Posts from — May 2008

by Peewack & Julius Schorzman

The last time I made a pass at the forthcoming book on how to get your career out of its rut, I took a part-time (36 hr/wk) job at a US retailer of consumer electronics. I learned a great deal there about theft and sales, but I also noticed something strange: no one ever minded when I bought them coffee.

Even the boss.

But if anyone else did it, chances were that they would be told, “Naw, you don’t have to do that — here’s two bucks.”

At my previous position, with an IT security boutique in Chicago, it seemed very important to people to make sure that no single person had bought too often. We would trade on a regular basis. There was even one guy whom others started to resent because he offered to buy too often.

What in the world was going on?

It has to do with these Work Levels that we have been talking about. And it explains some of the problems that you may be having in your social life.

The biggest person in the room has to buy the coffee.
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Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Alistair Mant, Chairman, Socio-technical Study Group, spoke at the 2005 GO Society Conference in Toronto about his experiences and work with Wilfred Brown, the chairman of Glacier Metal Company, where the ideas about work levels were originally worked out. Mant makes the point that well before Dr. Jaques and his Tavistock colleagues came onto the scene, Brown was working to create a different kind of company.

Brown was a lifelong Socialist, according to Mant. He certainly published several times in Socialist papers in the 1940s and was always a member of Labour. Mant points out that when he was elevated to Baron, he chose to be Baron of the location of his favorite golf course. (Brown was a scratch golfer throughout much of his life.)
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As I continue to attempt to understand the history of the Glacier Project, I’ve been reading about Wilfred Brown’s work in there political sphere to gain some of this. Because he was a socialist and socialism dominated the political landscape of the UK during this time, it is probably hard to separate out.

Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson mention Wilfred Brown in passing (and Glacier Metal Company a bit more) in their 1993 Industrial Efficiency and State Intervention: Labour 1939-1951 (Routledge). They mention how the Socialisation of Industries Committee, chaired by Herbert Morrison, took to the ideas expressed by Brown during the Labour government of the late 1940s.

It’s interesting that “that other industrialist / theorist”, Lyndall Urwick, was also makin this call. Col. Urwick had similar thoughts about the need for clarity and precision of language in dealing with organizations, especially in separating out structural issues from personality and fit.
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I just read about the death of Isabel Menzies. She was a major force for good in healthcare organization and a long-time member of the Tavistock Institute. She died in February of this year.

The Independent carried an obituary of Menzies Lyth.

In January, I scored a copy of the Bros. Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die as I was working with an Australian start-up. I commend their book in its entirety — very useful, and it explains in clear language (that I wish I had come up with) why I write case studies for other consultants like I do — but today I’d like to focus on a single short point that they make about “Maslow’s Basement” and a brief crack about how it explains incentive pay.

And why it doesn’t work.

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by Michael Baranovsky (GDL 1.2)

Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where it seemed like the jackals were circling one of their own injured? I was sitting in a meeting with the department heads of an IT outsource account in Chicago. We had just finished listening to a dry run of some help desk training. It hadn’t gone well.

No, let’s be honest: it was abysmal. If it had been just for them, outsource staff, it would have been bad. But this was to train the client on the new help desk ticket system, too. The client was always looking for some way to get on top of the outsourcer. That’s how the game was played. If they sat through this, the account would lose face. And maybe a lot of money.

The other department heads smelled weakness, it seemed, and started going at him. It was bad enough that the manager stopped it and, giving me a brief look before saying, asked what they were going to do. The class was in two days.

Chris and I had been working on the custom documentation for the new system. We knew it. And we were both top-notch presenters and the manager knew it.

It was after five. I wanted to get home. And the training sessions started the day after next, four hour sessions rolling for two days.

It wasn’t even my account on the line: I was a consultant.

What would you do?
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by Ziko-C. GNU Doc License 1.2

Okay, okay: you have questions. You have no idea what I just said. It was just too confusing. Don’t fret too much: I’ll be continuing to try and explain what I mean and why it’s so important for underachievers. (Because it explains a whole lot.)

If you can’t wait and want to Read More About It, there are several places to look for more information, both online and printed.

I don’t recommend reading Elliott Jaques work, or most of the work done by his colleagues simply because people complain about it being unreadable. I think his General Theory of Bureaucracy is pretty straight-forward but most people disagree.

The GO Society has re-release Wilfred Brown’s incredible film series on management that includes a lengthy discussion of levels of work. If it’s still available, you can have it for the cost of shipping and handling. Leave them a note with your email address saying that you are interested. The US dollar is so weak that I can’t say what the current prices are from their Toronto offices. They also have some interesting articles on their Articles page. Mark Van Clieaf’s articles are well written but definitely about CEO work. Michelle Malay Carter’s articles are easy to understand and clear (also available from PeopleFit). The GO Society also has Wilfred Brown’s books (most of them, anyway) available in PDF for free download.

I especially like Jerry Harvey’s “The Elephant in the Parlor or Who the Devil Is Elliott Jaques?” which is how I discovered all this stuff to begin with.
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A little teaser for the forthcoming Part 2 of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian organizational expert and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioner’s Guide. In this 30-second excerpt, Hoebeke talks about the most important thing Koldo Saratxaga did to help IRIZAR create a high-performance, team-focused work culture.

If you’re not Spanish or Basque, you probably have missed the buzz around the culture at the Mondragon Cooperative and IRIZAR. IRIZAR builds long-range coaches (think “tour bus”) and has seen remarkable results in a workforce of 70,000+ that spans continents.

The full part 2 will have Hoebeke’s more extended thoughts.

If there is interest, I will publish some of his thoughts on the role Elliott Jaques’s ideas about the form of time play in his work.

Excerpt from my Hoebeke conversation part 2

I’ve implemented a little addon that will let you read Requisite Writing on your iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device. I’ve been delighted by how it works on my Blackberry Curve. If you have an iPhone, would you consider testing out this page’s permalink and leave a comment below?

The addon is “Wordpress PDA & iPhone Plugin” by Imthiaz Rafiq, who requests donations to SOS Children’s Villages.

by Hamed Saber. Atrribution License

Let’s return to something Mary wrote in a comment about my post, “Knowing Who You Are Can Get You Out of Underachievement“:

When I read “Underachievers, Are You Simply Out of Flow” and then Andrew Olivier’s “Our Working Journey and Stress”, I could hardly believe my eyes. I diagnosed myself immediately.

I have been on 2 sick leaves, the last one for 7 months because of depression. Even though I had stopped eating and sleeping I seriously didn’t care because I had all that extra time (that would have been spent sleeping and eating) to pursue my art-related hobbies. All day and all night. I was so happy! ( And skinny).

I mean, duh, I knew that my jobs were not very fitting, but I didn’t know that they could make me that sick. I thought I was sick mostly because my boss was mean and I was freakishly sensitive.

I’ve already talked about how sometimes (but not always!) that “evil” boss is as much a victim of an evil work system as are you. But let’s address why working where you don’t fit can make you sick.
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One of the problems with having grown a blog out of one’s own thoughts (and conversations with friends) is that the early stuff always looks a little questionable. Last time, I linked to a post from 2004 October in which I used some of the technical language about the Capability of Information Processing coding.

The language rightly raised some eyebrows. Nancy was the one brave enough to leave the comment about it. She says:

Coding sounds like such a strange thing to be doing to people. You talk about people like they are lab rats. I would code many of you at a stratum .01 cxip with very little potential to become a II.

Yeah, “coding” does sound most unpleasant. It really is simply a formal form of evaluation, the same way that Myers-Briggs is a formal way of evaluating personality traits. Both are forms of evaluation of people, as are our own simply judgments about someone’s ability to do something. For example, I have to make judgments about what I am personally capable of doing or what others can do better. I pay an accountant because he is much more capable than I am in properly doing my taxes, based on my evaluations and judgments of both our capabilities.

Coding, then, is really about judgment. For me, it’s mostly judgment about yourself and the judgments others have of you.
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Picture by gill. cc-by-sa-2.0

A quick comment from Wilfred Brown, at the time retired both CEO of Glacier Metal Company and Minister of State at the Board of Trade (UK), makes the point that you aren’t going to get ahead at your current job:

Men [or women, when you think of it] whose ability is greater than is called for by their job have to leave one employer and seek a higher level of work with another company. But this is difficult to achieve because they cannot cite experience on that higher level of work. In any case it is a risky procedure if there is unemployment.

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Four years ago, I posted about the difference between Closed-Sector and Open-Sector careers. It’s worth looking at again, because your choice of career will affect the choices that you have.

A brief excerpt:

If your first appointment in a Closed-Sector Career matters, it may be used as a proxy for capability. I may assume that you are low-capability because you were hired as on the shopfloor even though you are quite clearly more complex than your co-workers or boss. Likewise, if you are hired into a managerial position, I will assume that you have the complexity to advance according to the same rate I advanced. This lets me off the hook for personally evaluating you as a subordinate, and thereby not have to do one of the key elements of management.

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I’m going through my old email archives, and discovered a note from a project I ran to help a very large US property & casualty insurer to better retool their mainframe-oriented programmers (procedural using COBOL) to client-server paradigms (mostly Object-Oriented Programming using Java). It was an interesting project because the dirty secret was that some people were better than others. One of the other systems architects with whom I worked said of his experience at Bank of America, “Our best COBOLers made the best Java programmers. Good software development is good software development.”

Well, kind of. It’s actually not that simple.

And it turns out that what they found is relevant to Overachievers and Underachievers (those high-potential people working below their capability).

I note the following from Richard A. Johnson, Bill C. Hardgrave, E. Reed Doke [(1999). "An industry analysis of developer beliefs about object-oriented systems development", ACM SIGMIS Database, 30(1): 47 - 64, Winter 1999]:
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Photo by David

I have been muddying up the difference between what you can now do and what you could do now, say with the right training; between the size of your capability bucket and how much is in it. One is current capability while the latter is your current capacity. Glenn Mehltretter of PeopleFit reminded me in a comment he left on an earlier post, and it’s so clear (you should take one of his courses) that I’m going to quote it here:

Going back to some definitions: CPC and CAC. In your comment “If you’re know the numbers, she coded as 4L at 32.” It’s referring to CPC or Current Potential Capability: what you could do if 1) you valued the work and 2) had the full load of knowledge, skill, and experience, to work at your current potential.

CAC, or Current Applied Capability, refers to what you bring to the situation today. The idea being somewhat less than your potential due to a shortfall in either valuing of the work or knowledge, skills or experience.

With these two things in mind the underutilized underachiever question may reduce to fit and coaching. Fit, from a values standpoint — can I find work that lights a fire? Coaching, from a skill development standpoint.

Since the GO conference last year four of us have had the benefit of personal coaching. We have all found it of significant value. As a general statement that value came through knowing ones-self better and, with that making adjustments around what we valued, and how we defined our work.

(All emphases were added by me.)

And your Potential is always larger than your Applied. What you are trying to do is to get your Applied Capability level to be as close to your Potential as possible. Which sounds a lot like self-actualization, doesn’t it?

Let’s take a look at this and what it means for people who feel they are Overachieving or have blasted through that to underachieverhood.
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Lots of people these days have a problem with work hierarchies, and with good reason. Their experience of them is that bosses micro-manage or change the rules to suit themselves. They take over as much of your life as they can, and have no loyalty to anyone but themselves.

Sadly, this is indeed the case in many situations. But that’s not work hierarchy. Oddly, it’s actually a failure of organization. But most people don’t see this, especially in New Economy companies which rely almost solely on Creative Class outputs. Work hierarchies are intended to control other people, they say, and the solution is to keep organizations small and let “natural selection” and ordering take place. An emergent, natural and righteous workplace will emerge, free of the Power Mad Boss syndrome.

Methinks these people have never seen a tribe of baboons or chimpanzees.

The real issue is that the people making these suggestions don’t understand that all work is making decisions. I’ve actually sat in a room with a bunch of prima donna software developers — the type whose feathers get ruffled at the merest hint of an upper manager putting limits on what can be done — have the nerve to say that the people who use the systems that they design should just be made to use it, and if they don’t comply they should get fired. “I should be able to make decisions over my own work area, but I should be able to tell you how you should do your work.”

No, everyone should have — and fulfilling their jobs requires — the discretion to make decisions about their work, within known limits. If you’re chaffing at the constraints, maybe the problem is that you are too big for your job and the decision-making discretion you long for is outside of it.

Wilfred Brown tackled some of these issues in his 1971 management classic, Organization (London: Heinneman Educational Books, Ltd.). At the time the retired from both leading Glacier Metal Company, a multi-national concern, and a Minister of State at the Board of Trade, Brown found the then popular American idea of “informal organization” “a contradiction in terms. ‘Informal’ implies the lack of structure, whereas ‘organization’ implies the existence of one.” [58] If you can’t get his difference here, you are probably not going to be successful with innovative organizational forms and power lines.
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From Rushworth Kidder’s Moral Courage, chapter one. Walter Eric Duckworth (OBE), who I believe went on to serve as Head of the Fulmer Ltd. and Chairman of the London Metallurgical Society, describes an incident early in his career with Glacier Metal Company, right about the time that Tavistock and Elliott Jaques started working with the company. He is also a PhD from Cambridge (1945) and an honorary graduate of Brunel (1976) and U of Surrey (1980). Interesting chap.

But the story is great because it illustrates what was possible at Glacier back before Tavistock and Elliot Jaques came in.

The CEO is Wilfred Brown.

Eric Duckworth, an ebullient Englishman with an impish wit, notes with self-deprecating modesty that where moral courage is concerned he “usually fails.” But “on one occasion when I was young and idealistic,” he recalls, “I succeeded-and have been proud of it ever since.”

In 1949 Duckworth and his wife were newly married and applying for a mortgage to buy their first home in suburban London. A metallurgist by training, he had joined the Glacier Metal Company, now part of Federal Mogul, a firm that specialized in making bearings for internal combustion engines. Among his tasks were examining damaged bearings returned by customers to determine the causes of the failures, reporting back to the customers, and if necessary recommending changes in production processes to correct the problem.

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