Run on East Side Bank, N.Y. 1912 February 16. Bain News Service via Library of Congress.

Why Boards Go Wrong: “It’s the Group, Stupid!”

Forrest ChristianGovernance, Reviews - Articles Leave a Comment

Back in 2005, the Brooklyn Law Review published the papers from the Corporate Misbehavior by Elite Decision-Makers Symposium, which Brooklyn Law School apparently held. Harvard’s Rakesh Khurana & Katharina Pick contributed a social-psychological look at how boards of directors of corporations can go wrong through social or group processes and how the current spate of “control the directors” changes have …

Full Employee Participation in Policy-Making Through Representative Council (workplace democracy)

Forrest Christianelliott jaques, Governance, Managing, Wilfred Brown Leave a Comment

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.

From the Bimbo cartoon “The Bum Bandit” (1931), Fleischer studio- not mickey mouse!

How the Disney World Model Leads to Top-Down Absolute Control

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Did the American Evangelical megachurch adopt the unchecked executive model because it wanted to emulate Disney World and its fantasy of American small town life? It’s a charge that’s worth looking at because it can shed some light on this issue. I’m going to be unabashedly churchy in this, so comment if you need a translation of the Evangelical jargon. …

Winter at Lofoten (2008). By Tackbert. Public Domain.

Using Requisite Organization to Manage Staff in an Evangelical Megachurch

Forrest ChristianGovernance, Organizations, Reviews - Videos, Theory Leave a Comment

The Rev. Dr. John Morgan is the head pastor of a growing independent Evangelical church in New Mexico that uses the mega-church model. Morgan wrote a chapter in the GO Society book (disclosure: I edited that piece) that does a good job describing his efforts and how Work Levels play out in independent churches. In these churches, the local congregation …

Lord Wilfred Brown’s Training Films Now Available Online

Forrest ChristianGovernance, Managing, Organizations, requisite organization, Reviews - Videos, Wilfred Brown Leave a Comment

The GO Society has quietly put up the Exploration in Management training films. These films, produced for the Glacier Institute of Management and narrated by Lord Wilfred Brown, the retired Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company and Prochancellor of Brunel University, show how the radical ideas Brown developed with Dr. Jaques work from a manager’s point of view. I’m glad …

Vanderburg on Galbraith on Technostructure

Forrest ChristianGovernance, Reviews - Books, Theory Leave a Comment

Some notes from Living In The Labyrinth of Technology by Willem H. Vanderburg. (University of Toronto Press, 2005). Citing Galbraith’s earlier work, to argue for Ellul’s rise of technique. The argument is that the corporation has to create a technostructure, a group of committees of technical expertise, because the endeavour is so complex that no one person understands it. The …

Winter at Lofoten (2008). By Tackbert. Public Domain.

How To Judge a CEO’s Capacity to Do That Job

Forrest ChristianGovernance 1 Comment

You can get a pretty good idea of how risky a CEO’s tenure will be to overall shareholder value by looking at interviews he or she gave before taking on that top job, and assessing these via Elliott Jaques’s “complexity of information processing” (CIP) method. This often gives you some really good data. I’ve decided to start measuring the interviews …