Posts from — February 2009

I have written before about a high-moder I have talked with off and on. His story is perhaps interesting, so I will retell it here. He’s not a client, nor has he been — we just talked as associates from time to time. He was never trying to hide his story, except from his employers, and we’ve talked about him here or on another site before. He’s recently dead and I wanted to review his life a bit.

“Tim” was an interesting fellow. He always felt like a high-moder (in that way that you can feel people’s mode just by being around them) but I could never get a solid bead on it. I did a test CIP interview with him but it had the problems that some folks’ do and wasn’t code-able. That may be a problem with my technique but I think he also saw the world in a different way.

He was certainly intelligent, as far as those measures go. His IQ fell between 170 and 180 (IQ is an estimate rather than a set number over time) which is high but nothing amazing, as many people told him over his adult years. I’m not sure what IQ actually measures, and many people argue that it’s useless. It may be, but it seems to me that there is probably a difference in thinking between someone who has been professionally scored in Tim’s range over many years versus someone who scores consistently around average. Which is 120? I can’t remember. I think “genius” is something like 165, so Tim was a few points ahead of Mensa membership.

My point there is that this probably showed that Tim had a different way of thinking. I think that this point is relevant to my discussion of him, as we will see.

[Read more →]

Andrew Olivier, a pal who wrote those amazing articles on Your Working Journey, is leading an morning seminar introducing the Principles of Requisite Organisation Leadership in Hobart, Tasmania on Friday, 20 March 2009. (That’s Hobart in Australia and not Hobart, Indiana!) He invites you to combine business and pleasure and visit them on the beautiful island of Tasmania.

When you contact him, let him know that Forrest sent ya!

“Can Entrepreneurs Save Newspapers?”

Dunno. But you might. Newspapers are dying. Which means that it’s a great time for a hidden high potential to get into the News business with a completely different model.

Crains Chicago has video on some new ideas coming out in town (that’s Chicago) to solve the newspaper problem. Both the Tribune and Sun-Times parent companies aren’t doing well. The Tribune Company is bankrupt, of course, and the Sun-Times is on the ropes.

(We saw them both in an earlier review of newspapers problems with reporting circulation.)

Some interesting ideas.
[Read more →]

Many of the work-levels people have worked with churches on their organizational issues. This includes the Church of England and the Illinois association of American Baptist churches. (Anyone know of more?) Let’s take a look at what some of them have said.

Elliott Jaques, who coined the term “mid-life crisis” and was an accomplished psychoanalyst in addition to be a landmark organizational thinker, dealt with the issues of church very briefly in General Theory of Bureaucracy:
[Read more →]

Recently, I had two problems come up. Neither of them are really horrifying but the experiences that I had show why Apple dominates the markets for consumer-oriented electronics, and why RIM’s Blackberry, Obamania aside, is declining.

I should start out with a confession: I’ve been a systems administrator at a variety of levels on several network OSes, including Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT, some Linuxes (“Lini?”), and a couple of DEC variants, along with supporting or creating support for other systems like Mac OS and Windows desktops. I’ve even had a DEC Alpha and a Sun Enterprise 2 sitting under my desk. All that to say that I’m not a technical idiot, although I am now old enough to want somebody else to do all the heavy lifting. Still, I’m used to the software and system upgrade procedure and with problems with hardware.

Here’s the story:
[Read more →]

The Str4 artist at work: Little Birds. © 2008 Dawn Wheat. Used by permission.

Part of Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” theory is that the world has become “spikey”: certain cities draw almost all the top talent in the world, leaving everyone else to languish. (He who has will be given more; for he who has not, even what he has will be taken from him.) It’s much like what they have found on Web sites: some sites get all the links.

Florida describes the Creative Class City (CCC) in a 2006 interview in Rotman Magazine (Spring/Summer 2006). He cites as evidence some then interesting real estate numbers:

Joseph Gyourko, the great real estate economist at Wharton, shows the rapid rise in appreciation of housing prices in 15 ‘superstar cities’ in the U.S. – growing at two, three, or four times the average rate, and not coming down. Yet people aren’t decentralizing out of these hyperexpensive superstar cities and moving back to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or St. Louis; they’re not moving out of Toronto or Vancouver and moving to other Canadian cities.And why is that, given the costs associated with living in these cities? It’s the fact that we as human beings gain enormous productivity increases when we are located next to one another. When we locate together in concentrated, densely-packed cities like Toronto, New York or Bangalore, we increase each other’s productivity; that’s really the motor force of economic growth. And as a result, the world is developing a couple of dozen ‘spikes’.

The problem is that the real estate market has imploded.
[Read more →]

Or is it lipstick on the pig?

Since several people have commented that yesterday’s post was snarky, let me explain that manipulating your presentation of self is something that we all do. We use images and techniques to demonstrate who were are through affiliations, allegiances, beliefs and dogmas. Just because the Creative Class think themselves so smart that they don’t do this (thus explaining AdBusters) this doesn’t mean that they don’t. And because they don’t have a conscious ability to recognize that they do it, you can manipulate their symbols and their foibles to get a job in a depressed market.

Many of you don’t live in Creative Class Centers (CCC) so don’t understand what all this is about. I live in an God-blessedly totally uncool place, northern Indiana, where we like Country Music, farming, NASCAR, the WWE and the UFC. But I used to work in a tier-2 CCC and worked in a CC industry. Back then I tended to use Texanisms such as overt threats of massive physical violence, pink Oxford shirts and references to BAR-B-Q rather than the CC methods but the idea is the same. And, reflecting back, it might have been more successful.

All of this is written for some thankfully uncool readers who asked a specific question: How can I increase my chances in executive interviews? The answer depends on industry but it always comes down to this: You have to look like one of them.
[Read more →]

Jack Fallow had an excellent article in the recent GO Society book, Organization Design, Levels of Work and Human Capability: Executive Guide (“On Being Heard: Insights from complexity theory
and values as touchstones for effective executive communication
across the levels”). In it, Jack talks about the values that followers seem to expect from a leader who is supposed to be at each level. I imagine that it also goes the other way: this is the type of leadership behaviours that managers expect out of their subordinates.

Here’s his table:
[Read more →]

A client asks the question:

What should I do to win an executive level interview?

So today let’s look at how to manipulate the forms that are expected by today’s uninformed managers. (I’d say “idiot” but there are too many lawsuits these days.)

I’ll assume that you’re a heterosexual American guy who wants a job as part of Richard Florida’s Creative Class. If you’ve read his books, you’ll know that the Creative class is a “meritocracy”, which means that no one knows how to judge anyone else’s performance. Therefore, perception and appearances are the number one thing that you’ll be judged on.

How you manipulate your appearance and presentation of self will determine whether you’re seen as a Winner or someone who, sadly, is not cool.

(Another weird thing is that much of what I say doesn’t apply very well in Europe. Which either says a lot about Europe or a lot about America. I have no idea if these ideas apply to women for reasons that I can’t explain because, well, I don’t need to get sued.) [Read more →]

Malcolm Gladwell reports that “the correlation between I.Q. and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3.” That’s more than no correlation at all but much less than something worth paying much attention to. But it seems somewhat counterintuitive. Elliott Jaques has an answer. I’m betting that one’s current capacity of work (your level or work that gets measured by the CIP process) is only loosely correlated with occupational success.

If IQ is correlated to one’s level of current capacity (and that’s a mighty big “if”), it still is only weakly correlated to one’s current capability. Remember that capacity is the level of work you might be capable of, were you fully trained, educated, interested and could fully devote your energy to the job. Capability, on the other hand, is the level of work that you are currently able to do. For people in normal Modes, capacity and capability match up pretty well: you have enough time to develop as you grow that you can grow your capability at about the same rate as your capacity, barring economic disruptions that force you to leave your field. It’s different for the higher Modes. Their current capability is always chasing their current capacity: the tank is growing so fast that they can’t get the gasoline coming in fast enough.

Now let’s add my special sauce and see how all of this might work.
[Read more →]