Posts from — July 2007

I got sidetracked by some other issues and haven’t gotten around to finishing my posts on the GO Society Conference. Most importantly was my wife’s completion of the Phase 1 deliverable of our Baby Project (Alice Lee Christian, mom and her both doing great).

Upcoming in the next two weeks (no earlier — it’s our first) are topics that you might be interested in:

1. The Ethics of Requisite Organization
2. Values, especially from Warren Kinston
3. People, focusing on the folks I met: let’s face it, talking in the hallways is more interesting than the sessions, or at least that’s the hallmark of conferences worth attending in my opinion
4. Requisitely organising Information Technology, especially IBM’s new project delivery methodology

Others from my notes when I get focused and recover my wits.

I’ll be dwelling on the ethical issues of CPAs, RO implementation, providing managers with information on their employees, etc. that I think are worth addressing. Kinston’s values taxonomy is pretty interesting but I will need to think about how to talk about it.

If you are interested in what he might be saying (and you probably should), take a look at his brief book available on the GO Society website.

Religious Systems not just denominations or churches, etc.

Some comments from the participants in this session. Hierarchy seems to have come from the order of the priesthood (various religions). The hierarchy is then a reflection of the holy(?). What is a managerial accountability hierarchy and what is not, and how these issues in religious systems has impact generally.

Some comments about John Morgan’s discussions yesterday at the plenary on “RO Goes to Church”. Byran pointed out that mega-church and it being a new social institution (Drucker).

Going when I go where I can get knowledge and often find it while discussing with religious people.

Although there is much in OD that is applicable, “you will never achieve salvation by management.” But we have to be clear about who we are first, before we can bring things into it from OD.
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Ian Macdonald, of Macdonald Associates Consultancy, opens the day with a short plenary on “Positive Oranizations: Discipline not Dogma”. Reflecting on the practitioner and the practice. Why he does it.

What drew him to EJ’s work was the underlying values, lik Felt-Fairness, what’s social justice, non-paranoiagenic institutions. It was about building social institutions.

Second, the method of social analysis. Waiting for people to invite you to discuss what they could do, wanted to do. He likes it because it is founded on uncertainty. It’s like the psychoanalytical method. You don’t know where you are going to end up with a client.

Talked about using social analysis in work with the health services in the UK. He just told them that he was there, and that they could talk to him if they wanted to. An invitation.

“The production of knowledge is a social process; it is rarely if ever the product of one mind.”

We have to be careful not to end up in the situation where we are seen as celebrating what he calls “negative dogma”. These complaints (in his preso: see the website) come from what we do.
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The Plenary Day opened with the video (available on the website) again, so that all us “authors” and new people could know what it was. It was followed by some history of the work on the theories. (Do you know the book Strategic Leadership that’s an academic-level book on Jaques and Co.? I think it’s related to the work in the US Army and is a T. Owen Jacobs thing, but let me know if you know more.)

Ken Shepard introduced the special guests, whom I’ll cover later. Noting here Jerry Hunt’s appearance because he’s from Texas and wears boots, plus had an interesting book I need to pick up, and was editor of Leadership Quarterly for some years. Kathryn Cason is here, too: it’s good to finally see what she looks like.

Today’s focus is what is happening now. Larry Tapp, ex CEO of a packaging company and paritally retired dean (?) of the Ivey Business School in Western Ontario, appeared by recorded phone interview. He talked about general problems in business, and said that family businesses are probably the best place currently (at least in the west) to bring in RO ideas.
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(This is basically for Kalman, who couldn’t make it to the conference. Perhaps it will help with his reviews.)

The “Designing Organizations for Value-Creation, Sustainability and Social Well-Being” pre-conference program actually started last Friday with a two-day course by Barry and Sheila Deane. I didn’t attend, but I spoke with Barry on Sunday and he said it went rather well. Although I think that he could have done with a day off.

Instead, he got pulled into the “Legacy Day”, a time when leaders in the RO community sat down and discussed the state of things in light of the history. This report is a random set of statements about Legacy Day, in no particular order.

(I got an invite so that I could do things like this, writing up reflections about the conference. And, I must admit, not getting enough sleep.)
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As part of the GO Society Conference in Toronto, we attendees were asked to complete a survey by Online PeopleScan. I have no idea what the results mean, but thought that some of you might find it interesting to see.

It’s a PDF because I wasn’t thinking. IT professional and all.

Culture Scan results

Facing up to parallelism: Multicore means today’s HPC is tomorrow’s general purpose” by Martin Banks

The Register has an interesting article on the International Supercomputing Conference keynote speech by Burton Smith, who used to be Chief Scientist at Cray and now works at Microsoft. Smith believes that parallel computing, now the domain of mostly High Performance Computing (HPC) and Grid folks, will reinvent computing. Since I didn’t get the nod to travel out to it this year, and, frankly, with everything that’s going on, I’m not disappointed, it was good to see some coverage.

“We are now at the point where we are breaking the Von Neumann Assumption that there is only one program counter that allows the proper ordering and scheduling of variables,” he said. “Parallel programming makes this hazardous, but we are also now at the point where serial programs are becoming slow programs.”

It’s disturbing to think about it if you follow out the implications of his speech. And I work in grid technologies, part of the whole massively parallel world. (Depending on how you use the term.) One of our biggest problems in our grid (really a coalition of local grids more than a grid itself) is that scientists do not know how to think in parallel. It turns out that although High Energy Physics (HEP) is extremely data intensive and sees major improvements from the parallelism of the grid, its computing requirements really aren’t all that complex. It’s more of a brute force problem than one of finesse. Other sciences have more complex computing needs or have to address a much more complex, interconnected problem. These scientists have to totally rethink their computing solutions, rebuild their applications from scratch. It’s these problems, rather than the MPP ones that we normally deal with here, that are what Smith is talking about.

So this reinvention of computing, which Smith has spent awhile talking about really,

Worth a read.

More:

• Inteview with Smith in HPC
• “Supercomputing is Dead; Long Live Supercomputing” from ITNews (AU):
  

  “Those of us who invented programming are still alive. We did it once can do it again,” he said.

• Microsoft press release on the speech