Category

elliott jaques

Does Requisite Organization really work over a weekend? (REDUX)

Eight years ago, back when I was Google-ranked #1 or #2 for such things, I asked if the Requisite Organization of Elliott Jaques would really work wonders over a weekend, as Dr. Jaques implied in his book, Requisite Organization (2nd Ed.). Paul Tremlett had an interesting take from conversations with the late Dr. Jaques.

My best recollection of EJ on this one was he (at least initially)…

Elliott Jaques’s “Intellectual Odyssey”

Douglas Kirsner of Deakin University spoke with Elliott Jaques before he died, and wrote up the results from the perspective of another psychoanalyst. Jaques abandoned psychoanalysis but would later refer to that as perhaps going overboard. It’s an interesting read for those of you who are interested in what he thought of things at the end of his life.

This copy seems to be a poor conversion, so…

Jaques First To Use “Culture” About Companies

Geert Hofstede, in “Culture’s Consequences”, says it plain: Elliott Jaques was the first to use “culture” in management literature.

The Law of the Real Boss & Your Love Life

A Parabolic Trajectory

Learn how your love life is influenced by the Law of the Real Boss — discovered by Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown (etc.) at Glacier Metal — and the associated corollaries. If you are on a higher trajectory than others, finding a mate will be harder.

Full participation by employee reps in policy making

Wilfred Brown, organizational genius

Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director and Chairman of Glacier Metal Company during Elliott Jaques’s work there, continued to believe that all employees had interest in changes to POLICY. He delimited that against the rights of managers to do their jobs within policy. What was policy was defined within the works council. Elliott Jaques abandoned this later in favor of trusting managers to represent their subordinates, in direct contradiction to his supposed value of creating systems rather than trusting people to be “good” as managers. Here’s why Brown was right and Jaques was not.

Elliott Jaques on the Problems of Church Organization

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 organizationa…

New PeopleFit Course

Michelle Malay Carter of Mission Minded Management has let out that PeopleFit will put on another public seminar to introduce interested folks in the organizational theories that come out of Stratified Systems Theory / Requisite Organization:

On January 7th, I’ll be co-leading a short course on some of the basics of the model and their implications for organizational structure, employ…

Warren Kinston's "A Total Framework for Inquiry"

Kinston’s 1988 article is up.

Kinston's & Algie's guide on how managers can approach decisions

For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

Alistair Mant speaks on Wilfred Brown and Industrial Democracy

Alistair Mant speaking at the 2005 GO Society conference in Toronto

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Alistair Mant, Chairman, Socio-technical Study Group, spoke at the 2005 GO Society Conference in Toronto about his experiences and work with Wilfred Brown, the chairman of Glacier Metal Company, where the ideas about work levels were originally worked out. Mant makes the point that well before Dr. Jaques and his Tavistock colleagues came onto the scene, Brown was…

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