Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2006
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 …
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 …
Let’s take a look at something I wrote awhile back while we wait for Al to come back on! A recent post by Michael Bates, the Tulsa-based urban planning, on the work of Jane Jacobs had me searching for an old post of my own Malcolm Gladwell’s article discussing how companies are trying to look like Jacobs’s description of Greenwich …
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 …
That’s not you controlling your business through SAP but SAP running you. From Ron May’s excellent email newsletter, The May Report, of 2006-Jan-17: The best interview I conducted was with a guy from Kellogg who explained how Kellogg was somewhat boxed into the decision to go with SAP because Keebler already had it and they had just bought Keebler, so …
Amazon’s self-help categories are filled with books by so-called experts who tell you that what you really need to correct this or that deficiency is to change. You need to become motivated by these things, they tell you. Before you spend years trying to follow this wretched advice, here’s a hard learned lesson and I’m giving it to you for …
