Entries from June 2004

I would like to begin the combination of the following ideas. As always, this everything, in no particular order (with apologies to WXRT’s advertising staff of 1993).
Elliott Jaques’s ideas of requisite organization and trust-building hierarchies;
the social capital argument of trust within a culture and trust-building within a culture, specifically the ideas popularized by Francis Fukuyama [...]
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Tags: Theory

Every Best Practice becomes a Worst Practice when you have the wrong people in the wrong places.
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Tags: Change · Managing

MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!!
Look, if it works for spammers, maybe RO supporters should give it a try. Making money with something is the best way to prove that it works.
What RO gives us is not a replacement for management or business skills, but a way to classify that mysterious “leadership” that seems to change the [...]
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Tags: Theory

Reviewing Cass R. Sunstein’s “Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go To Extremes” in The Yale Law Journal, Oct 2000.
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Tags: Organizations · Reviews - Articles

Besides having a very entertaining title, Marc Bilodeau and Al Silvinski’s “Tolient Cleaning and Department Chairing: Volunteering a Public Service” (1994) has some interesting proofs. Basically, they want to put forth some propositions about figuring out who would volunteer to do an activity that no one wants to do but that everyone would benefit [...]
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Tags: Reviews - Articles

One of the things that I spoke with Ken recently about was the idea of “commitment networks”. This phrase has some particular meanings in AI research but he used it as something that was different from an accountability hierarchy. Running it through HiBeam (the old elibrary — we can thank any demise of “e dash” [...]
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Tags: Organizations

In order, let’s go over what I think are the truths of Requisite Organization. Some of this comes from a result of reading Solaas’s article (see my other posts for a link) and some from fighting through my own questions.
And, yes, I know that TSD is validated and I already have the Craddock bibliography. That [...]
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Tags: Theory

Harald Solaas, who wrote a comment to Does RO Really Work Over the Weekend?, has written an article entitled “Why Is RO Theory So Difficult to Understand?” In it, he relates the following story about working with Elliot Jaques on a Requisite Organization project:
…Jaques absolutely rejected trying to establish the size of a role by [...]
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Tags: Theory

West reviews the philosophical underpinnings of the battle between structured programming and object-oriented programming. It’s an interesting read, as he goes back to the basic fight between the rationalist/formalist Enlightenment camp and their pesky detractors, variously called “hermeneutics”, “constructivist” or “interpretationalism”.
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Tags: Computers/IT · Reviews - Articles

When I asked earlier about Jaques’s “Weekend Theory” really working, I was asking a specifically micro- question: does changing the structure of the organization produce “instant” results in individuals?
I got an answer about the macro question I wasn’t asking: Jaques just doesn’t talk about the process by which the change occurs, from old structure to [...]
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Tags: Change · Theory