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 a 2002 article …
CIP and Representative vs Direct Democracy
I’ll be posting some random, unsubstantiated thoughts after the great PeopleFit course in Raleigh last week. If CIP is real, then having a representative democracy (like the United States and Canada both do) is superior to direct democracy. The people are capable of choosing the biggest leader, even if he or she is much bigger than they are. Of course, …
PeopleFit’s Course on “Assessing Raw Talent”
So, I returned from the PeopleFit course on how to assess raw talent through CIP evaluations. Wow. What a great class. Hands down the best course that I have ever attended. I’ll be unpacking the various things I learned, including how much I got from the other people in the class over the next few days. There are several things, …
Tata Sons’ Complexity Diagram
I went ahead and read some more of the Tata Sons material on their implementation of Billis’s (Rowbottom’s & Billis’s?) Work Levels. They use a two dimensional model to measure the level of work done within a company (see page two of the interview with Exec. Dir. R. Gopalakrishnan; the diagram is down the page). “Management Scope” goes up the …
To Clear Things Up, I Do Not Believe That Alison Brause Misunderstands RO
Although that certainly didn’t read clearly in the original post. The guy who wrote the article on Brause’s work didn’t understand RO. That was my point. It was obvious reading the piece that he thought of RO as fascist. IMHO. He has some type of axe to grind. I can make some speculations about what happened but I won’t. I …
Misunderstanding Requisite Organization
I was poking around to see if Alison Brause had done anything on this election and found an interesting opinion piece on her Requisite Organization based study over at the Boston Globe’s site. I’m not particularly a fan of the Brause report — something smells a bit bad about basing the evaluations on debate transcripts — but the author [UPDATE: …
Some Change Management articles
When I did the work for CSC, I boned up on these issues because I knew absolutely nothing. I actually read all of this so that I could put together a working change control process for the IT environment. Really. I could have simply made the guess without reading and would have produced the same process. But this was pretty …
Bibliography of articles on project risk management and escalation of commitment
I wanted to note some interesting articles that I found useful in my work with IT over the past few years, including Risk Management and Escalation of Commitment. These articles deal with Project Risk Management. Admittedly, I focus on RM for IT projects, so this is heavily skewed towards development and implementation projects that are computer-related.
Start with opinions
I hope that this citation is correct. I think this comes from Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive (1967): Most books on decision making tell the reader: “First find the facts.” But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.
Communities of Practice and Management Hierarchy: Can it work?
In this blog post from 2004, I muse on the interaction between the network forms of Communities of Practice and managerial hierarchies (cascades of Real Bosses, not simply organizational charts). I wonder if now, years later, this is still valid. Let me know what you think. How do Communities of Practice (CoP) interact with the self-organizing principles that Elliott Jaques …






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