The BBC have taken down the “Here Comes the Boss” series by Patrick Wright, mentioned by Ken Craddock in his excellent bibliography on Requisite Organization related writings. I’ve been trying to track down a copy for weeks now. And then I remembered: the Internet Archive Wayback Machine! They have collected the transcripts of the series. Not as good as having …
No Flooding at Requisite Writing Central
As some of you probably know, some of my partners have been washed out in Cedar Rapids and southern Indiana. Thus far we at The Manasclerk Company headquarters have been able to escape these 500-year rainfall events here in Indiana’s North End. But I’ve still been very busy with a new program that I’m rolling out. Stay tuned.
Want Clarity About Work? Start By Defining Terms
I have decided to take the advice I gave Paul Holmström at Management Unplugged, I’m posting my answers to questions posed elsewhere. Recently, Jim Heskett of Harvard Business School asked “Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?” If you want to see why Wilfred Brown kept talking about need to define terms like “manager”, you could do a lot worse than reading …
Are You Trying to Succeed Where You Can’t?
Some time ago, I was complaining to my own executive coach about how I wasn’t getting rich when he leaned in, looked me straight in the eye, and shot the truth right to the heart of it all: “Maybe you’re not getting all that because you don’t want it” “You’re a smart guy,” he said. “If you wanted to be …
A Conversation with Luc Hoebeke: Part 2
Here’s part two of my interview with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian management thinker and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioners Guide. Hoebeke (pronounced, more or less, “HOO-bay-kuh”) is a RO-heretic: he likes General Theory of Bureaucracy and the original work, but thinks pretty poorly of Requisite Organization. See Part 1 for his particular departures.
Last ‘Giftedness Making You Sick’ Post
(This is a reply to Marcy’s last comment that got out of hand. I guess I’m working through some of these ideas in the non-work environment.) Marcy, I never delete anything unless it’s known spam or using some really abusive language. (I did take down my most popular post because it was attracting too much foul language; and I have …
If the CEOs are Vetting the Next Leaders, You'd Better Have Big Enough CEOs
A colleague sent an announcement for the Oliver Wyman Journal. They had an article on succession planning (“Bench Strength: How are you developing your highpotential leaders?” by Steve Krupp) that had some interesting thoughts on the problem. The CEO must own and sponsor the process. No major initiative within an organization will succeed unless the CEO champions the efforts…. General …
More on Your Giftedness Making You Sick
Looking at Marcy’s comment on my last post (Is Your Giftedness Making You Sick?, I admit that what I wrote is almost unreadable. But I’m trying to say something big without having to get into all the ins and outs that I talk about for work. The point is that if you are what I call in one of the …
Is Your “Giftedness” Making You Sicker
“Marcy” recently wrote about looking for a new psychotherapist in Northern Indiana, and talked about some judgments that she had about some of her previous therapists who didn’t fit with her. One of Marcy’s old therapists, with whom she did good work, wrote a book with the late Warren Rule, an Adlerian who for years was at Virginia Commonwealth; this …
New Wikipedia Entry for Wilfred Brown
Not the famous tenor but the Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company. I noticed that there wasn’t one up there, so I added one. I need to set up a disambiguation page to separate out the two Wilfred Browns. (Actually, there are several famous WBs in the late twentieth century.) It’s odd that the entry for Elliott Jaques had no …