Science had a great article on Çatalhöyük (there are various spellings) a few years ago that reviews the latest research, as of 1998 ["THE FIRST CITIES: Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities", DOI: 10.1126 / science.282.5393.1442]. There’s even a website of the latest excavations at Çatalhöyük. Be warned, though: it’s not that exciting. The [...]

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Both formal structural organizational methods and informal, emotive and emergent methods must be fostered to have a firm that not only invents but innovates.

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Rather than tending inevitably toward rigidity, organizations produce areas of autonomy and spontaneity — which are actually often less easy to achieve in small groups. [pp. 138]

Anthony Giddens. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity: The Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures.

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From Brown and Duguid’s The Social Life of Information
Well, duh.
Wish I had thought of that. The current cry for “cross-functional teams” results from the inability of the organization to manage its divisions. The local divisions will occur in any group that gets larger than about 12. Put fifty people in a church even and [...]

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I spent most of yesterday sidetracked on Carroll Quigley. All I wanted was to get a small reference about Milner’s Kindergarten because I realized that I had come up with an idea for changing the world that suspiciously resembled it. In one of the more rational articles, “From Mesopotamia through Carroll Quigley to Bill Clinton: [...]

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From “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”, by Ronald S. Burt (U of Chicago), 2003:pp. 23 [preprint of article to appear in AJS]:
In the annual ccyle preceding the network survey, 17% of the managers were judged “poor”, 55% were judged “good”, and 28% were judged “outstanding”. Under pressure from top management to identify more weak performers, [...]

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“Come back Elliott Jaques, all is forgiven” By Helen Trinca, in Financial Review BOSS [Australia]
An interesting article about Elliott Jaques’s work in Australia. It includes a review of Julian Fairfield’s book, Levels of Excellence, a copy of which Glenn Mehltretter of PeopleFitgraciously provided to me when I met with him recently down in Raleigh. I’ve [...]

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a new study of 100 manufacturing companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States supports the view that IT expenditures have little impact on productivity unless they are accompanied by first-rate management practices.………………..Companies should first improve their management practices and then invest in IT. — from “When IT lifts productivity” by Stephen [...]

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In my quest for more data about Karen Stephenson’s work, I came across an old New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, the happy camper behind The Tipping Point. The article, “Designs for Working: Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village“, originally appeared 2000 Dec 11. He starts off with a [...]

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“Systems development surprise” by Allan E. Alter. COMPUTERWORLD, 1996 Feb 12.
Alter reported on results that came out of a study done by P. J. Guinan, Jay Cooperider and S. Sawyer ["The effective use of automated application development tools", IBM Systems Journal, 36(1), 1997 — although it may be "Software development: Processes and performance", IBM [...]

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