Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, C&NW RR-1943 Clinton, IA (LOC) Delano, Jack

Dunbar Numbers and Requisite Failures

Forrest ChristianTheory 2 Comments

I’ve been looking for information about W.L. Gore & Associates because of a connection with Requisite Organization research. In my search, I came across an interesting discussion about management styles by instrument scientist Eric Nehrlich. He directs us to a very useful case study about Gore (which will be dealt with in a later post) but he also mentions the …

ADLER typewriter Model n°7 (Frankfurt / Germany). Unknown model date (probably ~1930/40). By Dake

Using Technology To Network Is Not New

Forrest ChristianNetworks Leave a Comment

UPDATE 2015: Originally a quick note in September 2004, this was just a quick thought about social networks at the time. I think I was shortsighted: obviously social networking systems can be used to build social capital, too. In “INTERNETWORKING (MIT Technology Review, April 2004, pp. 44-49), Michael Fitzgerald quotes Visible Path’s Antony Brydon as saying, “Eighty to ninety percent …

Small cup of coffee. (c) Julius Schorzman (CC BY-SA 2.0). Via Wikimedia.

Why Starbucks Will Run Our Local Coffee House Out of Business

Forrest ChristianOrganizations Leave a Comment

[I’ve updated this post with 2013 December information at the bottom] Starbucks has arrived in my town and even though it is inconveniently located, it will thrive and in the end drive the old downtown coffee house out of business. Starbucks, while not necessarily making decent coffee, does do several other things right. When I lived in Chicago and worked …

Smiling crowd— Bild Publikum. Photograph by Roger & Renate Rössing , 1954 (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE). Deutsche Fotothek?. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Controlling for CIP in the Social Sciences

Forrest ChristianTheory 7 Comments

I’ve been thinking lately about the role of “time span of discretion” findings of Elliott Jaques and his colleagues in the results of social science. For example, Nancy M. Schullery reviews some of the literature about success and argumentativeness in “Argumentative Men: Expectations of Success” (The Journal of Business Communication, October 1999): Individuals with the personality predisposition of high argumentativeness …

Tata Sons Implementing Billis’s Levels

Forrest ChristianChange, Managing, Reviews - Articles Leave a Comment

I went searching for more information about David Billis’s Worklevels. It turns out that Tata Sons, a Indian consortium of sorts of 80 companies, has implemented Billis’s worklevels in a new management system. The article is, of course, from Tata, but it covers some interesting ground on how a company would implement a SST-based organizational structure. If someone has any …

Dome of the Belgian royal greenhouses in Laeken (external). (c) E. Forrest Christian

Mark Van Clieaf asks, “What work are we paying CEOs to do?”

Forrest ChristianGovernance, Strategy Leave a Comment

Mark Van Clieaf is all for paying someone for what they are doing but he believes that CEOs are delivering only short-term value, at the expense of the company’s long term viability. And, if his numbers are correct, most US CEOs aren’t even delivering short term value: their companies are not making more than they are spending.

Pile of twenty pound notes. (c) 2011 TaxFix.co.uk Ltd.. (CC BY 2.0) Via flickr.

Executive Compensation May Be Out of Whack Entirely For What We Get

Forrest ChristianGovernance, Reviews - Articles Leave a Comment

Mark Van Clieaf recently sent me an article he’s written (“Executive Accountability and Excessive Compensation: A New Test For Director Liability”). He and his colleagues have done a study of 700 Fortune 500 companies — representing 80% of the US stock market — and found some troubling things about CEO compensation and even the entire executive team and Board. It …

Satellite image of Laguna San Antonio, Bolivia. NASA image

The Llanos de Moxos

Forrest ChristianReviews - Articles 7 Comments

Writing about Çatalhöyük has led me to do some other reading, which led me to the Llanos de Moxos of the Beni in Bolivia. It’s amazing: a massive culture that stretched around the size of the Midwest of America but that not too many people talk about. Science had an interesting article about William Denevan’s work in the Beni. There’s …