Below you'll find a list of all posts from May, 2008
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. …
You complain about being stuck where you are, thinking it can somehow work out. To find right-fitting work, Hidden High Potentials have to move forward and leave their past behind. 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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
You boss might not be Benito Mussolini like you think, regardless of how much he resembles him when he lectures the team. I have really enjoyed Mary’s comments on these thoughts on how underachievers (overachievers) can get right fitting work. About my last post (“Knowing Who You Are Can Get You Out of Underachievement“, she wrote: When I read “Underachievers, …
