There’s nothing more discouraging than having systems go down and not knowing why. I still don’t. I started creating commercial websites in late 1994 and yet I’m still left with the bad feeling that it’s all run by mysterious spirits. No wonder UNIX has daemons running all the time. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, my home, and we’ll …
Management Accountability Hierarchy Not Always Best (Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization)
Recently, a post from Tom Foster made me want to clarify something: The Management Accountability Hierachies described by Elliott Jaques are not always the most effective form of organization. Foster answers a question about the employees of a volunteer outreach center. He clearly believes that it requires a management accountability hierarchy (where there are clear lines of accountability and Real …
Office Bullies Do It Because They Enjoy Bullying
Bullies just enjoy hurting you, according to research reported in Medical News: “Brain Scans Show Bullies May Enjoy Watching Pain“. In their paper (“Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct disorder: a functional MRI investigation“, Biological Psychology, Jan. 2007), Jean Decety, Kalina J. Michalska, Yuko Akitsuki, and Benjamin B. Lahey describe their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study which …
Top Reasons Why High Potentials Have To Do Things Different For Job Security
If you are a Hidden High Potential (HHP) and you never hear anything else from me, memorize this statement: What is safe for other people is dangerous for you; what is guaranteed to fail for most people is what’s most likely to succeed for you. Or, as Pippin in the Two Towers movie put it: The closer we are to …
Why Is Career Advice So Useless?
eWeek, a leading rag in the corporate IT industry, has a new article by Rich Milgram on “How to Ensure IT Job Security Despite an Economic Meltdown“. It’s a great example of useless career advice. And you don’t even have to be in IT to see that. Here are his four points, if you can call them that: Provide meaningful …
Keynes on Why Bankers Can’t Self-Regulate
I asked Warren Kinston about something I had recently written regarding Imaginist thinking and Obama’s success. (He points out that Imaginist isn’t appropriate at societal level; I was wrong and should study more.) But that got me thinking about the values in play, and I returned to his Working With Values to look at Ethical Choice. Warren is describing the …
Keynes on Why Bankers Didn’t Avoid Danger
I asked Warren Kinston about something I had recently written regarding Imaginist thinking and Obama’s success. (He points out that Imaginist isn’t appropriate at societal level; I was wrong and should study more.) But that got me thinking about the values in play, and I returned to his Working With Values to look at Ethical Choice. Warren is describing the …
Feeds Corrected
There has been a problem with the feeds for some users. This has hopefully been corrected. The new feeds all go through Feedburner.com so that I can supply the best feed for your needs. If you read Requisite Writing, The Secret Rules Blog in a newsreader, let me know if you’ve got new problems. For some of the rest of …
Becoming the Enablement Vehicle for Others’ Unarticulated Desires
Back when I was working on the GO Society’s book, Organization Design, Levels of Work and Human Capability: Executive Guide, I had the opportunity to spend an Sunday afternoon talking to Julian Fairfield in his early Monday morning. (I love talking to Australia!) He’s an amazing thinker with a wide ranging interest that started years ago on the shopfloor, moved …