Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2008
The last time I made a pass at the forthcoming book on how to get your career out of its rut, I took a part-time (36 hr/wk) job at a US retailer of consumer electronics. I learned a great deal there about theft and sales, but I also noticed something strange: no one ever minded when I bought them coffee. …
Alistair Mant, Chairman, Socio-technical Study Group, spoke at the 2005 GO Society Conference in Toronto about his experiences and work with Wilfred Brown, the chairman of Glacier Metal Company, where the ideas about work levels were originally worked out. Mant makes the point that well before Dr. Jaques and his Tavistock colleagues came onto the scene, Brown was working to …
As I continue to attempt to understand the history of the Glacier Project, I’ve been reading about Wilfred Brown’s work in there political sphere to gain some of this. Because he was a socialist and socialism dominated the political landscape of the UK during this time, it is probably hard to separate out. Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson mention Wilfred …
I just read about the death of Isabel Menzies. She was a major force for good in healthcare organization and a long-time member of the Tavistock Institute. She died in February of this year. The Independent carried an obituary of Menzies Lyth.
This post has been one of my most popular since I wrote it. If you’re coming to this site for the first time, let me know what you thought in a comment below. In January, I scored a copy of the Bros. Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die as I was working with an Australian …
by Michael Baranovsky (GDL 1.2) Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where it seemed like the jackals were circling one of their own injured? I was sitting in a meeting with the department heads of an IT outsource account in Chicago. We had just finished listening to a dry run of some help desk training. It hadn’t …
You may have been sitting there, listening to me prattle on and on about this Work Levels -slash- Levels of Work -slash- Requisite Organization -slash- Real Boss -slash- whatever and have gotten to the point where your eyes are getting glazy or, more likely, they’re starting to glance about for someone else to talk to. You think they might be …
A little teaser for the forthcoming Part 2 of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian organizational expert and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioner’s Guide. In this 30-second excerpt, Hoebeke talks about the most important thing Koldo Saratxaga did to help IRIZAR create a high-performance, team-focused work culture. If you’re not Spanish or Basque, you probably have …
I’ve implemented a little addon that will let you read Requisite Writing on your iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device. I’ve been delighted by how it works on my Blackberry Curve. If you have an iPhone, would you consider testing out this page’s permalink and leave a comment below? The addon is “WordPress PDA & iPhone Plugin” by Imthiaz Rafiq, …
Let’s return to something Mary wrote in a comment about my post, “Knowing Who You Are Can Get You Out of Underachievement“: When I read “Underachievers, Are You Simply Out of Flow” and then Andrew Olivier’s “Our Working Journey and Stress”, I could hardly believe my eyes. I diagnosed myself immediately. I have been on 2 sick leaves, the last …
