Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Organizations”
I have decided to take the advice I gave Paul Holmström at Management Unplugged, I’m posting my answers to questions posed elsewhere. Recently, Jim Heskett of Harvard Business School asked “Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?” If you want to see why Wilfred Brown kept talking about need to define terms like “manager”, you could do a lot worse than reading …
by Michael Baranovsky (GDL 1.2) Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where it seemed like the jackals were circling one of their own injured? I was sitting in a meeting with the department heads of an IT outsource account in Chicago. We had just finished listening to a dry run of some help desk training. It hadn’t …
Four years ago, I posted about the difference between Closed-Sector and Open-Sector careers. It’s worth looking at again, because your choice of career will affect the choices that you have. A brief excerpt: If your first appointment in a Closed-Sector Career matters, it may be used as a proxy for capability. I may assume that you are low-capability because you …
Last month, Michael Spencer posted a list of what he, as a religious person, wanted in a church. His readers, from a variety of denominations, all agreed whole-heartedly with his vision. And that’s the problem. Take a look at how using vague Universal Language (as opposed to even Universal Values) can lead to agreement where there probably isn’t any, whether in churches, companies or associations.
You’ve got a problem: your executives are all “baby boomers” and about to hit retirement. But so are the ranks just below them. How in the world can you get new executives in the pipeline who have industry experience and know your corporate culture?
From “The Wrong Incentive” by Roger Martin, Baron’s, Dec 23, 2003: How, then, should incentive compensation be structured? It should be based exclusively on features of the real market — sales, costs, investments, margins, profits. These are items over which management and employees have some control and their actions can be directly linked to such items. Compensation plans should look …
Neurologist Robert Sapolsky is an interesting character. The Edge has an interesting piece by him, which seems to be fairly stream of consciousness. Sapolsky, of couse, has done some fascinating field research on baboons and lab research into the inner workings of the brain, and a little of both all the time. In the Edge pice, Sapolsky writes about what …
What is important to recognize now is why success, such as that achieved at Southwest, can be sustained and can not readily be imitated by competitors. There are two fundamental reasons. First, the success that comes from managing people effectively is often not as visible or transparent as to its source…. Even when they are described…, they are difficult to …
Mohit Kishore, an always interesting perspective, published an article in The Hindu Business Line — “Leaderless groups – a case against hierarchy“. (He republished it in his blog.) It’s interesting in light of some of our recent discussions, especially at Toronto. A few thoughts and responses to it. Many of the cases that he cites are indeed the cases that …
The bi-annual Global Organization Design Conference is coming up in Toronto, July 16-19. Subtitled “Designing Organizations for Value-Creation, Sustainability, and Social Well-Being”, the conference proved to be of value to me two years ago. The bullshit level is amazingly low for conference. People are there who are using the theory in their own organizations, from large multinationals to entrepreneurial operations …
