delectable) liberties, such as free (and always available) beer in the office for employees to drink whenever they want.
However, two novel problems occur with this policy – the first being a disparity in decision-making between different employees over work matters (one person’s UGJ may well be the opposite of another’s UGJ), with managers using UGJ to pass off difficult decision-making to other employees. As one manager candidly admits: ‘UGJ is a way for people at my level to avoid making decisions.’ The second quandary is that some employees are able to live more UGJ than others: for example, engineers with prior technical experience were able to exercise UGJ to greater levels.
TechCo’s idiosyncratic environment also requires a very specific type of person to succeed (millennial, extrovert, thick-skinned, obsessive), making hiring a critical process. It is perhaps churlish, but I am fascinated to hear more insights on recruitment and integration from the TechCo hiring manager who explains: ‘We rarely hire people from other places, and when we do, their experience is discounted. I have to coach people not to talk about their experience.’ The frequently cult-like atmosphere of TechCo could potentially make transition from the wider world to TechCo life difficult, or perhaps not if young recruits have little experience and are therefore more malleable. This transition is certainly ripe for further exploration; equally, more questions could be asked of how work-life balance is managed, if at all, at TechCo. The reader sees hints at potential failure in achieving this balance with the failing maternity leave standardisation as well as the relegation of some employees to ‘second-class citizens’ – a term used directly by several TechCo employees – when it came to control over time and schedules. The latter phenomenon has occurred because some roles in TechCo allow for more flexibility over work schedules than others: customer support and entry-level sales reps cannot by the nature of their work get the same level of flexibility in vacations as engineers. The openness of the conversational firm makes this inequality hard to ignore as vacation requests are available for all TechCo personnel to see on the company wiki and employees discuss their vacation plans in TechCo chat rooms.
The book is an excellent addition to the field of publications like Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations, gaining an empathetic understanding of how grand communication ideas like a conversational firm can affect employees in the smallest ways. Turco accompanies this emotional analysis with rigorous academic context, but this does not impede accessibility for more lay readers. A particular gem of the book is the methodological appendix at the end: here, the reader learns about the dilemmas of writing – for example, should TechCo ever be de-anonymised post-publishing? – and Turco brings to life her experience, whilst also briefly scraping away at the problem of integration for newcomers: ‘I am an introvert who craves structure and routine, and I was operating inside a company that privileged communication over control and had a unique tolerance for disorder and chaos.’
One of the great strengths of Turco’s book is emphasising the understated power of having a voice. One may not always have demands respected, but to have a voice, be listened to and consulted before a decision is made is important to people. Social media has given the opportunity to do this in the workplace, and in the wider world if used correctly. On the other hand, it can be a tool to buttress power and not engage, a prime example being Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a broadcasting tool instead of engaging in conversational democracy. TechCo’s iconoclasts give some hope that conversation does not need to fizzle out, and that now more than ever there are more opportunities for it to occur – all that is required is the will to speak and listen.
Michael Warren completed an MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation at the LSE in 2012, and graduated from the University of Sheffield (studying on exchange at the University of Waterloo, Ontario) with a BA in Modern History in 2011. He researched on an open data project for Deloitte and the Open Data Institute, and worked for the All-Party Parliamentary Health Group and as a Management Consultant in Health and Public Service at Accenture. He is a Policy Adviser at the Professional Standards Authority. Read more reviews by Michael Warren.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.