Because the killer app is us.

There’s a fascinating paper at the IMF by social capital guru Francis Fukuyama (Social Capital and Civil Society – Prepared for delivery at the IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms) that covers his reasoning behind social capital being called “capital” at all. Besides being interested in how to create societies, I’ve always found him a lucid writer who discusses a topic that relates to the Law of the Real Boss — Elliott Jaques’s “requisite organization” (RO) and Stratified Systems Theory — because it touches on the importance of trust.
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I recently tweeted that “As long as you advocate leaderless groups, the power-hungry will control you. The answer is more complex.” Asked to provide some more, I figured I’d do it here since it ties into some of the workplace stuff we’ve been talking about (from when Wilfred Brown was MD/CEO of Glacier) and the new model of Evangelical church organization.

I’ve talked about this issue before and it’s been contradictory. I’ve written about “Leaderless Groups and Why Wilfred Brown Was Brilliant“, The Single Leader Fallacy and employee participation in policy making through representative democracy. I’ve even talked about fascist pastors. and my thinking has been changed a good deal by the work of Warren Kinston on movements and purpose. That makes this worth going over.

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When I went to Vancouver, I was castigated by a family friend for having a company name that doesn’t make any sense. If you haven’t kept track, although I use a few Brand Names, my company name is “The Manasclerk Company”.

“It makes me think of deranged sales associates at Sears,” he said, not a little derisively.

I pointed out that between Lands End and Craftsman (and, let’s be honest, Kmart), I buy a lot of stuff from Sears. Didn’t make him happy and he proceeded to berate me for not doing this other thing. He bought dinner, and I’ll put up with a lot for sushi, so I shut up and nodded a lot.

Still, I suppose it is true enough that I’ve not done a good job saying what “manasclerk” means. If you’re interested, this post will let you know what it is.

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Let’s take another gander at how a hidden high potential can either get or stay in a that low-level job. It’s counter to prevailing advice you get, so you may want to pay attention.

Before I start, I have to emphasize that I’m only talking about Hidden High Potentials (HHPs) and not Normal People. Normals give HHPs advice which is lousy because it’s the advice that works for them (other Normals, that is). They can’t imagine that this Slacker / Underachiever / Idiot to whom they’re talking is in a completely different league, workwise. Heck, y’all aren’t even playing the same game.

Let’s do this by looking at the advice you get and what you really should be doing.

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From Organizational Participation: Myth and Reality by Frank Heller, Eugen Pusicć, George Strauss, and Bernhard Wilpert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 294 pp.

These experts (Heller is from Tavistock) have a brief mention of Wilfred Brown’s participative management at Glacier Metal Company.

In some individual cases the transition from autocracy to a variety of organizational forms where influence is more widely distributed can be achieved by deliberate intra-organizational processes, as for instance in the formation of the Scott Bader Commonwealth (Hoe 1978) or the democratization of the Glacier Metal Company (Jaques 1951; Wilfred Brown 1960). In the case of Scott Bader, the founder of the business was a devout Christian who, after a prolonged strike of his workforce. came to the conclusion that he no longer wished to be the sole owner. In the Commonwealth he created, every employee became formally a part owner and two potentially participative decision-making councils were set up. The Managing Director of the Glacier Metal Comapny, Wilfred Brown, was a very unusual person. He combined intellectual and socio-political interests (he was for a time a Minister in the British Labour Government with a very sympathetic attitude to social science which led him to engage a psychoanalytically oriented consultant, Elliot [sic] Jaques from the Tavistock Institute in London, to help introduce a participative-humanistic organization (Jaques 1951).

These two well documented cases, while not unique, are examples of substantial structural and to a lesser extent behavioural changes consequent on a policy decision by a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). In both cases the CEO stayed on the scene for sufficiently long to consolidate the structural changes and in both cases these changes survived the death of the founder for a number of years. [145-6]

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A few years ago, I was talking with Naga Kumar, who had been a colleague of David Cooperrider at Case Western when he was developing Appreciative Inquiry. He told me that while he like and used a lot of AI in his work, he parted ways with Cooperrider, who believed that AI was value neutral: there was something to appreciate in any organization.

Which always brings up the Nazi question: can you do AI with the Gestapo?

“Some organizations,” Naga told me, “should not be appreciated.”

The story came back to me as I was working with several different psycho-social tools (read: things that help you understand how people work together). It struck me that they were value neutral, that there was nothing stated explicitly about the values or value choices you should make.

And that’s possibly troubling.

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I’ve been wondering lately if Requisite Organization (the ideas formulated by Elliott Jaques) will survive for much longer. The GO Society identified several years ago that most of their members were “gray” — retirees or close to retirement age — and there were few young people in the pipeline to replace them.

I’ve worked with Requisite Organization people for several years now, since being found while blogging about Elliott Jaques’s books. I reckon that I know most of the people in the field these days, by name at least. I can only think of a couple of people my age or younger who are active in it, Michelle Carter and Sergei (whose last name escapes me). Many of what the RO people consider the “younger generation” are actually close 50. Younger people like Michael Raynor (author of The Strategy Paradox) use the ideas developed at Wilfred Brown’s Glacier Metal Company in the 1950s and 1960s, but not especially those from Elliott Jaques’s later works. Especially not Requisite Organization.

If you want to have a movement, it’s probably a bad idea to not be developing young people to take your place. It’s interesting that for the most part this isn’t happening.

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I spent some time perusing the programming stacks at Seattle’s main library today, and skimmed through some texts on software architecture. Perhaps the most interesting was 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts (ed. Richard Monson-Haefel). It’s a collection of various two-page thoughts from people who do software architecture from across the globe.

Think Chicken Soup for the Software Architect.

Officially, I’ve actually been a software architect and unofficially I’ve done some as the need arose in large clients. I’m not one but I’ve spent the better part of 15 years working with people who are, whether they called themselves this or not.

What I found interesting was how many contradictory pieces of advise that there were.

And how each of them was entirely correct.

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Today’s post talks about another blogger, Julie Neidlinger, a wonderful North Dakota-based artist who is currently having an “Art Rummage Sale” where you pays your tiny bit of cash and get a random set of art from her office. This seems to be pretty worthwhile: I’ve not seen anything that you’d be disappointed in owning. Frankly, it’s way too little for what you’re likely to get. I recommend you get this before the world wises up and her stuff is priced where is deserves to be.

Sometimes when you’ve been the Hidden part of “Hidden High Potential” for way too long, you just want to find something that pays the bills. You look for a job, any job.

This is hard to do, even when times are good. When times are hard, it seems impossible.

Just ask Julie Neidlinger. She knows all about how hard it is to get a job when you’re grossly overqualified. The story she tells is an excellent example, because it’s such a common one to so many of you Hidden High Potentials. She went looking for an office job in the state with the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, lower than my region had during the good times.

I was looking for something Monday through Friday, normal business hours, regular paycheck, nothing retail or selling — I just want to be able to put aside money and rebuild my savings.

For some reason, in this type of work, I am not hireable. I do not know why.

So I’m going to tell her, and give some hints as to how she might be able to pull this off, and close with the core truths that are more useful.

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For those of you who care, I’m spending the summer in Seattle at the behest of a fellow (much larger) investor in a Green startup up in Vancouver. He thinks it’s in the best interest of both the startup and my family to bug out to the Northwest.

Where I am currently enjoying a “sunny” day that seems to be mostly drizzle.

Very exciting, and if you’re in the northwest, let me know. I’m looking forward to setting up shop here, both for the different functions of The Manasclerk Company (including the Secret Rules of Career Success) and the Green business.

Taking years off her life.
Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com.

Research published last month in the International Journal of Epidemiology shows a link between being bored at work and dying early. Back in the late 1980s, 7,500 civil servants in London — aged 35 to 55 — were polled about their jobs. Thirty years later, Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London went looking to see what happened to these people. The results are startling:

Compared to everyone other workers, folks who said they were “very bored” at their civil service jobs were 37% more likely to have died. For the chronically bored (those who reported high boredom again three years later), the incidence of coronary heart disease was 2.5 times those who weren’t bored.

Think that’s not so bad? In the same population of civil workers, those with lots of job stress were 1.7 times more likely to have coronary heart disease than those who reported having no work stress.

That’s right: boredom may be even more dangerous than stress.

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You have no idea what’s in store for you. Smiling goat via George Chernilevsky

Teams that encounter frustrating problems as they are working sometimes attach to a single team member all the negative feelings that are rampant in the group. They make that person to be scapegoat, the one who is responsible for everything that has gone wrong. If that bad actor could just be removed, the thinking goes, the team’s problems would disappear. The impulse to scapegoat someone when the going gets rough can be quite strong; moreover, the scapegoated member often starts to behave in accordance with his or her peers’ expectations, which makes things worse all around.

— from commentary by professor J. Richard Hackman in Harvard Business Review, November-December 1994

Hidden high potentials have a significantly higher risk of being scapegoated by teams than do normal people. People with too much going on are irritating and usually seen as a threat, which is why HHPs also have strange behaviours to obfuscate their potential.

There’s not much that I can see you can do when the group turns on you. I’ve been on the receiving end of this, and have a steady stream of people coming to me who are deep in it. The only real solution is to either leave to something better or to accept your lot in life, suffer, and hope that after you have been punished for their sins that they will let you back in the group.
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If you are a subscriber, the latest Secret Rules of Career Success newsletter deals with how your unconventional paths to achieving more than other people can actually destroy your career and even get you fired. It’s a big topic, so there should be more coming about it.

What? Not a subscriber? Now that’s just plain wrong!

The cobbler’s children go unshod.

— Old Russian proverb

I’ve told you for years (if you’ve been paying attention) that you can’t force people wanting what you have to offer. That you can’t change certain parts of who you are. That when people don’t want what you have to offer — either due to working below your worklevel, fighting your personality’s inclinations for framing things, or doing work in the wrong work domain — you should just move on.

You’d think that I’d have this stuff down and always implement it in my own life. But I didn’t.

After fighting a “I know this won’t work” losing battle in the Chicago area, I’ve decided that a move is necessary. It’s time to go to where people are responding positively to me, where people want what I have to offer, the unique set of transforming skills that make up my calling in life.

Therefore, I’m moving out to Seattle.

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In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others.

Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer:

[Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of the large bright-white eggs most popular with Americans. [Purdue University research William] Muir said that approach unintentionally produced birds that also have a heightened self-preservation instinct and desire to literally be at the top of the pecking order. [Associated Press article by Rick Callahan]

It’s amazing that so much of what we have done that has helped increase natural production so dramatically has had so many other side-effects. Years ago the banana industry was devastated because they had standardized on a single type of banana plant, which had suddenly gotten a deadly disease. Europe standardized its forests to single tree types, meaning that during major storms an entire mountainside would be completely destroyed, laying on the ground.

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Or just stuff I may not have noted.

• Battelle. 1997. Lead Exposure Associate With Renovation and Remodeling Activities: Summary Report (EPA 747-R-96-005). Washington, DC: Technical Programs Branch, Chemical Management Division, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
• Westen, Drew; Weinberger, Joel; and Bradley Rebekah. 2007. “Motivation, Decision Making and Consciousness: From Psychodynamics to Subliminal Priming and Emotional Constraint Satisfaction”. In Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, Evan Thompson (eds), Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, pp. 673-702.
• McMahon, Patrick D.; Showers, Carolin J.; Reider, Sherry L.; Abramson, Lyn Y.; and Hogan, Michael E. 2003. “Integrative thinking and flexibility in the organization of self-knowledge”. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 27(2): 167-184.
• Hosman, Lawrence A. & Siltanen, Susan A. 2006. “Powerful and Powerless Language Forms: Their Consequences for Impression Formation, Attributions of Control of Self and Control of Others, Cognitive Responses, and Message Memory”. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 25(1): 33-46.
• Lawrence, W. Gordon; Bain, Alastair; and Gould, Laurence J. 1996. “The fifth basic assumption”. Free Associations, 6:28-55.
• Larkin, Ian & Leider, Stephen. 2010. “Why do firms use non-linear incentive schemes? Experimental evidence on sorting and overconfidence” (Harvard Business School Working Paper 10-078).
• Hackman, J. Richard. 1992. “Group Influences on Individuals in Organizations”. In M.D. Dunnette & L.M. Hugh (eds.), Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Vol 3), Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.
• Wikielman, Piotr; Knutson, Brian; Paulus, Martin; and Trujillo, Jennifer L. 2007. “Affective Influence on Judgments and Decisions: Moving Towards Core Mechanisms”. Review of General Psychology, 11(2): 179-192.
• Pfeffer, Jeffrey; Cialdini, Robert B.; Hanna, Benjamin; and Knopoff, Kathleen. 1998. “Faith in Supervision and the Self-Enhancement Bias: Two Psychological Reasons Why Managers Don’t Empower Workers”. Baisc and Applied Social Psychology, 20(4): 313-321.
• Anderson, Cameron; Srivastava, Sanjay; Beer, Jennifer S.; Spataro, Sandra E.; and Chatman, Jennifer A. 2006. “Knowing Your Place: Self-Perceptions of Status in Face-To-Face Groups”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6): 1094-1110.
• Baldwin, Carliss Y. 2010. “The Strategic Use of Architectural Knowledge by Entrepreneurial Firms” (Harvard Business School Working Paper Series: 10-063). Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA.

Thinking that the lead-based paint on the walls of your old house is no big deal? You’ll be hearing differently, and I’ll explain a bit of why.

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From “The Fifth Basic Assumption”, Free Associations (1996) Volume 6, Part 1 (No. 37): 2855, by W. Gordon Lawrence, Alastair Bain, and Laurence Gould

Just a part that I found interesting and perhaps relevant in the recent sex scandal cases in the Roman Catholic Church. Although cases have predated Vatican II. It also seems relevant or illuminating in the changes within the American Evangelical churches. I have discussed the need for certitude, and found it interesting that Lawrence & co. touch on this in a way that was related.

The article is rather thick going, or perhaps the field is simply too foreign for me.

The first inklings of baM came from the experience of working with religious (nuns and priests) on a series of actionresearch projects 20 years after Vatican II. During these projects Lawrence had the first glimpses of the phenomenon we now call baM. The key factor in all these actionresearch projects was that the majority of the known structures of the religious life had been removed because of Vatican II. At the time, Lawrence was preoccupied with the existential crisis that religious were in and wrote that they were experiencing the loss of a social world which had been ordered, regular, and had a purpose. While this loss was a release for some because it brought freedom-as expressed in liberation theology, for instance-for a great many it was causing feelings of grief and mourning. We can argue against the quality of religious life before Vatican II and give evidence to show that it had many disadvantages in terms of the human development of religious because the emphasis was on baD. That is secondary to our main point which is that, whatever its quality, the then structures of religious life provided a container into which uncertainty could be projected and certitude received back, or introjected. With the erosion of these structures indivduals were driven back into themselves, within their own personal boundaries, as the only sure anchor in a world of uncertaintv (Lawrence, 1985b). With hindsight it can be interpreted that religious were thrown into baM as a mode of survival.

As time has passed one can see that this baM experience became for some a necessary, temporary, basic assumption for it has allowed many nuns and priests to come to redefine the religious life as in, for example, their taking of the ‘option for the poor’. This has enabled them to redefine their apostolates and change their lifestyle accordingly. So they have been able to reaffirm themselves in the new versions of the religious life which are now more orientated to revelation through the processes of interpreting the Word in the light of the changing circumstances in the environment. There is, then, a sophisticated use of baM which can lead to a redefinition of Work and new activities to further that work.

Douglas Kirsner of Deakin University spoke with Elliott Jaques before he died, and wrote up the results from the perspective of another psychoanalyst. Jaques abandoned psychoanalysis but would later refer to that as perhaps going overboard. It’s an interesting read for those of you who are interested in what he thought of things at the end of his life.

This copy seems to be a poor conversion, so you will have to piece together what is quotations from Jaques and what isn’t. Not too hard but I could go for some use of blockquote tags.

It should be noted that Jaques, like everyone else, would remember things a bit as he wanted them to be rather than they were. For example, in the 1990s he would say that Glacier abandoned works councils because they had run their course, whereas Brown never stopped seeing them as the cornerstone of how he led the company. Jaques did abandon the ideas of the works councils, to be replaced with the strict hierarchy in all things, and he apparently unconsciously reconfigured his memory to fit his later values.

Many people (if not most) do this, and making getting the story right after several years hellish. One can think of the recent studies on modern artists of France or the Jack Kirby vs. Stan Lee debates where even the 1960s have become opaque behind a wall of conflicting memories.

Still, fascinating look into the changing mind of a remarkable genius.

Kirsner, Douglas. 2004. “The Intellectual Odyssey of Elliot Jaques: From Alchemy to Science“. Free Associations: psychoanalysis, groups, politics, culture, 11(2): 179-204. Free Association Books, London, UK.

This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy.

One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s time to develop a multi-site church model.’”

Really.

The multisite church model is also called the satellite model because it involves having remote congregations — that is, those who are not physically at the main congregation’s location — who hear the exact same sermon and sing or hear the same songs. Today this is done by having the sermon telecast, either by transcription or satellite or Internet feed, to the remote site. A local team of musicians (a band of sorts, and called a “local worship team”) plays songs whose choice and order is determined an executive team at the main site.

A clergyman is based at the remote site but does not preach sermons or homilies, which are delivered via large video screens. The local clergy is responsible for managing the local volunteers and insuring that they work according to procedures specified by the main site.

Volunteers are usually only permitted to work after undergoing training by head volunteers or paid staffers from the main site, and working several weeks at the main site. This is sometimes impossible, as the remote site is in another state. In these cases, the initial staff is usually large enough to train and control the local volunteers according to the standards and procedures of the main congregation.

By “main congregation”, we usually mean “executive paid staff at the main site”.

Decisions are made by going through the clerical or staff chain of command. Few decisions that are made at the local level can be appealed, because they are made in accordance to a strict set of methods and standards set in place by the executive staff of the main site. Local parishioners may have representation on an advisory board at the main site. This representation is usually via numbers, much like the U.S. House of Representatives. There is no per-community representation as per the U.S. Senate, so satellite congregations will have little voice in how things are run.

This may be moot, as most of the multisite churches follow the Megachurch model. In it, all power is concentrated in the chief executive, who often chooses the board members, and “fires” those who get in the way of his desired changes.

Supporters of this model naively call it revolutionary.

Let’s look at what it really is.
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