As I’ve said, 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 [...]

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Think Friendster. PSFK has an interesting review of social networking websites.
In “INTERNETWORKING (MIT Technology Review, April 2004, pp. 44-49), Michael Fitzgerald quotes Visible Path’s Antony Brydon as saying, �Eighty to ninety percent of [real-world] social networks have a digital component.� Wow. Now let’s talk about what “digital component” may mean. If you translate [...]

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I got the Red Cover edition of Elliott Jaques’s book today. I could have saved some cash and ordered it from Australia, but I figured that the Friends To The North would ship more quickly. And they did: it arrive a week and a half after my ABEBooks order.
I have no idea what the Red [...]

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Starbucks has arrived in Valparaiso 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 out of home office, I used to [...]

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I’ve been thinking lately about the role of Jaques and Co.’s findings 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 are more [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

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It’s Labor Day here in the States and I’m working rather than participating in the Labor Parade like I should be. I read through a draft sent to me by Mark Van Clieaf. (”Executive Accountability and Excessive Compensation: A New Test For Director Liability”) Mark and Co. have done a study of 700 Fortune 500 [...]

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PeopleFit is doing a three-day short course on how to assess staff members’ Complexity of Information Processing (CIP) on Oct. 21, 22 and Nov. 8 in Raleigh, NC. Unfortunately, the two week gap to let the information sink in before the third day means that many from out-of-town will have problems attending. Still, you may [...]

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After reading some anthropological texts, reading Jaques’s writing is like plowing through a field full honey.

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