The Plugged-In Manager

Many of us are technology-, people-, or process-focused — we don’t naturally use all three of these critical organizational dimensions at the same time as we manage, work in teams, or even just do our own work.

“Plugged-in managers” are different. They never try to solve a problem with just a single silver bullet. They see choices across a situation’s dimensions of people, technology, and organizational processes/ resources, and then are able to “mix” them together into new — and powerful — organizational strategies, structures, and practices. In this PARC Forum talk, I will share how to identify plugged-in managers, the backgrounds for developing these skills, and results in designing work and related technologies.

Presenter(s)

Terri Griffith is a Professor of Management at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business. An expert on combining technology and organization decisions and how to effect organizational change, she most recently published The Plugged-In Manager (Jossey-Bass 2011). Terri is also a regular contributor to GigaOM WebWorkerDaily, her blog Technology and Organizations, and journals such as Organization Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Academy of Management Review. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Griffith earned her doctoral and master's degrees in organizational psychology and theory with minors in technology from the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University. She began her academic career in engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In her free time, Terri is a pilot and sailboat race captain.