Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2005
What happens when people in a meeting are different stratum (per Elliott Jaques’s requisite organization theory), knowing each other well enough to have some experience of each other’s capacity? Who leads? If certain people talk, does the conversation die? Does the meeting have to be facilitated by the highest stratum person? Will it be regardless, at least effectively? This got …
You can get a pretty good idea of how risky a CEO’s tenure will be to overall shareholder value by looking at interviews he or she gave before taking on that top job, and assessing these via Elliott Jaques’s “complexity of information processing” (CIP) method. This often gives you some really good data. I’ve decided to start measuring the interviews …
I’m announcing my intention to code the interview Charlie Rose did with Lee Raymond, outgoing CEO of ExxonMobil. Raymond is a remarkable thinker and I believe illustrates strong high-mode characteristics in this interview. What caught my attention was his use of the timespans. He mentioned research that Exxon did into alternative fuels back in the early 1980s. Rose considered that …
In an attempt to thwart spammers, Google Mail has started using mobile phone numbers to provide customers with gmail invitations. This is an interesting development, one that has been predicted for at least since the miniaturizaion of mobile telephones. With number portability in the United States, this finally becomes a possibility for many corporations. Mobile numbers stay with you. Although …
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the null hypothesis for RO. There would have to be one that’s pretty clearly testable. Some thoughts: A StrX person can create a StrX+1 organization. This is a weird one that you just won’t test, since why would you try something that you think will fail? Maybe a historical analysis. …
!["Bessemer converter (iron into steel) Allegheny Ludlum Steel e Corp Brackenridge, Pa (LOC)" [crop]. Ca. 1940. Alfred T. Palmer via Library of Congress](https://i0.wp.com/www.manasclerk.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1a35063u-Bessemer-converter-iron-into-steel-Allegheny-Ludlum-Steel-e-Corp-Brackenridge-Pa-LOC-1600x995.jpg?fit=862%2C536&ssl=1)
When Tony Stark took Specialty Chemicals – a division of Conglomerate, Inc. – the group had had 0.2% growth over the last seven years. So how did it turn into sustained double-digit growth the year after he arrived?
It’s odd that an agricultural phrase (“low-hanging fruit”) came into business usage. Most of our business metaphors come from the military. It’s not a good fit. Agriculture would be, I’d reckon. From what I know from talking to successful farmers and gardeners, it’s a hard life full of risk. You have weather, sure, but you also have changes from plot to plot. You don’t just have to worry about which landrace will work on your soil but which will work best when it’s wet in the spring, dry in the summer and wet at harvest. All rice are not the same. You must predict the unpredictable (weather), rally forces to react to outside actions (war, markets, catastrophic atmospheric events), create adequate reserves while not having so much that they go to waste. Most of the time, there aren’t known good decisions. You have to make decisions in uncertainty, relying on the wisdom of the past and your own experience. Even non-modern farming has these issues.
A common complaint against those of us working with The Law of the Real Boss (or RO or Worklevels, etc.) is that we concentrate too much on the structure of the organization to the exclusion of other important things, such as what the organization actually does. It’s a valid complaint. So let’s talk about how different important elements interact. I …
eWeek interviewd IBM’s Janet Perna as she retires this month (“Interview: IBM’s Perna Predicts Changes in What ‘Data’ Means”). She’s been with the company for 31 years, and in that time became one of the leading forces behind databases. Her closing comments about what she is really proud of is interesting and worth hearing. [eWeek:] Looking back, what are you …
A recent interviewee gave me this statement. It matches so well with what I have been writing on lately (outside of here) that I can only believe that I heard it and subconsciously started chewing on it. It’s a great statement from someone who took a company from 1-2% annual growth for seven years to double digit growth in one. …
