I’m still uncertain about the connection between Flyvbjerg’s “think slow, then act fast” and Warren Kinston’s Pragmatic phase of management culture, but that shouldn’t stop us from moving forward! Kinston points out that Simple Pragmatism, the base of organizational life, always degrades. You think it won’t, that all you need to do is keep doing what’s in front of you. …
First, Do Something. Maybe?
“If you want to know how to get started, just do something!” Or, as M. Bartok Wolfe always told me, “Action is Action.” When you are getting something started — anything, really — action takes precedence. It’s not about thinking or planning: it’s about doing something. At least. it’s sometimes like that. In an ongoing business, it’s best to simply …
When You Run into History, and it’s My Lai
Wait – did he just say had served under Lt. Calley? The Aged Relative and I had stopped at a diner somewhere in western Virginia (not to be confused with West Virginia, which is a different state) to get some food and break up my long drive. I stepped out to wash my hands, and when I returned, I saw …
Why You Have Useless Layers of Management Above You
It struck me, after pointing out that Citi’s going from 13 levels of management to 8 was just following the emergent natural hierarchy and so just cutting non-value adding positions, that I never really said why companies get in this mess. If these positions can NEVER add value no matter who is in them, why do companies create them? Probably …
Why Citi is shedding 5 layers of management
Why is Citicorp removing 5 layers of management? If they needed 13 layers to get their old results, how in heaven can they just ditch these layers? Because they didn’t need them. You NEVER need more than seven layers
Don’t reject fear. Activate Courage.
The whammy has come. The boss gave you the pink slip. Your spouse says, “I’m in love with someone else.” Your doctor tells you, “You have cancer” – or, so much, much worse, says “Your child has cancer.” The cop asks you to turn around and put your hands behind your back. You answer the doorbell and there’s the military …
Sometimes, “the closer you are to [career] danger, the farther you are from [life] harm”
“You’re the only parent of anyone I know who is pushing their art kid to art school and out of nursing.” I was talking to my oldest kid, encouraging her to apply to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts High School, a residential performing arts school which also has a visual arts program. We live in a …
What’s more important to job satisfaction: work language or work level? “It depends.”
Should I look for a Real Boss, one who can unpack a “stratum” more complexity than I can, who can think out farther that I can? Or should I look for a team that “speaks my language”? As always with things that are deeply true, “it depends”.
How an Urban Studies course taught me that my “friends” were wrong (and I wasn’t an idiot)
It’s odd how some of us get stuck in a rut of not understanding who we are. Being told to go in a direction that is antithetical to our core, we work where what we have is not what they want. For most people, this is probably nuts. If you aren’t one, maybe a tale from my past will help.
So, I asked Chat GPT to write some poems about my writing….
I asked Chat GPT to review the contents of this site, and using that knowledge, write some poems about Hidden High Potentials. (Which you can go research if you’re unfamiliar. I’ll wait for you here.) My first attempt was requesting a sonnet, no style otherwise: Amidst the crowds, a gem oft goes unseen, A talent shining bright, but rarely found, …