Here’s a repost of something from 2004 about what job posting are best for learning how to be a manager. It’s still relevant.

Philippines Marine Corps parachuting.

Morgan W. McCall, in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job
(1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:

• Project / Task Force: limited duration assignments to complete either a goal or solve a project. I would imagine that special projects are what he is talking about and not the “project-oriented” organization where everything is projectized.
• Line-to-Staff switches: where you go from working within a Line of Service (LoS) to a cross-departmental position. This is pretty obvious: staff positions require you to know about the business as a whole instead of just your little part. They also have you work on a variety of problems under greater pressures, much like projects.
• Start-ups
• Fixits / Turnarounds: I’ve worked on several of these and I doubt that someone who can’t learn quickly could survive. One of the issues with a Fixit is that the common knowledge doesn’t work. You have to listen to the system and just try things until something works. You often have no idea why it worked, only that it did. Which may not really be learning.
• Leaps in Scope of Responsibility: Although if you leap beyond your actual level of Competence (as defined by Jaques in Requisiste Organization) you may end up learning to fail. In a wretching, awful way.

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I’ve been writing about work levels and stratified systems theory since 2003, just after I started writing this blog. Some of these older posts are great, full of wonderful information that you’ll no doubt find useful. Other posts are clearly wrongheaded: I had much to learn.

My clean up is just to get rid of some of the problems in the text: bad characters, formatting that failed to make some conversion to a newer version, dead links, etc. I’m thinking about putting together some ebooks that would aggregate the better ones, clean them up and make the necessary corrections. It might be more useful than having to trawl what was at the time simply a place to put notes on what I was reading. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I still do half the time.

I don’t do as much reading any more. Maybe it was a phase, but I rather think that it was a time to shove a massive amount of information into my head as quickly as possible. These days I’m trying to assimilate all this information and figure out how to deliver it. My work with Warren Kinston taught me something relevant to this: most of the time, you have to present information that challenges preconceptions several times and in several different ways for it to be useful. It means fewer posts, because there is a few number of things to say or simple things to think through.

Anyway, if you see lots of updates coming on the RSS feed, it’s because I’m continuing to clean up these old posts.