A friend asked this question: “Well, if you were CEO, how would you do it?” Good question. This is a random thought experiment using the companies that I have experience with, mostly large multi-billion dollar companies, some based in the States and some in Europe, ranging from 15,000 (for a subdiary) to 100,000 employees, although the sites I was at …
Mintzberg Quoting Mozart on Composing
For whatever reason, there’s something about the “Aha!” nature of genius that resists deconstruction. Or reduction. Or even reducing to a broth. One of the problems with many of the current KM theories and practices is that they basically ignore this. It’s as if knowledge and knowing were somehow the big secret. The big secret is guessing and doing. Then …
Power is Tragicomedy
From Mintzberg’s Power In and Around Organizations, page xvii: In our society, power in and around organizations is a kind of tragicomedy; we would like to laugh, and sometimes do, but there is also much to cry about.
Another Duh! From McKinsey
An interesting article from McKinsey Quarterly that proves that no one has a clue about how to manage any longer: New from The McKinsey Quarterly:Strategy“Balancing short- and long-term performance”The benefits are many for corporations that can walk this tightrope.(Premium Membership required)http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/links/15927
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning… and project planning, too
Mintzberg makes some scathing remarks about the Strategic Planning industry. A lot of it seems to come down that the planners are (A) taking the power away from managers and (B) it doesn’t work in practice. I’m wondering if a similar argument can’t be made about software project management.
Consultancy Rates Going Up?
Top Consultant reports that management consultancy salaries have increased and fee rates are firmer now than they have been for 3 years, and there is a bit more money to spend on salaries. All firms reported a shortage of good candidates, and those that gave October salary reviews awarded increases of around 5%, reflecting the need to attract new staff …
“IS Outsourcing: A Survey and Analysis of the Literature”
The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, a publications of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems, has devoted an entire issue to IT Outsourcing. Jens Dibbern, Time Goles, Rudy Hirschheim and Bandula Jayatilaka take over the entire issue for a journal-length review of everything that has been done. One of the interesting things was that they did …
Mintzberg on Developing the Developing World
The previous discussion about Henry Mintzberg’s “Quiet Leadership” led me to read some of his newspaper articles. “Africa’s ‘Best Practices’” is from the Daily Times of Pakistan (March 9,2004), although it has been published elsewhere earlier. Mitzberg asks the important question: do we or even can we develop leaders? Perhaps we don’t develop leaders so much as foster the conditions …
Quiet Leadership
Jon pointed out “Managing Quietly” [Leader to Leader, 12 (Spring 1999): 24-30], one of the few articles by Henry Mintzberg available online. It talks about the fact that the loud, glossy CEOs who become darlings of the business press, do not in fact perform all that well. Quiet leaders, whom you never hear about, do much better. It’s worth a …
Communities of Practice
If people had any idea what real management leadership looked like, the idea of self-managed teams wouldn’t be thought of as anything so radical.