Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Organizations”
As Mark Nichols describes in “Flat Will Kill You, Eventually: Why Every Company Needs Structure“, flat seems like such a great idea when we start out. It works so well and things go so smoothly. Then everything slides downhill on a runaway shopping cart into hell of recrimination, anger and mistrust. What in the world just happened? Why did the …
Most executives that implement a PeopleSoft or SAP are surprised that productivity takes such a dive in the departments that these systems were supposed to automate. Departments that are dependent on the data see some productivity increase as information becomes more available, but many tasks that used to take a moment (or could, if you were pal-ly with the clerks) …
Behavior is as much defined and limited by the role that a work inhabits as his personality and the quality of his relationships within the company. Lord Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company for decades and a major management thinker in his own right, was insistent on this point. You can even take this farther than he …
There’s a fascinating paper at the IMF by social capital guru Francis Fukuyama (Social Capital and Civil Society – Prepared for delivery at the IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms) that covers his reasoning behind social capital being called “capital” at all. Besides being interested in how to create societies, I’ve always found him a lucid writer who discusses a …
I recently tweeted that “As long as you advocate leaderless groups, the power-hungry will control you. The answer is more complex.” Asked to provide some more, I figured I’d do it here since it ties into some of the workplace stuff we’ve been talking about (from when Wilfred Brown was MD/CEO of Glacier) and the new model of Evangelical church …
This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy. One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s …
![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)
I’ve been reading Jim McCarthy’s materials lately. He used to be in charge of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft. His work there was nothing short of phenomenal: MS-VC++ came out of nowhere and demolished its long-time rival. Sure, MS has scads of cash but that wasn’t the whole picture. Borland went from 85% marketshare to nothing in a very …
Wilfred Brown (along with Elliott Jaques, to a lesser extent) understood what Lord Acton understood about power. They created a constitutional system of rights at Glacier Metal. Here’s why it’s important.
“Can Entrepreneurs Save Newspapers?” Dunno. But you might. Newspapers are dying. Which means that it’s a great time for a hidden high potential to get into the News business with a completely different model. Crains Chicago has video on some new ideas coming out in town (that’s Chicago) to solve the newspaper problem. Both the Tribune and Sun-Times parent companies …
Maybe it’s obvious, but humans built organizations because they helped them achieve things. Networks are nice, and very useful, but the Organization (which is a subtype of network) works in more specific ways. Daniel H. Burnham, the famous Chicago architect, felt something of this. Donald L. Miller, in City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of …
