After recently finishing a gig with a company that has hit a spate of bad luck, both self-inflicted and environmental, I have taken to reading. And as always when I read, I like to meander aimlessly through the thoughts of disparate thinkers who have nothing in common except that they caught my fancy for the [...]

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On Monday, 2006 March 20, we will be doing some minor site maintenance from noon to 14:00 GMT. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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Reviewed: Wastell, David G. (1999). “Learning dysfunctons in information systems development: Overcoming the social defenses with transitional objects.” MIS Quarterly 23(4):581-600 [Dec 99].
(Just a thought: wouldn’t it be nice to simply have these references in XML and simply display them as needed? Another reason to move to Framemaker with DITA.)
Wastell, who was Senior Lecturer in [...]

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Reviewed: John Sterman, Nelson Repenning, and Fred Kofman. “Unanticipated Side Effects of Successful Quality Programs: Exploring a Paradox of Organizational Improvement”. Management Science, 43(4), April 1997. Available online.
Sterman et al. show how a fairly basic model can show the results of a TQM implementation at a largish company. They also discuss the problems inherent in [...]

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If you missed on of Jack Fallows’s presentations at the GO Society conference last August, you will be pleased to hear that he will be publishing a portion of his work as a chapter in the new book coming out this fall from that group. It won’t have his spiffy Flash animations to illustrate his [...]

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A second kind of evidence to suggest that the evolving success of the system has a powerful developmental effect on the leadership comes from the way members of high-performing systems talk about the early formative period of the system. There are consistent statements such as, “We had no idea things would turn out like this”; [...]

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One with perspective brings a broader, patient, more long-range view to his or her leadership responsibilities which enables the sorting of trivial from important events and outcomes and the determining of worth…. In a recent Wall Street Journal-Gallup poll, for example, integrity was the factor considered most important for advancement by chief executives of 282 [...]

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Just to let y’all know: the GO Society has finally put up the books by Wilfred Lord Brown, Minister of Health and CEO of Glacier Metals. Lord Brown had a different take on the work that Jaques did for him, and it’s interesting to read an owner’s accounts of how to run a business.
The books [...]

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By now, most of us have heard the news of former RadioShack CEO Dave Edmondson’s fall from grace for allegedly misrepresenting his college background on his CV years back. According to reports, Mr. Edmondson claimed to have gotten a couple of degrees from a college where, according to them, he only studied for two semesters.
If [...]

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