Another in my belated series of summaries of the GO Society conference in Toronto, Ontario. There was a special plenary-style session on “Ethics and RO” after dinner Tuesday night. It was an interesting discussion, partly because there were definitely different value sets in the audience. If it got recorded, I doubt that it would be useful: there was a lot …
Le Guin, high moders and systems thinking
I don’t think that Elliott Jaques was right about high moders’ distribution in society. They certainly seem much more prevalent than his published numbers. If I know a handful of mode 7s and 8s, then they can’t be all that rare: I don’t get around that much. I think the issue comes in where they work. High moders are prevalent in IT because the field is so poorly managed. High capacity people can continue to work as technical experts, even though they don’t get paid well. It’s odd how many times I’ve seen a Str4 or 5 person working for a Str2 manager.
Global Organization Design Conference 2007: highly recommened
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 …
High-Moders and Hierachies
Although I’ve been called away these past few weeks with a family emergency, I’ve been thinking about the points that Christine Baker of Requisite Development raises in her recent comments on “Writing a Level-3 CV” on the careers of high-moders. She points out that options today are greater for them than in the past: There is another point to make …
On Trust: Playing Iterative Prisoners’ Dilemma, Belief Raising Insurance Rates, and Competence
I’ve been thinking about Trust. That most elusive quality in our world and yet that which must underlie all our social worlds. I’ve also been reading some odd things this summer and thought that this would be a good time to put them down, in absolutely no particular order.
Fallows to Publish in GO Society Book
If you missed on of Jack Fallows’s presentations at the GO Society conference last August, you will be pleased to hear that he will be publishing a portion of his work as a chapter in the new book coming out this fall from that group. It won’t have his spiffy Flash animations to illustrate his points (very spiffy, IMO) but …
Management Books by Lord Brown Now Free and Online!
Just to let y’all know: the GO Society has finally put up the books by Wilfred Lord Brown, Minister of Health and CEO of Glacier Metals. Lord Brown had a different take on the work that Jaques did for him, and it’s interesting to read an owner’s accounts of how to run a business. The books now online include some …
Genius: Capacity and Hard Work
For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he would get so lost in his own equations that he would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves. According to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, he wasn’t …
Your Company’s Manifest, Assumed, Extant and Requisite Organizations
I was looking up something else (the use of books of hours in medieval church practice, to be honest) and somehow came across Bennis’s description of the “requisite” organization from the mid-1980s. I wondered if the term, which seemed to match Dr. Jaques’s use, was his own or something borrowed. Turns out it’s borrowed (see the quotation below). But I …
Vanderburg on Galbraith on Technostructure
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 …