Depressives and Reality

Forrest ChristianReviews - Books 1 Comment

More on Martin Seligman’s What You Can Change and What You Can’t: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement : Depressives are incredibly realistic. I mean incredibly realistic. In turns out that a realistic understanding of one’s skills and chances codes incredibly well with either having depression or future depression. HBR had an article on this last year by Dan Lovallo …

What You Can Change & What You Can't

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I went to the library here in town, which has a great selection of business books, to start some reading I needed to do on Chris Argyris’s action science. A reviewer on Amazon suggested a book by Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism, as the second book in a learning series. When I looked online before I left the house, the local …

Advertisment design study for Pierce Arrow automobiles (1915). By Edward Penfield. Via Library of Congress collection.

Top 5 Job Assignments That Produce Learning

Forrest ChristianCareers, Learning 2 Comments

Not every posting is equivalent to build great managers. That’s pretty clear to even the densest of us (me). What’s not is which of the quality postings will produce better learning than others. Morgan W. McCall, in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job (1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:

Victorian woman walking between two men in bowlers. Vintage Field and Garden, small business / blog license.

How Berners-Lee Finally Built Hypertext By Taking It Back 30 Years

Forrest ChristianComputers/IT, Knowledge, Organizations, Reviews - Articles Leave a Comment

There were lots of more interesting and much more robust systems that provided better access to knowledge. But they didn’t have Berners-Lee and his peculiar mix of vision and practicality. That mix was uncommon, and for innovators to be successful with bringing technology to change the world, they have to believe that they work for a greater good.

Aberdeen Angus im Gadental an den Steilhängen des Muttawangjoch oder auch Mutterwangjoch genannt. Im Hintegrund die Südflanke des Feuerstein 2271m. (c) Böhringer Friedrich (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)

Risky Monocultures: In Agriculture or IT Systems, It’s Bad Risk Taking

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You wouldn’t think that books discussing agronomics would have much to say relevant to Organizational Structure, IT Management or Knowledge Management. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can see how people would think that. I’d like to show how some of the ideas being debated in the agricultural industry’s fringes can illuminate our own issues. James C. Scott, in …

Bix sits in confusion (Detail), from "Heaven's to Betsy!", Club "16" comics

Do Best Practices Destroy Long Term Value in Knowledge Management & Process Design?

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Jack Vinson has an interesting report on a recent presentation by Bob Hiebeler of St. Charles Partners. The fascinating part was the discussion of “best practices”: it got me thinking about James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) and what it implies for …

Typists. By Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940). ca. 1915. George Eastman House Collection.

Measuring Software Project Size

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I’ve mentioned articles by Phillip Armour of Corvus International (Deer Park, IL) before: he writes a regular feature in Communications of the ACM called “The Business of Software” and normally features some of the tougher, management-oriented problems of development. This month he tackles how software is measured and points out the ridiculous use of “Lines of Code” or LOC. (Of …