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Entries Tagged as 'Theory'

Judgment of Capacity Must Be On Work

October 2nd, 2008 · 13 Comments

You could not judge Gov. Sarah Palin’s current capacity based on her interview with CBS’s Katie Couric because it did not get her talking on issues on which she has concentrated before.

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Tags: Theory

Warren Kinston’s “A Total Framework for Inquiry”

September 11th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Kinston’s 1988 article is up.

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Tags: Careers · Elliott Jaques · Managing · Reviews - Books · Theory · Warren Kinston

Cosmides on the Dangers of “Anyone Can Be Shaped Into Anything”

September 10th, 2008 · No Comments

A quick look at one of Leda Cosmides’s answers during an interview for El Mecurio (Chile), on the idea of environmental determinism.

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Tags: Learning · Reviews - Articles · Theory

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

August 22nd, 2008 · 3 Comments

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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Tags: Careers · Change · Coaching · Computers/IT · Decision-making · Elliott Jaques · GO Conference · Governance · Managing · Motivation · Networks · Ontologies · Organizations · Outsourcing · Overachievers · Quality · Resources · Reviews - Articles · Reviews - Books · Risk Management · Social Network Analysis · Strategy · THEE · Theory · Uncategorized · Underachievers · Warren Kinston · Wilfred Brown · podcast · requisite organization

Kinston & Rowbottom’s “A New Model of Managing Based On Levels of Work”

August 2nd, 2008 · 6 Comments

Here’s the second in the set, from 1990. Warren probably hasn’t really looked at these for some time, and I know that he has taken things farther in documents coming out of his SIGMA Centre.
Warren Kinston and Ralph Rowbottom. 1990. “A New Model of Managing Based On Levels of Work”. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, [...]

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Tags: Managing · Theory · Warren Kinston

Kinston & Rowbottom: “Levels of Work: New Applications To Management In Large Organisations”

August 1st, 2008 · 5 Comments

After Glenn Mehltretter’s comments about Kinston and Rowbottom’s article from 1990, I went and got copies, OCRed them, and got Warren’s permission to post them here. This is the first, from 1989. They are useful articles and should be in someone’s database but this journal has never been electronically archived anywhere that I could find.
Warren [...]

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Tags: Theory · Warren Kinston

Pragmatist Meets Structuralist: A Web Example

July 24th, 2008 · 2 Comments

If you’ve been following my discussions of Kinston and Algie’s Seven Languages of Achievement (aka Seven Decision Languages), here’s a good example of what someone who is a structuralist sounds like when talking to a pragmatist.
The manager, like most managers, is a pragmatist working in a pragmatist company. “Get ‘er done” is the motto. The [...]

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Tags: Theory · Warren Kinston

Isabel Menzies Lyth: 1917-2008

May 29th, 2008 · 1 Comment

I just read about the death of Isabel Menzies. She was a major force for good in healthcare organization and a long-time member of the Tavistock Institute. She died in February of this year.
The Independent carried an obituary of Menzies Lyth.

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Tags: Theory

“What’s With This ‘Coding’?” A bit of personal manifesto

May 15th, 2008 · 3 Comments

One of the problems with having grown a blog out of one’s own thoughts (and conversations with friends) is that the early stuff always looks a little questionable. Last time, I linked to a post from 2004 October in which I used some of the technical language about the Capability of Information Processing coding.
The language [...]

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Tags: Coaching · Theory

Retraining Mainframers to Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

May 8th, 2008 · No Comments

I’m going through my old email archives, and discovered a note from a project I ran to help a very large US property & casualty insurer to better retool their mainframe-oriented programmers (procedural using COBOL) to client-server paradigms (mostly Object-Oriented Programming using Java). It was an interesting project because the dirty secret was that some [...]

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Tags: Computers/IT · Theory