Entries from February 2006

Ernest Rutherford
For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he would get so lost in his own equations that he would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves. According to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, [...]
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Tags: Careers · Decision-making · Learning · Theory · Underachievers

I was looking up something else (the use of books of hours in medieval church practice, to be honest) and somehow came across Bennis’s description of the “requisite” organization from the mid-1980s. I wondered if the term, which seemed to match Dr. Jaques’s use, was his own or something borrowed.
Borrowed: see the quotation below.
But [...]
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Tags: Organizations · Theory

I was looking up something else (the use of books of hours in medieval church practice, to be honest) and somehow came across Bennis’s description of the “requisite” organization from the mid-1980s. I wondered if the term, which seemed to match Dr. Jaques’s use, was his own or something borrowed.
Borrowed: see the quotation below.
But I [...]
[Read more →]
Tags: Managing · Organizations · Theory

Let’s take a look at something I wrote awhile back while we wait for Al to come back on! A recent post by Michael Bates, the Tulsa-based urban planning, on the work of Jane Jacobs had me searching for an old post of my own Malcolm Gladwell’s article discussing how companies are trying to look [...]
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Tags: Managing · Networks

Some notes from Living In The Labyrinth of Technology by Willem H. Vanderburg. (University of Toronto Press, 2005). Citing Galbraith’s earlier work, to argue for Ellul’s rise of technique.
The argument is that the corporation has to create a technostructure, a group of committees of technical expertise, because the endeavour is so complex that no [...]
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Tags: Governance · Reviews - Books · Theory