Host E. Forrest Christian of The Manasclerk Company covers how

A friend of mine encouraged me to tell this story which I watched unfold first hand while a software development manager for a mid-sized consulting firm. One of my best developers — a software architect, really — started laughing in the middle of the day. We all needed something to release the strain of our bi-weekly drop work, so all us meerkats gathered around his desk.

“Look at this!” he said, and pointed to some small sort of print that was in an email.

Apparently he had just gotten an unsolicited solicitation to apply for a job doing .NET work. Now at the time .NET was brand new: it had only been officially on the market for some months and it had only been a couple of years since it had started beta.

We all knew this because part of the project was migrating the client to .NET. He had been an early alpha tester, the people who work with software applications before it even gets solid enough to start beta testing. It was an elite group, these .NET alpha testers, and he had bragged a couple of times about it. He quickly reminded us of it again, and then demanded that we look at the advert.

Squinting, we told him that we would prefer him to tell us whatever point he had.

“They say that they’re looking for a .NET developer, which has only been out for a few months now,” he said. “But then they say that they require ‘at least 5 years .NET experience.’

“Even I don’t have five years’ experience. I’m not even sure that the Microsoft engineers who created it have five years.”

Yes indeed, the great “must have experience in something that was just created” strikes again.

If you were wondering why your large institution (bank, insurance firm, governmental agency, etc.) can’t keep it’s computers working, you need look no further than idiots as managers.

It’s inevitable, having an idiot as a manager of technical staff. I’ve been one (both manager and idiot) so I know of which I speak. The trick to being successful is knowing and admitting that you’re an idiot.

Why this is true is something that until now I’ve only described orally to clients. But perhaps it’s worth describing in more detail.

In late November, while talking to my old partner about how the Seven Decision Making Approaches (or “languages of achievement”) are relevant to his current work problems, I suddenly realised something startling. For several years, I have been selling myself as either Imaginist or Empiricist, but delivering Systemicist results. The disconnect has been startling. It cleanly explains many of the issues that I’ve seen over the past eight years since leaving business process design and going into, well, everything else.

There are implications that follow, of course.

[Read more →]

[I continue my notes on Kinston & Algie's decision systems.]

As we continue with our exploration of the seven approaches to decision making that were originally developed by Jimmy Algie, reformulated by he and Warren Kinston, then extended by Warren [refs follow below], keep in mind that they can also be seen in two other ways.

Languages of Achievement: The words and syntax you use to talk about getting something done, how even your group should achieve a goal. Even when talking about getting to the same goal, people using two different approaches will argue endlessly about the approach.

Action Path: The way or path that you take in order to achieve your goal. This is why the decision approach is so important: it’s not just how you think but how you take action to achieve or solve a problem.

The Imaginist / Initutionist Decision Making Approach

The Imaginist (sometimes “intuitionist”) decision-making approach is normally thought of as the Creative one. The reason is that it works by imagining new things. It’s focus is on internal experiences. This approach emphasizes vision and charismatic leadership. Imaginists succeed when the issue isn’t clear, when things are confused. These are people who lead you out of a fog of confusion by describing something that doesn’t exist.

Examples of Imaginist include Jim McCarthy’s Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision
, Dan Pink’s “right-brain revolution”, most of Peter Block’s The Answer To How Is Yes, and most of the “find your inner compass” people. Many of these people come out of Empiricist-dominated fields. McCarthy ran the team at Microsoft that developed the software that developers use to create software. My old high-school lab partner became an electrical engineer and is now a “passion expert” with a thriving private practice. They see the degeneration of their Empiricist values and look for something that can be more.

That something is the Imaginist system.

[Read more →]

One of my friends suggested that I check out the pilot for the 2009 TV series called Being Erica from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She thought that it had a lot of ties to things that I had discussed.

[Read more →]

From “How Companies Spend Their Money” [PDF] (McKinsey Global Survey)

A survey of executives from around the world highlights how frequently — and why — a company’s resource allocation decisions go wrong.

Companies start off well, respondents say: senior executives are heavily involved in these decisions and routinely assess the prior performance of business units and the value creation protential of proposed projects, among other critera.

However, respondents also describe a climate in which optimistic forecasts are coupled with risk aversion. Companies can also be deliberately led astray: more than a third say that executives hide, restrict, or misrepresent information when requesting funds.

I found this interesting enough to link to it but I don’t have time to comment. Perhaps someone else can explain why how we have come to expect and embrace unethical behaviour from executives (e.g., “misrepresent information”). I’m betting that Michelle Carter has a insightful answer about being non-requisite and these shenanigans.

I’ve been reading Jim McCarthy’s materials lately. He used to be in charge of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft. His work there was nothing short of phenomenal: MS-VC++ came out of nowhere and demolished its long-time rival. Sure, MS has scads of cash but that wasn’t the whole picture. Borland went from 85% marketshare to nothing in a very short time because McCarthy’s team had put together a product that users wanted to use. We can argue over whether that produced good software (I’ve suffered years of putting up with VC++ programmers who didn’t understand the basics any better than I did, and I was management) but it did sell. And sell extremely well.

Lately, McCarthy and his wife, Michelle McCarthy, have been pushing The Core and its accompanying Core Commitments. I enjoyed the McCarthy’s rules for developing successfully, but this is ridiculous. It’s like he started going through an encounter group and decided that all relationships should be run with such artifice.

[Read more →]

Empiricists love data. Lots of data.

Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie posited that there are seven, and only seven, unique mindsets or approaches humans use when making decisions about action. This is conscious decision, not simply unconscious reaction based on stimula-response.I’ve got the full article available, although the quality is wanting. (See [2])

Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie weren’t a couple of bumblers: Algie had been looking at this since the 1970s and Kinston had, too, albeit from a different angle. Their work together extended Algie’s original work of four approaches and was based on extensive experience consulting with managers and professionals in commerce and medicine, and through many open workshops where the decision methods were taught and tested.

I’m going to be describing each different decision approach over the next few weeks as a I prep for some other work I’m doing.

Each approach has specific mindset and values that make it uniquely appropriate for certain types of problems. Adherents to a particular type (and we are all) believe that their favored approach works in all situations. But it doesn’t.

Decision making approaches can also be seen as “languages of achievement” [1] because it is through them that we act. We make decisions about action.

Many of our disagreements in meetings and even families can be seen as disagreements about how to decide, rather than the action itself.

Also, I will just note here something Warren has pointed out several times: your decision making language seems to be doing the work. If I know your dominant decision approach, I can predict with uncanny accuracy how you will approach the problem and what decisions you will make. It is almost as if we are simply channels for the approach. Knowing more about them can make this not true, so this is worth looking at.

(Let’s be clear here that I am writing up what I think is true. Warren wrote things up quite differently, and I need to translate what I have read and heard into my own words. I am likely introducing some error in my efforts to bring this to a larger audience, so feel free to comment.)

Here’s the first decision making approach.

[Read more →]

Here’s a good lesson demonstrating why you need native speakers to help you write your materials when working abroad, especially in non-Western languages. The illustration comes from the other way around, the world’s largest bank.

This is ICBC China’s attempt at English in an official recruiting site:

Our leading enterprise needs excellent talent, and excellent talent also looks forward to joining a leading team…. Detailed enrollment information, please refer to our website: www.icbc.com.cn. ICBC would like to be hand in hand with you, to develop our business and also help to achieve your personal value.

Yes, this seems to be real. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is so bad that I wonder if non-native speakers could properly parse its meaning.

Language mangling like this occurs all the time when people use computer translators, like Babel Fish or Google Translate. It should not be so obvious when they use human translators.

ICBC China would have done better to have used a two-step translation process, where the first pass is done by a real translator, and the second by a native-speaking professional writer to ensure that it makes sense in International English. As it is, it just makes them look like they aren’t even trying. Perhaps there are not that many proficient English speakers in Chinese banking, unlike their Hong Kong counterparts. It makes the ICBC look as provincial as many US-based banks, whose staff often speak nothing more than English.

Writers are paid because they understand how to use language more effectively than you do. (Disclosure: I have been a professional writer.) Skimping on language is much like having your IT support being done by your office manager: it can work, but it is usually less robust than having dedicated staff, especially in larger organizations.

You’ll have to follow the money

Did you know that if you start work during a recession, you are likely to never make as much as someone who started working during good times? This is probably not news to you: Forbes and the Wall Street Journal both covered this back before the class of 2009 graduated in May.

It turns out that economic research showed that people who graduate during a depression not only make less money when they come out, because the market is depressed and jobs are scarce, but they continue to make less for years to come and may never catch up with people who are exactly like them but graduated a couple of years earlier during a run-up. Even when times get better, they still earn less money for the same jobs.

The reasons for this should be obvious, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to spout useless claptrap.

For example, Forbes’s David Serchuk (“How To Graduate In A Recession”, 2009 April 16) wrote that:

Having the bad luck to graduate in a recession can mark someone’s entire career, as it can lead workers to start careers at smaller firms that pay less….

[S]ometimes having your plans shattered can bring you to make a career out of what you’d really like to do with your life, as opposed to simply chasing the money.

John Osborne, later in the article, said that

Graduating into a recession or a Great Recession or whatever we are calling it is a great gift, a real blessing in disguise. Why? For two simple reasons: You are learning in dog years (one year equals seven years of experience), and you are getting more experience since you are more actually valuable.

If your Bullshit Detector hasn’t already gone off, it should. Forbes, of course, doesn’t make money by telling people the truth which is why they seemed blissfully unaware of the impending crash even though everyone knew that it was coming. These are nice thoughts but they clearly aren’t true, or at least aren’t true for the vast majority of graduates.

To see why this is bullshit, we need to look at why recession-era graduates will make less, even after the recovery.

[Read more →]

It seems that I’ve done something here to upset Google. Back when I started writing about Dr. Elliott Jaques, my blog was #3 when you searched for “elliott jaques”, right after his own Requisite Organization and Art Kleiner’s excellent introductory article on the man and his stratified systems theory.

Now it’s #76.

It’s clear that somehow I’ve done something wrong, for I have continued to write about the good Dr. Jaques and Requisite Organization / Stratified Systems Theory, showing how they apply to a variety of different contexts. Maybe it’s because this is a blog.

But even in blogs I’m #7.

So….

It might be time to admit that while I really do think I explain Jaques’s work levels in clear english — I can even explain the basic ideas to the regularly dismissed “Level 1 worker” — I can probably do better by doing something else.

It’s a thought.

Ever wonder what what I write looks like? I Wordled the first page of my Organizations category archive. This is what it looked like:

click to enlarge

It would be interesting to do a full blog archive and see what I really think about.

SmartPlanet’s Andrew Nusca interviewe MAYA Design’s chief, Mickey McManus. McManus had some interesting things to say about making things so easy that they were intuitive, so easy that the user becomes “smug”:

We have a graph we write out. On one end is the customer that apologizes or make excuses. At the other end of the spectrum is smug. We want users to be smug. We’ll paper prototype it, then we’ll Wizard of Oz prototype it. After a few iterations, they’re smug. “This is so obvious, I don’t need to say it out loud.” And we want that.

If you think about it, this is something that Hidden High Potentials do regularly. More on that below.

[Read more →]

Bully boss? Maybe he just feels incompetent at power

Research published this month “examine[s] the effects of self-perceptions of incompetence on power holders’ tendency to aggress.” Or, why bully bosses are likely to be incompetent at their role.

From the Workplace Bullying Institute’s summary:

In a 4-study research paper to be published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science, by Nathaniel Fast (University of Southern California) and Serena Chen (University of California, Berkeley) linked aggression at work to perceived inadequacy of people in power (bosses). [Fast, N.J. & Chen, S. (2009) When the boss feels inadequate: Power, incompetence and aggression. Psychological Science, Nov. 2009]

In this study, incompetence means that the boss feels that he or she has a “low ability to influence other people” within that role. This is more salient for power roles (such as executives) and less so for someone without subordinates.

Nathanael Fast & Serena Chen conducted four experiments, some with adult workers, to determine whether one’s feeling of competence to power affects one’s willingness to do harm to another. They also tested to see if ego-stroking would help mitigate one’s desire to harm.

It turns out that bosses who feel that they are less competent at influencing people are more likely to “bully”. What was interesting was that in study 4, when they allowed participants to write about a value that they hold, a task which has been shown (apparently) to boost self-worth. Whatever that is. The important thing may be affirming one’s values, because it mitigated the tendency to aggress.

[Read more →]

Might not be the best person for the job. Then again, she might.

We all want to be happy. At least in the States, being happy is the closest thing to Nirvana. But it turns out that research has shown that sad workers will often out-perform happier ones.

Two psychologists at the University of Alberta, Professor Robert Sinclair (now with Laurentian University in Sudbury, ON) and PhD student Carrie Lavis, published some research in 2001 on work they did with workers in a printed circuit board factory. They made some of the workers sad, about as sad as one would get after watching a sad movie. These workers didn’t make more boards, but had fewer errors, and therefore made more usable product (less rework).

It seems that sad people use work to distract themselves from their sadness. They may also be more reflective. Happy workers see work as a distraction, too, but from their happiness.

Of course, there are several caveats.

[Read more →]

Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news

“Broader Measure of U.S. Unemployment Stands at 17.5%”

The New York Times reports today on the situation of unemployment in the United States. The numbers, which I have been mentioning, differ from the standard ones issued by the government because they include those who have stopped looking for work, or who have part-time work but want full-time work. This does not include those who consider themselves “underemployed” while working full-time.

The Times notes that had we been keeping records that far back, this number would surely be the highest since the Great Depression.

At the end of the article — interestingly placed — the author mentions some of the most troubling aspects of today’s unemployment:

One of the more striking aspects of the Great Recession is that most of its impact has fallen on a relatively narrow group of workers. This is evident primarily in two ways.

First, the number of people who have experienced any unemployment is surprisingly low, given the severity of the recession. The pace of layoffs has increased, but the peak layoff rate this year was the same as it was during the 2001 recession, which was a fairly mild downturn. The main reason that the unemployment rate has soared is the hiring rate has plummeted.

So fewer workers than might be expected have lost their jobs. But those without work are paying a steep price, because finding a new job is extremely difficult.

Second, wages have continued to rise for most people who still have jobs. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers, who make up about four-fifths of the work force, actually accelerated in October, according to the new report.

This is has not happened since the Great Depression, which was a time of foment for various movements for change in how America was run. Since official unemployment is expected to continue to remain above 10% through sometime in 2011, I would imagine that this army of forgotten men and women will be fodder for similar movements here.

What would the feds do if 1 million unemployed people, most of whom will have lost their homes, decide to march on Washington?

Last I found it interesting that all of this gets reported on Saturday, when almost no one reads the paper.

The old research has been pretty consistent: optimists are lousy at predicting what will really happen because they always assume “happy day”. But no one has ever seen how optimists predictions change as they get more information.

Until now.

A recent study (currently a working paper) tracked MBA students performance predictions across semesters. It turned out that the students more who had more optimistic projections in the beginning (and were wrong) got much more accurate over time as they got more information and feedback. Pessimists, oddly, got less accurate as the semester progressed. Apparently having the initial optimism about success (when they have no data) doesn’t color their ability to make more accurate evaluations as they get more data.

However, we all know stories about business leaders who kept on thinking that things were going to go their way when they clearly weren’t. There is probably a nuance that needs to be addressed here that is being missed by everyone.

I’d also be interested in how level of capacity affects these findings. Were the “pessimists” simply working at the wrong level? I think MBA work, even at Duke, is level 2 or less.

Read the whole working paper:

Ron Kaniel, Cade Massey & David T. Robinson. 20087/8. “Optimism without illusion: The impact of experience on expectations“. Yale Working Papers.

Maybe I can convince Alan, our resident recruiter, to chime in on this, but I’m pretty sure that the rule is this:

If you have to pay for placement, it’s a ripoff.

“Job Search Firms: Big Pitches and Fees, Few Jobs“, New York Times, 2009 Aug 17.

I meant to post something more on this, but you should read it if you are using job search firms or thinking about it.

I don’t do job placement. I don’t even promise people with whom I work will get a better job. I can only promise that they will understand what will work and what will not. If I know some people who can use you, then, sure, I’m going to want to try and connect you with them. High potentials are hard for other people to find, so connecting you may help my reputation with these other people.

Which is always good.

Of course, many of you also have some wickedly weird coping mechanisms that we have to disable so that you can do the work at the level you are capable. It’s just a matter of giving you new techniques that work when you are working at the right level, and helping you identify the situations where those old techniques are still useful.

Don’t ever give money to anyone who says that they can get you work. It’s almost always a ripoff. Where it’s not, it’s usually just luck that you get the work.

Besides, most job placement people do not have any idea to help hidden high potentials find work in good times, much less when the economy is a mess and unemployment is still rising. Because being unemployed means that you will be more unemployed these days, you can’t do things they way that you have been doing them. Or the way that everyone else is doing them.

You probably can’t really look for a job. You have to meet people while seeming to be gainfully employed.

I’ll talk more about this later. It’s a trick that many of you can deploy.

Here’s a repost of something from 2004 about what job posting are best for learning how to be a manager. It’s still relevant.

Philippines Marine Corps parachuting.

Morgan W. McCall, in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job
(1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:

• Project / Task Force: limited duration assignments to complete either a goal or solve a project. I would imagine that special projects are what he is talking about and not the “project-oriented” organization where everything is projectized.
• Line-to-Staff switches: where you go from working within a Line of Service (LoS) to a cross-departmental position. This is pretty obvious: staff positions require you to know about the business as a whole instead of just your little part. They also have you work on a variety of problems under greater pressures, much like projects.
• Start-ups
• Fixits / Turnarounds: I’ve worked on several of these and I doubt that someone who can’t learn quickly could survive. One of the issues with a Fixit is that the common knowledge doesn’t work. You have to listen to the system and just try things until something works. You often have no idea why it worked, only that it did. Which may not really be learning.
• Leaps in Scope of Responsibility: Although if you leap beyond your actual level of Competence (as defined by Jaques in Requisiste Organization) you may end up learning to fail. In a wretching, awful way.

[Read more →]

I’ve been writing about work levels and stratified systems theory since 2003, just after I started writing this blog. Some of these older posts are great, full of wonderful information that you’ll no doubt find useful. Other posts are clearly wrongheaded: I had much to learn.

My clean up is just to get rid of some of the problems in the text: bad characters, formatting that failed to make some conversion to a newer version, dead links, etc. I’m thinking about putting together some ebooks that would aggregate the better ones, clean them up and make the necessary corrections. It might be more useful than having to trawl what was at the time simply a place to put notes on what I was reading. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I still do half the time.

I don’t do as much reading any more. Maybe it was a phase, but I rather think that it was a time to shove a massive amount of information into my head as quickly as possible. These days I’m trying to assimilate all this information and figure out how to deliver it. My work with Warren Kinston taught me something relevant to this: most of the time, you have to present information that challenges preconceptions several times and in several different ways for it to be useful. It means fewer posts, because there is a few number of things to say or simple things to think through.

Anyway, if you see lots of updates coming on the RSS feed, it’s because I’m continuing to clean up these old posts.

“He’s such a cold bastard! Even the room gets a chill when he walks in!”

We’re weren’t even out of the room and my consulting pal was already berating our client. He had point: it had been chilly in there, and the client — never someone who filled your heart with bonhomie — was in particularly icy form that day.

I’d always laugh when my pal said these things, of course: we all know that the “cold bastard” was (a) statistically likely born in wedlock given where he came from and (2) had a body temp around 98.6°F (37°C), give or take.

It turns out that my colorful pal was onto something. Temperature really does affect one’s affect, changing the emotions considerably, and even affects one’s intellectual performance.

[Read more →]