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Faculty
Research: Willie Ocasio, MORS
Professor
Willie Ocasio spotlights how corporate leaders gain attention
by
Ed Finkel
Willie
Ocasio doesn’t like to use the term “attention
deficit disorder” to describe a challenge confronting
the corporations he studies.
“Others
have applied that term, and it’s a little too slick,”
says Ocasio, the John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor
of Management and Organizations. He has been working on a
series of theoretical and empirical papers on “attention
management,” nomenclature he prefers to use.
“We live
in a world where there’s so much information and so
many competing data affecting the agenda of a corporation,”
he says.
Fundamentally,
an important role of management is to focus the attention
of workers and managers on a limited number of issues and
initiatives.”
To an extent,
such attention management happens company-wide, although in
some cases it’s more targeted, Ocasio says. “Sometimes
large, complex organizations also have to differentiate and
specialize their attention,” he says. “Some parts
of the organization pay attention to certain things and other
parts pay attention to others.”
Ocasio researches
how communications and information systems help to manage
attention. His framework breaks down into three areas: attention
channels, language and political capital. By attention channels,
he means the paths down which communications and information
travel, which don’t always follow typical reporting
relationships.
“Traditional
reporting is clearly one way people communicate and focus
attention, but there’s a lot more lateral communication
and group-based interaction that is also quite consequential,”
says Ocasio. “We have to look at other ways, outside
of the reporting relationships, by which the attention and
agenda of the organization is managed.”
In his recent
publications examining General Electric Corp., Ocasio found
a highly developed example of tight communication processes
that, to some extent, pre-dated celebrity CEO Jack Welch.
“The strategic agenda management process is very tightly
coupled,” he says. “You have committees and a
series of one-on-one meetings. All these activities are planned
and regulated, and they build on each other. It allows the
senior management to have a unified agenda that is then transmitted
and communicated throughout the corporation.”
The language that
corporations use also has a profound affect on attention management,
Ocasio says. “Organizations develop very specialized
vocabularies to understand and interpret the world,”
he explains. “The vocabularies we use have consequences
for what we pay attention to. The content side is critical.”
Under Welch, GE
shifted its content away from a purely financial focus. “Numbers
are always important, but you cannot have an effective organization
where the agenda is purely managed by the numbers because
you end up missing other indicators,” Ocasio says. “Here’s
a CEO who was in place for 20 years, but every couple of years,
you can shift the agenda of the organization through these
communication channels and make sure that there’s consistent
follow-through” in terms of content.
By political
capital, Ocasio refers to how one’s status impacts that
person’s ability to affect the agenda. “Some people
will command more attention than others,” he says. “We
have to think about who are the high-status players in the
organization. Who gets invited to these [agenda-setting] meetings
is quite consequential because it becomes a signal of political
capital. It’s a way of distinguishing the organization’s
up-and-coming stars. This is not necessarily tied to the formal
reporting structure.”
This
aspect connects to Ocasio’s points about channels and
language in that political capital is derived partly from
the ability to communicate effectively.
“If you can, in a sense, be a developer of the language
and the culture, that becomes one main sources of political
capital,” Ocasio says. “This perspective on power
is distinct from traditional perspectives that talk more about
the ability to control resources and to reward and punish.”
About
Professor Ocasio
William Ocasio is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished
Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School.
His research links organizational politics, cognition, and
culture with the study of strategic processes, corporate governance,
and organizational and institutional change. These varied
interests are brought together by a focus on explaining the
determinants of organizational and industry attention and
its consequences for stability and change in organizations
and institutions.
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