I got sidetracked by some other issues and haven’t gotten around to finishing my posts on the GO Society Conference. Most importantly was my wife’s completion of the Phase 1 deliverable of our Baby Project (Alice Lee Christian, mom and her both doing great). Upcoming in the next two weeks (no earlier — it’s our first) are topics that you …
Conference Report: Religious Systems and RO
Religious Systems not just denominations or churches, etc. Some comments from the participants in this session. Hierarchy seems to have come from the order of the priesthood (various religions). The hierarchy is then a reflection of the holy(?). What is a managerial accountability hierarchy and what is not, and how these issues in religious systems has impact generally. Some comments …
Ian Macdonald on Values and the Shadow-side of Requisite Organization (Conference Report)
Ian Macdonald, of Macdonald Associates Consultancy, opens the day with a short plenary on “Positive Oranizations: Discipline not Dogma”. Reflecting on the practitioner and the practice. Why he does it. What drew him to Elliott Jaques’s work was the underlying values, like Felt-Fairness, what’s social justice, non-paranoiagenic organizations. It was about building social institutions. Second, the method of social analysis. …
Conference Report: CEOs Plenary
The Plenary Day opened with the video (available on the website) again, so that all us “authors” and new people could know what it was. It was followed by some history of the work on the theories. (Do you know the book Strategic Leadership that’s an academic-level book on Jaques and Co.? I think it’s related to the work in …
Conference Report: Legacy Day
(This is basically for Kalman, who couldn’t make it to the conference. Perhaps it will help with his reviews.) The “Designing Organizations for Value-Creation, Sustainability and Social Well-Being” pre-conference program actually started last Friday with a two-day course by Barry and Sheila Deane. I didn’t attend, but I spoke with Barry on Sunday and he said it went rather well. …
Spiral Dynamics profile
As part of the GO Society Conference in Toronto, we attendees were asked to complete a survey by Online PeopleScan. I have no idea what the results mean, but thought that some of you might find it interesting to see. It’s a PDF because I wasn’t thinking. IT professional and all. Culture Scan results
Adult Underachievers and Why That’s Stupid
Michael Bates, in a recent email, suggested that I take a look at what Julie R. Neidlinger, who besides having a fun last name, recently discussed her total failure at Ken Christian’s “adult underachiever test”. (I should note that I have no affiliation or relation with Neidlinger or Christian, but I have spent a couple of enjoyable evenings talking with …
“We are breaking the Von Neumann Assumption”: Burton Smith’s Keynote
Facing up to parallelism: Multicore means today’s HPC is tomorrow’s general purpose” by Martin Banks The Register has an interesting article on the International Supercomputing Conference keynote speech by Burton Smith, who used to be Chief Scientist at Cray and now works at Microsoft. Smith believes that parallel computing, now the domain of mostly High Performance Computing (HPC) and Grid …
Le Guin, high moders and systems thinking
I don’t think that Elliott Jaques was right about high moders’ distribution in society. They certainly seem much more prevalent than his published numbers. If I know a handful of mode 7s and 8s, then they can’t be all that rare: I don’t get around that much. I think the issue comes in where they work. High moders are prevalent in IT because the field is so poorly managed. High capacity people can continue to work as technical experts, even though they don’t get paid well. It’s odd how many times I’ve seen a Str4 or 5 person working for a Str2 manager.
Global Organization Design Conference 2007: highly recommened
The bi-annual Global Organization Design Conference is coming up in Toronto, July 16-19. Subtitled “Designing Organizations for Value-Creation, Sustainability, and Social Well-Being”, the conference proved to be of value to me two years ago. The bullshit level is amazingly low for conference. People are there who are using the theory in their own organizations, from large multinationals to entrepreneurial operations …