The chickens have come to roost, as my grandfather used to say. The insane practices around bundling loans that never should have been made, along with our own greed, have led to a massive crisis internationally. I was first warned of this a year ago by some Australian investors but it’s still shocking to see [...]

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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.

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From Jeffrey Pfeffer, 1994, “Competitive Advantage Through People”, California Management Review, Winter 1994, pp. 9-28.

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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That’s not you controlling your business through SAP but SAP running you. From Ron May’s excellent email newsletter, The May Report, of 2006-Jan-17:

The best interview I conducted was with a guy from Kellogg who explained how Kellogg was somewhat boxed into the decision to go with SAP because Keebler already had it and they had [...]

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When Tony Stark took Specialty Chemicals – a division of Conglomerate, Inc. – the group had had 0.2% growth over the last seven years. So how did it turn into sustained double-digit growth the year after he arrived?

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It’s odd that an agricultural phrase (”low-hanging fruit”) came into business usage. Most of our business metaphors come from the military. It’s not a good fit. Agriculture would be, I’d reckon. From what I know from talking to successful farmers and gardeners, it’s a hard life full of risk. You have weather, sure, but you also have changes from plot to plot. You don’t just have to worry about which landrace will work on your soil but which will work best when it’s wet in the spring, dry in the summer and wet at harvest. All rice are not the same. You must predict the unpredictable (weather), rally forces to react to outside actions (war, markets, catastrophic atmospheric events), create adequate reserves while not having so much that they go to waste. Most of the time, there aren’t known good decisions. You have to make decisions in uncertainty, relying on the wisdom of the past and your own experience. Even non-modern farming has these issues.

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A common complaint against those of us working with The Law of the Real Boss (or RO or Worklevels, etc.) is that we concentrate too much on the structure of the organization to the exclusion of other important things, such as what the organization actually does.
It’s a valid complaint. So let’s talk about how [...]

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A recent interviewee gave me this statement. It matches so well with what I have been writing on lately (outside of here) that I can only believe that I heard it and subconsciously started chewing on it. It’s a great statement from someone who took a company from 1-2% annual growth for seven years to [...]

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Well, I didn’t mean to password protect this. You can use a product for years and still learn a new thing about it.
Having lived in Chicago and being married to an art historian, I’ve often heard Louis Sullivan’s dictum “Form Follows Function”. At the recent Global Organizational Design Society conference in Toronto, I had [...]

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