Vance, a Trapper Boy, 15 years old. Has trapped for several years in a West Va. Coal mine. $.75 a day for 10 hours work. All he does is to open and shut this door: most of the time he sits here idle, waiting for the cars to come. On account of the intense darkness in the mine, the hieroglyphics on the door were not visible until plate was developed. Location: West Virginia. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1908 September.

Corporations Exist To Stifle Innovation, Not Encourage It

Forrest ChristianUncategorized Leave a Comment

There seems to be an attitude in most of the innovation & creativity discussions that innovation is always good. At least the shareholders, management, employees and others may not want the innovation that results. Remember that unions were innovations. Also, within cultures innovation is rarely welcome. Al-Qaeda is an innovative organizational form and many of their attacks have been extremely …

Manhattan Bridge under construction-1909

Instilling Values in an Organization Takes Time, So Be Patient

Forrest ChristianChange, Warren Kinston 2 Comments

vOne of the things that always seesms to surprise people who do organizational change projects (and pretty much all IT projects are organizational change projects) is that it takes longer to change things than you thought it would. While you are waiting for things to settle down, you can’t walk away or everything that you brought to them walks out …

An Announcement: New Affiliation

Forrest ChristianAdmin 2 Comments

I’ve joined a new company run by Warren Kinston to bring his voluminous set intellectual tools to a broader audience. We had been talking since the end of the Toronto conference and decided that it was a good time to pull the trigger on the startup. For a good idea of what we will be bringing out (in a more …

Latest Reading, or what’s keeping me busy

Forrest ChristianReviews - Articles, Reviews - Books Leave a Comment

Besides a new appointment at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, I’ve been busy trying to get my mind wrapped around Warren Kinston’s materials. And parent a colicky baby, of course. Current reading list (for my tracking purposes): Warren Kinson, 1994. Strengthening the Management Culture (available as a PDF download from the GO Society). The Sigma Centre, London. …

Mimicking a Statue, (c) 2012 Michael Coghlan (CC BY-SA 2.0). Via flickr.

Tell the World, Because They Won’t Be Able To Copy You

Forrest ChristianOrganizations, Strategy Leave a Comment

What is important to recognize now is why success, such as that achieved at Southwest, can be sustained and can not readily be imitated by competitors. There are two fundamental reasons. First, the success that comes from managing people effectively is often not as visible or transparent as to its source…. Even when they are described…, they are difficult to …

RO Related Feeds

Forrest ChristianLearning 3 Comments

Besides this blog, the GO Society also has an RSS feed that you may want to catch. I’ve somehow not found the twenty seconds it took to put it into my Google Reader aggregator. Gillian Stamp also has some good stuff at her relatively new site. Another worthwhile feed. Anyone know of any others?

Conference Update: Is RO Ethical?

Forrest ChristianGO Conference, Theory 3 Comments

Another in my belated series of summaries of the GO Society conference in Toronto, Ontario. There was a special plenary-style session on “Ethics and RO” after dinner Tuesday night. It was an interesting discussion, partly because there were definitely different value sets in the audience. If it got recorded, I doubt that it would be useful: there was a lot …

Leaderless Groups and Why Wilfred Brown Was Brilliant

Forrest ChristianManaging, Organizations 3 Comments

Mohit Kishore, an always interesting perspective, published an article in The Hindu Business Line — “Leaderless groups – a case against hierarchy“. (He republished it in his blog.) It’s interesting in light of some of our recent discussions, especially at Toronto. A few thoughts and responses to it. Many of the cases that he cites are indeed the cases that …

Comments Repaired

Forrest ChristianAdmin Leave a Comment

We’ve been having problems with the comments. Basically, you had to be a registered user to comment. Since that hasn’t really reduced the amount of spam that hits here (it staggers the mind) I’ve gotten that turned back off. It wasn’t meant to be on in the first place. User error again.