Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2004
Top Consultant, a UK-based operation dealing with consultancies, has an interesting article describing a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Celerant Consulting, an affiliate of Novell. Top-Consultant reports that More than 4 in 10 senior executives surveyed in a major new cross-industry study said that performance improvement initiatives undertaken at their companies over the past three …
Military organizational experts point out that the war-fighting armies are almost always organized “requisitely” — that is, according to a natural order of hierarchical needs. But it often takes armies that aren’t continually at war to get to that state. An interesting case is that of Ulysses S. Grant. From Ulysses S. Grant:: Soldier & President, in regards to Grant’s …
From Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, an interestingly balanced if slightly dull biography of the General who became President of the American States. The unthinkable had become thinkable. The South, unable to manage either transition to a postslavery economy or irrevocable economic decline, was now talking only to itself as it sought to defend the indefensible, slavery, and deny …
I’ve been reading Thomas Fleming’s extended essay on the requirements of morality and why provincialism should trump any call to universalism (“Save my family” trumps “Save the world”), The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition. It’s an interesting read. I’ll review it when I’m done. He quotes Gabriel Marcel, from Man Against Mass Society …
I’ve been reading KM articles and discussions lately. Again. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of the problem of different levels of abstraction. Just because I’m in Software Development doesn’t mean that I want the same level of detail as the guy down the hall. I tend towards big picture thinking, wanting to see the details of the program, …
I am simply trying to get this down. Communities of practice, left unmolested in a small organization, formalized and evolved (i.e., changed into the new form of) the functional silo. That’s why getting rid of the functional silo is so difficult: they keep on coming back. Walk with me on this one. When a company is small, below the magical …
Let’s play “Let’s Pretend”! Or, if you want to be more grown-up, let’s follow Einstein’s lead and perform a “thought experiment” using a set of hypothetical situations, following a set of changes through to the end. Big Insurance Group (BIG) is a horribly non-requisite organization. There are too many layers or too few, depending on where you are. Managers who …
Let’s meander for awhile, talking about what the experience of being a hidden high potential, what Elliott Jaques called “high mode individuals”. “High mode” means someone who will be in Stratum 6 or higher at 65-70 yrs, and Higher Mode means Stratum 9 or higher, and Really-High Mode is someone at Str 11 or more. God help anyone who is …
As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been listening to Peter Block’s The Right Use of Power, an audio book (more a talk, really) that deals with issues from Stewardship and that are more fully developed in The Answer to How is Yes, which I’ve also been rereading. I’m interested in how his ideas intersect with Elliott Jaques’s theories of bureaucracy. Block …
While at the PeopleFit “Assessing Raw Talent” class this last week, I heard that it is common for people to overestimate the CIP (Elliott Jaques’s idea of Complexity of Information Processing) of persons who have a lower CIP and to underestimate their subordinates who have a higher CIP than they do. I figured that they were simply citing Wood’s article. …
