Alan Downs is a very successful executive coach who has worked the inside of a large corporation himself. He is even the author of an intriguing memoir of sorts about axing huge numbers of the employees for the corporation. The Fearless Executive rejects the very premise of the title: there are no fearless executives, only executives who face and work …
Rules for Organizing for Project Success
Even though they are continuing to spend millions every year, the project has almost no chance of success for entirely organizational reasons.
Teesside Confidentiality Model as presented at SACMAT
this year. Regretfully, I didn’t attend but I have been pouring through the proceedings. As I promised months ago, this post highlights some of the more interesting points for those of us doing access control technologies for software systems.
Latest issue of COMPUTER actually useful
Wouldn’t you know it? The last issue that I have coming to me before I was going to end my IEEE Computer Society membership and it had to be interesting. I’ve been reading Computer for several years now and I’ve gotten to the point where I just pass it on to some other IT schmuck without actually opening it. I …
Elliott Jaques on Complexity, Simplicity and How It Won’t Get Easier
We’re not happy in positions that we don’t have the ability to do nor are we successful.
On Hierarchies and Requisite Organization
What have we lost in our rejection of hierarchy?
Jaques and Clement on Leadership and Subordinate Behaviours
In their book, Executive Leadership, Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement make the point that almost any personality type can be an effective manager — role that contains leadership. (They go to lengths to make it clear that leadership does not exist outside of a particular role performance.) These personality quirks are irrelevant until they become disruptive to the organization or …




