Posts from — July 2008

I’ve been extolling the wonders of Warren Kinston’s Strengthening the Management Culture (SMC) for the past few months. It’s not the equal of his meatier Working With Values: The Software of the Mind but has the virtue of being one fifth that tome’s length. (It’s really thick: there’s just so much in it.)

One of the complaints I’ve been hearing is that it’s hard to get beyond the idea that “management” means something bad:

The problem is that as soon as I see the word “management,” I think of cubicles, blue-gray carpet, and fluorescent lights, and my eyes glaze over.

The title doesn’t translate across the ocean. Or maybe outside of the CEOs for whom he wrote it. A better title would be Growing Your Company Culture.

But let’s deal with the issue of “management”.
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If you’ve been following my discussions of Kinston and Algie’s Seven Languages of Achievement (aka Seven Decision Languages), here’s a good example of what someone who is a structuralist sounds like when talking to a pragmatist.

The manager, like most managers, is a pragmatist working in a pragmatist company. “Get ‘er done” is the motto. The Software Engineering Institute referred to this as Level 1 in their Capability Maturity Model, and many other management frameworks talk about it.

As we saw in Warren’s spiral (this from the back of Strengthening the Management Culture [PDF, 12MB]), all businesses must start in pragmatism. Otherwise they will never get anything started. Pragmatism is the first level because it is the only necessary one: you have to have some form of pragmatism in order to keep moving. I say this as a supremely non-pragmatical person. I can’t understand it but I can appreciate that this is true.
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It always surprises me that caring, thinking people don’t seem to understand the problems of hidden high potentials. I had to stand up (again!) for a friend at his wedding this last weekend. He’s German and marrying my sister-in-law, so it’s been more work than usual. I’ve stood up so many times I could write a manual on it &emdash; and probably should &emdash; but I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations at weddings.

One was with a retiree who was concerned for her daughter. Her son-in-law had recently lost his job, again, a result of “picking companies that are about to go under”. I suggested that his problem might be related to that of the hidden high potentials. I even volunteered to give him a short overview of the Secret Rules of Career Success as a favor to her.

What was odd was how poorly these suggestions went over. [Read more →]

The newsletter comes out today, and with client pressures, I feel the time crunch. But somehow I started to think about work, work levels, fit work, and my ancestors.

I advocate everyone having work that fits. I know that it is the best way to get the most out of someone, and that many of the problems that spiteful people believe are caused by personal failings are actually a result of being too big or small for the roles that society has foisted upon folks. So many of us don’t have work that fits, work that builds us up by fully using our gifts and capacities.

I also remember my grandfather.

When my grandfather died, he had read more and more widely than any other person I have met. Yet he never finished the ninth grade, being forced to go to work in the West Virginia coal mines when his father died in a cave-in. He worked the mines until his twenties, when he apprenticed as a butcher in the coal camp store through some stroke of luck. It was the Depression and butchers got to eat the meat scraps. He worked hard all his life at jobs to small for him, but he saw that his son got to college.
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