Judy Hobrough of BIOSS went into an organization and mapped the current capability of people with what their current roles were. She found something that surprised the CEO: there was a gold mine in their ranks!
US Air Force Feeling the Level-shift Pain In Drone Program
We’ve talked about how you can level-shift a job down — making it so that it only requires a lower level of work — can change the playing field and let you compete in what seems like a closed market. The Register, online source of all that is geeky news goodness, recently wrote about the US Air Force’s problems in handling how the Predator has changed the face of military reconnaissance flying but the Air Force can’t make the transition.
Transitions To Higher Levels Mean Having To Build New Habits, And That’s Hard
When you transition from one work level to another, you have to learn new ways of being. These will be enshrined in habit but letting go of old ways hurts.
Jaques First To Use “Culture” About Companies
Geert Hofstede, in “Culture’s Consequences”, says it plain: Elliott Jaques was the first to use “culture” in management literature.
Your Love Life and the Law of the Real Boss
Learn how your love life is influenced by the Law of the Real Boss — discovered by Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown (etc.) at Glacier Metal — and the associated corollaries. If you are on a higher trajectory than others, finding a mate will be harder.
Full Employee Participation in Policy-Making Through Representative Council (workplace democracy)
Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director and Chairman of Glacier Metal Company during Elliott Jaques’s work there, continued to believe that all employees had interest in changes to POLICY. He delimited that against the rights of managers to do their jobs within policy. What was policy was defined within the works council. Elliott Jaques abandoned this later in favor of trusting managers to represent their subordinates, in direct contradiction to his supposed value of creating systems rather than trusting people to be “good” as managers. Here’s why Brown was right and Jaques was not.
How Unionization Benefits the Firm (Wilfred Brown, retired CEO of Glacier Metal Company, speaks out)
Wilfred Brown, Managing Director and Chairman of the Board at Glacier Metal Company (where Elliott Jaques came up with Stratified Systems Theory and levels of work) supported unions at his factories. Even managers can best defend themselves “if they have properly elected representatives.” From a conversation he had with Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber in the early 1980s.
Why Being Right Is Almost Always Wrong
Hidden high potentials coming to answers before everyone makes enemies, even when it saves the day. At best you see them ignore your warning and get hurt.
Elliott Jaques on How the Workplace Influences Democracy’s Development
One of the things that impressed me about Elliott Jaques when I first read him was his stated desire to build democratic feeling within workers. It may have been the influence of Wilfred Brown at Glacier, as Brown was always interested in democracy and how to build it, leading to his great interest in workplace democracy which predated his work …
Management Accountability Hierarchy Not Always Best (Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization)
Recently, a post from Tom Foster made me want to clarify something: The Management Accountability Hierachies described by Elliott Jaques are not always the most effective form of organization. Foster answers a question about the employees of a volunteer outreach center. He clearly believes that it requires a management accountability hierarchy (where there are clear lines of accountability and Real …