People who can see the whole complexity of the project “need to be paired with people that can deal with the details at other levels,” says Jack Vinson. Absolutely. Looking back on what I have written, I haven’t made that entirely clear. Everyone is important and necessary for the group to succeed. We need each other, each of us working …
How do I consult to a non-Requisite Organization, one whose very organizational structure means that they will not succeed at this change? I can’t in good conscience tell them that whatever I suggest will have much of an effect on their performance as a group.
I don’t think that I am going out on a limb when I say that short time horizons of project managers, sponsors and planners is the leading cause to the disastrous failure rate of IT projects… As Michelle says, “you want a consultant whose current capability at least equals that called for by the entire project, not just the time span of the planning phase.””
The issue of how to price consulting services perennially agitates IT consulting companies. The issue of market price never quite seems to fulfill the need: what a client will bear is often as close to free as they can get. All too often, customers get shafted with a too-high price for twenty-somethings but can’t see the value of the older, …
Have the detractors of Elliott Jaques ever bothered to read his work on Requisite Organization and Stratified Systems Theory (SST) before they condemned it?
For example, beer was originally taxed in 1951 at US$9.00/barrel and was taxed at US$18.00/barrel in 1999 (federal taxes only). If the US Congress had written an inflation-adjusted tax, it should have been US$55.88/barrel in 1999.
More on Martin Seligman’s What You Can Change and What You Can’t: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement : Depressives are incredibly realistic. I mean incredibly realistic. In turns out that a realistic understanding of one’s skills and chances codes incredibly well with either having depression or future depression. HBR had an article on this last year by Dan Lovallo …
I went to the library here in town, which has a great selection of business books, to start some reading I needed to do on Chris Argyris’s action science. A reviewer on Amazon suggested a book by Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism, as the second book in a learning series. When I looked online before I left the house, the local …
Not every posting is equivalent to build great managers. That’s pretty clear to even the densest of us (me). What’s not is which of the quality postings will produce better learning than others. Morgan W. McCall, in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job (1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:
There were lots of more interesting and much more robust systems that provided better access to knowledge. But they didn’t have Berners-Lee and his peculiar mix of vision and practicality. That mix was uncommon, and for innovators to be successful with bringing technology to change the world, they have to believe that they work for a greater good.
