HR.com recently had an interview with Karen Stephenson, the professorial founder of NetForm and the leading thinker in social network analysis. Dr. Stephenson notoriously doesn’t publish anything, preferring to patent her ideas. I think that she has combined hierarchy and social network into something more powerful. Jaques & Co. always needed something to counterbalance the top-down mentality and social network …
What is a Team?
HR.com’s recent interview with Jon R. Katzenbach piqued my interest. Katzenbach wrote The Wisdom of Teams, among others. He was probably interviewed to shill his new book, but the idea of teams is one that intriguing. Do teams work? is really my question. Katzenbach admits that the team approach to work is tricky in implmentation: What we have learned since …
Wolfowitz on Decision-Making
In this summer’s Atlanitc has an article describing a series of interviews that Mark Bowden held with Paul Wolfowitz from September 2004 to April 2005, before the American deputy secretary of defense took his new job heading the World Bank. Wolfowitz is a fascinating thinker, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics of conservative realism. For the …
Replacing Management With Project Management Is Disastrous
CIO (Australia) Magazine had an interesting article last month by Sue Bushell on Information Technology (IT) organizations and their spectacular failure to the business [“Just Deserts”, 2005 May 5]. Bushell quoted Kathryn Cason of Requisite Organization International Institute on the problems of IT being caused by the organizational structure itself: The fact that IT has primarily been pushed into a …
Coordinating Work Is Harder Than The Tasks Themselves
This complexity level of the real business, the coordination of other people’s efforts, is the essence of management.