There’s something missing in Jaques’s Requisite Organization theory, which is described in the ideas of social networks. There is something missing in social network theory that is described in RO theory. Interestingly, both “solutions to the ills of contemporary Western civilization” are socially based, rather than psychological.

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In Waltzing With Bears (a book on IT project risk management, not a manual for circuses), Lister and DeMarco describe the benefits of running IT projects as a portfolio. Not every one of them would have to succeed: you could take on several very high-risk (but high-payoff) projects and balance it with several low risk [...]

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Is there any evidence, even from your experience, that RO will solve the Model I problem of defensive coverups that Argyris describes?

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Raccoon describes the basics of learning curves — they go down and start at the top, so you actually want them to be as steep as possible to get back to parity and start process improvement. He points out that all people learn.

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Jesse Poore, the U of Tenn professor, is interviewed by ACM’s Ubiquity for his recent article in IEEE Computer, “A Tale of Three Disciplines… And a Revolution”. Poore talks about how if we made correct specifications, our software would work. While I agree that software should not fail as often as it does, I think [...]

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Ed Schein, at last year’s Best of OD Summit in Chicago, said that the problem with these types of reviews, where everyone around you (managers, peers, employees, making a 360 degreee circle) rates your performance is that it gets subordinates to think about things that the manager does poorly. Which they may have never done. [...]

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Blanton et al. did a small study in one metropolitan area of IT professionals, measuring variables that the earlier literature on professional obsolescence and how they interact with these IT pros keeping up (professional development to avoid obsolescence).

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They set out to understand why, if professional development is so important to their own careers and corporate performance, don’t more developers do it. They studied quite a few from several organizations and discovered, well, what I expected:

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In case you’ve missed it, namewitheld and gmehl have been having quite the banter in the comments of one of my posts about Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization. Take a look and see what they’ve been up to. It’s all good stuff: highly recommended. namewithheld is putting forth some good questions and Glenn is providing some [...]

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I’ve got something building up that has to do with the very substance of Community. I don’t have the connections yet, so I’m just going to pile up individual ideas until they seem to point to some conclusion. Very irritating, but I’m not yet to where I can get my hands around them enough to [...]

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