Lord Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company, was insistent: Behaviour is as much defined and limited by the role that a work inhabits as his personality and the quality of his relationships within the company. You can even take this farther than he did: the social role you inhabit (or are forced into) will make you behave in certain ways. This may comes as shock if you’r…
Category
Organizations
Trust Is Necessary To Society. The Glacier Model Builds Trust
There’s a fascinating paper at the IMF by social capital guru Francis Fukuyama (Social Capital and Civil Society – Prepared for delivery at the IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms) that covers his reasoning behind social capital being called “capital” at all. Besides being interested in how to create societies, I’ve always found him a lucid writer who discusses a topic that relates to t…
Why “Leaderless” Groups Go Fascist
I recently tweeted that “As long as you advocate leaderless groups, the power-hungry will control you. The answer is more complex.” Asked to provide some more, I figured I’d do it here since it ties into some of the workplace stuff we’ve been talking about (from when Wilfred Brown was MD/CEO of Glacier) and the new model of Evangelical church organization.
I’ve talked about this issue before and…
New Church Model Isn’t: Multisite Is Regurgitation of the Model They Hated
This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy.
One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s time to develop a multi-site churc…
Lord Acton on Organization
Wilfred Brown (along with Elliott Jaques, to a lesser extent) understood what Lord Acton understood about power. They created a constitutional system of rights at Glacier Metal. Here’s why it’s important.
Can Entrepreneurs Save Newspapers? Even in Chicago?
“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…
How the Disney World Model Leads to Top-Down Absolute Control
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.
In my quest to understand why American…
Burnham Says "You Can't Handle Big Things Unless You Have An Organization"
Burnham and Root’s Reliance Building in Chicago, 1894
Maybe it’s obvious, but humans built organizations because they helped them achieve things. Networks are nice, and very useful, but the Organization (which is a subtype of network) works in more specific ways.
Daniel H. Burnham, the famous Chicago architect, felt something of this. Donald L. Miller, in City of the Century: The Epic of…
John Morgan on using RO in a Megachurch Model
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 is the only authority over the pastor. They…
Warren Kinston on Democracy
You can’t see it until you see it. And once you see it, you can’t not see it!
Last fall, Dr. Warren Kinston wrote a note on Democracy at the request of some of the dissident leaders in Thailand, where he has a home and spends about a quarter of his year. This is a rough draft, but he has allowed me to post it here for our benefit: Democracy and its Difficulties by Warren Kinston…