Traffic signal at Tamil Nadu. (c) 2011 Thamizhpparithi Maari (CC BY SA 3.0)

Integrity Will Get You Promoted, But Limited Vision Will Get You Fired

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Elliott Jaques talks about time span of discretion — the time from a decision to when that work decision comes due — as a way to measure how “big” a role is. This is related to your personal time horizon, how far you can think into the future to handle uncertainty and complexity. Lots of people disagree with it. What’s …

The Power of SAP To Control Your Business

Forrest ChristianReviews - Articles, Strategy 1 Comment

That’s not you controlling your business through SAP but SAP running you. From Ron May’s excellent email newsletter, The May Report, of 2006-Jan-17: The best interview I conducted was with a guy from Kellogg who explained how Kellogg was somewhat boxed into the decision to go with SAP because Keebler already had it and they had just bought Keebler, so …

Karen Stephenson and How Networks Interweave with Hierarchies

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HR.com recently had an interview with Karen Stephenson, the professorial founder of NetForm and the leading thinker in social network analysis. Dr. Stephenson notoriously doesn’t publish anything, preferring to patent her ideas. I think that she has combined hierarchy and social network into something more powerful. Jaques & Co. always needed something to counterbalance the top-down mentality and social network …

What is a Team?

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HR.com’s recent interview with Jon R. Katzenbach piqued my interest. Katzenbach wrote The Wisdom of Teams, among others. He was probably interviewed to shill his new book, but the idea of teams is one that intriguing. Do teams work? is really my question. Katzenbach admits that the team approach to work is tricky in implmentation: What we have learned since …

Wolfowitz on Decision-Making

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In this summer’s Atlanitc has an article describing a series of interviews that Mark Bowden held with Paul Wolfowitz from September 2004 to April 2005, before the American deputy secretary of defense took his new job heading the World Bank. Wolfowitz is a fascinating thinker, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics of conservative realism. For the …

Thomas Friedman’s Flat World

Forrest ChristianOutsourcing, Reviews - Articles 2 Comments

There are two recent articles by Thomas Friedman, who did the recent PBS series on outsourcing to India. He’s also written a book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which is due out soon. Friedman’s article in the New York Times Magazine (It’s a Flat World After All”) is interesting. The article has been archived …

India and China in pact

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J sent me this article on the improving relations between China and India. When I went to the colloquiom on leading multi-cultural change (new associate coming out of that; stay tuned for an announcement here), I heard an earful on this from the Indians present. India needs stable relations with China simply because of proximity. The fact that the United …

Rugby Union players from Charters Towers (1904). Via Queensland State Library, collection.

Notes on W.L. Gore & Associates

Forrest ChristianManaging, Reviews - Articles

Yes, there is a point to all of this. The key article is the business case study from Huizenga Business School at Nova Southeastern. Very handy. W.L. Gore & Associates is the fave of most postmodern organizational theorists, who see the company’s lack of official hierarchy as the true networked organization. I believe that Gore has a great culture, but …