Posts from — July 2009

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While reviewing films for the GO Society, I came across this great statement from Judy Hobrough of BIOSS. She had gone into an organization and mapped the current capability of people with what their current roles were. She found something that surprised the CEO:

There was a huge amount of untapped potential in that organization. That’s not uncommon in the work that we do. There’s, in a lot of organizations, a huge amount of untapped potential

I say this all the time: if you are leading a large corporation and are worried about succession planning, I can go into your ranks and pull out mode 6-8 people within three months. Your subordinates fear their abilities, and not wanting to be shown up by someone younger or “less experienced”, they ensure that these high potentials are shoved down into bad work.

They know your business.

They know your industry.

They know where the bodies are buried. So to speak.

Why spend millions going after people who are still going to require years of training and learning to get there, and who are more likely to leave for somewhere else, when competent high potentials are sitting right under your nose?

Judy Hobrough of BIOSS on how Elliott Jaques’s Stratified Systems Theory can show CEOs the untapped potential in their corporations [free registration required to view]

Have you ever seen someone do something utterly boneheaded and have them, upon being asked why, give you what appears to be an utterly self-serving, made-up rationalization? Small children are the best examples. They do something and then, upon being “caught”, create the most fanciful stories about why. Given a little push, these stories can include the most wondrous creatures: dragons that talk, a “bad” boy or girl you’ve never seen who lives in the basement, men from Mars. These can be quite amusing if you allow that their small minds haven’t yet learned what reality is, and experience wishes and imagination in the same way that they experience the “real world”.

But did you know that you likely do the same thing? It’s not a Secret Rules of Career Success but it leads to an important one. And it’s one that explains why the story you tell yourself matters.

Even Warren Kinston has something to add here. He tells me that back in the 1980s, he and Jimmy Algie led several decision-making workshops through Brunel University. They explained how there are seven distinct decision-making styles, ways that you think in order to come to a decision. Each one is equal — no decision-making approach is the encapsulation of any other — and we often use a mix of two or even three ourselves, with a single one dominating. Our lead style, if you will.

Because we have a single dominant style, we tend to believe that people with different approaches are less thoughtful than are we. (This is true even of me, and I’ve worked with Warren. I know that they’re way of making decisions is even the best for certain situations, but if I’m honest, I still think that those folks are morons.)

“I think clearly,” we say. “These others are led by their stomachs.”

We are actually all just conduits for our decision making styles. Said another way, if I know what your dominant style is, I can tell you what you will say in the discussion.

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The church growth industry has led to the highly effective Mega-church model in the United States but has embraced the (actually) new model of Strong Pastor which has led to absolutist authoritarian leadership within the evangelical church growth movement. An examination by focusing on the Christian Base Communities in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. Part of a series on Church Organizational Structure and Democracy.

In 2004, the National Catholic Reporter published an article on Christian Base Communities as part of their series on Latin America. (They are also known as “Ecclesiastical base communities” and “Comunidades eclesiales de base”, even in English.) The article, “Base communities, once hope of church, now in disarray” by Barbara Fraser, (also at bnet’s FindArticles) describes the CEB and the continuing controversy they engender in the Roman Catholic Church.

The article describes many of the conflicts inherent in organizing Christian churches. Perhaps because they have such a strong hierarchy, and the CEB were such a democratic idea, these problems are easier to see in the Catholic Church. They certainly appear in Protestant churches, including Evangelicals who eschew hierarchy. Even the Emergent Church Movement’s house churches can’t escape these problems.
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You should maybe leave the house, though.

According to Paul Krugman in the New York Times, the “forecasting consensus” is that while a stock market recovery may be started, unemployment in the US will remain high for at least two more years. It’s what they call a jobless recovery, which is good if you’re one of the people left with capital but pretty awful if you aren’t.

It also means that the changes in the economic landscape haven’t ended.

I’m going to talk about this more in this week’s newsletter, but I’ll touch on it here: sometimes you have to get out of where you are. You have to move.

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If you’ve been seeing 20-30 updates on the RSS feed from Requisite Writing, it’s because I’m trying to recover the site. I did something stupid and lost 200 posts on Friday night. My backups for the last months were all zero bytes so no use at all. I’ve recovered as much as I can (database up to March) and then augmented with some local files I had here in MarsEdit and what I could get out of the search engine caches.

Thank goodness there are several.

I’ve learned a lot, not the least of which is that my site wasn’t being indexed very well. That needs to be corrected. Oh, yeah, and make backups more regularly.

The full recovery, as much as I can do, will take another week or so. Your comments from 2009 Feb 12 to 2009 April 30 are partly lost, which is a crying shame. Some recovery is possible, but some things are just lost.

I’d take it as an omen but, nah, I’m taking it as a sign of something.

Anyway, back to real posts later this week. Boy was I scared when I thought that I had lost over two years of posts!