In the last post on implementation, APFG commented that the middle layer in the company is where you have most of the problems. Since almost everyone says this, let’s take a look at why. Let’s admit that it is not always true: the middle layer in a company isn’t always the source of the problems. There are often people at …
Why We Over-Estimate In Evaluations
While at the PeopleFit “Assessing Raw Talent” class this last week, I heard that it is common for people to overestimate the CIP (Elliott Jaques’s idea of Complexity of Information Processing) of persons who have a lower CIP and to underestimate their subordinates who have a higher CIP than they do. I figured that they were simply a 2002 article …
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 …
Organizations are the ultimate cross-functional team
From Brown and Duguid’s The Social Life of Information Well, duh. Wish I had thought of that. The current cry for “cross-functional teams” results from the inability of the organization to manage its divisions. The local divisions will occur in any group that gets larger than about 12. Put fifty people in a church even and you will get a …
“Incentive Systems Promote Corporate Corruption”: Guest article by Al Gorman
Al Gorman has sent me an article that explains in more depth some of the points about incentive systems that he has made on this site. He’s volunteered to have it posted here, so I’ve converted it to PDF for easy, non-threatening viewing enjoyment. It’s interesting that he and Harald Solaas make such similar points. I think that Solaas says …
Management and Practice: You need both
Every Best Practice becomes a Worst Practice when you have the wrong people in the wrong places.
Using Time Span of Discretion to Price Consulting Services?
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, …
Jaques and Clement on Leadership and Subordinate Behaviours
In their book, Executive Leadership, Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement make the point that almost any personality type can be an effective manager — role that contains leadership. (They go to lengths to make it clear that leadership does not exist outside of a particular role performance.) These personality quirks are irrelevant until they become disruptive to the organization or …
Does Fear Belong in the Workplace?
The point is not to reduce fear but to increase hope.