When I did the work for CSC, I boned up on these issues because I knew absolutely nothing. I actually read all of this so that I could put together a working change control process for the IT environment. Really. I could have simply made the guess without reading and would have produced the same process. But this was pretty …
Bibliography of articles on project risk management and escalation of commitment
I wanted to note some interesting articles that I found useful in my work with IT over the past few years, including Risk Management and Escalation of Commitment. These articles deal with Project Risk Management. Admittedly, I focus on RM for IT projects, so this is heavily skewed towards development and implementation projects that are computer-related.
Start with opinions
I hope that this citation is correct. I think this comes from Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive (1967): Most books on decision making tell the reader: “First find the facts.” But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.
![Employees at Mid-Continent Refinery [ca. 1943 Tulsa, OK (LOC). By John Vachon]](https://i0.wp.com/www.manasclerk.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2179123915_75b400bf47_o-men-group-Employees-at-Mid-Continent-Refinery-c-1943-Tulsa-OK-LOC-Vachon-John-e1377964113665.jpeg?fit=862%2C519&ssl=1)
Communities of Practice and Management Hierarchy: Can it work?
In this blog post from 2004, I muse on the interaction between the network forms of Communities of Practice and managerial hierarchies (cascades of Real Bosses, not simply organizational charts). I wonder if now, years later, this is still valid. Let me know what you think. How do Communities of Practice (CoP) interact with the self-organizing principles that Elliott Jaques …
Dunbar Numbers and Requisite Failures
I’ve been looking for information about W.L. Gore & Associates because of a connection with Requisite Organization research. In my search, I came across an interesting discussion about management styles by instrument scientist Eric Nehrlich. He directs us to a very useful case study about Gore (which will be dealt with in a later post) but he also mentions the …
Using Technology To Network Is Not New
UPDATE 2015: Originally a quick note in September 2004, this was just a quick thought about social networks at the time. I think I was shortsighted: obviously social networking systems can be used to build social capital, too. In “INTERNETWORKING (MIT Technology Review, April 2004, pp. 44-49), Michael Fitzgerald quotes Visible Path’s Antony Brydon as saying, “Eighty to ninety percent …
Bought Jaques’s A GENERAL THEORY OF BUREAUCRACY
I got the Red Cover edition of Elliott Jaques’s book today. I could have saved some cash and ordered it from Australia, but I figured that the Friends To The North would ship more quickly. And they did: it arrive a week and a half after my ABEBooks order. I have no idea what the Red Cover edition comes from. …
Why Starbucks Will Run Our Local Coffee House Out of Business
[I’ve updated this post with 2013 December information at the bottom] Starbucks has arrived in my town and even though it is inconveniently located, it will thrive and in the end drive the old downtown coffee house out of business. Starbucks, while not necessarily making decent coffee, does do several other things right. When I lived in Chicago and worked …
Controlling for CIP in the Social Sciences
I’ve been thinking lately about the role of “time span of discretion” findings of Elliott Jaques and his colleagues in the results of social science. For example, Nancy M. Schullery reviews some of the literature about success and argumentativeness in “Argumentative Men: Expectations of Success” (The Journal of Business Communication, October 1999): Individuals with the personality predisposition of high argumentativeness …
Tata Sons Implementing Billis’s Levels
I went searching for more information about David Billis’s Worklevels. It turns out that Tata Sons, a Indian consortium of sorts of 80 companies, has implemented Billis’s worklevels in a new management system. The article is, of course, from Tata, but it covers some interesting ground on how a company would implement a SST-based organizational structure. If someone has any …