It seems that I’ve done something here to upset Google. Back when I started writing about Dr. Elliott Jaques, my blog was #3 when you searched for “elliott jaques”, right after his own Requisite Organization and Art Kleiner’s excellent introductory article on the man and his stratified systems theory. Now it’s #76. It’s clear that somehow I’ve done something wrong, …
Podcast update: Jack Fallow interview
The Manasclerk Company, along with the Secret Rules of Career Success, is adding a podcast called “The Killer App”. Yesterday I added an interview with Jack Fallow. Jack was founder Chairman of GasForce, a company created when its employees bought out the group from British Gas. Yes, an employee-owned company that followed the Glacier Metal Company model.
Mine Your Ranks to Find Gold: Finding Untapped Potential in Your Company with SST
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.
How Do You Know What You Can Do If There’s No One Modeling It?
Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, says “We don’t even know what we want to do with our lives  until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing.” Hidden high potentials often never get a model like this. What should they then do?
Bonuses Backfire by Reducing Long-term Employee Performance
New research shows that bonuses backfire on companies, even blocking common sense. A summary.
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.
Elliott Jaques on the Problems of Church Organization
Many of the work-levels people have worked with churches on their organizational issues. This includes the Church of England and the Illinois association of American Baptist churches. (Anyone know of more?) Let’s take a look at what some of them have said. Elliott Jaques, who coined the term “mid-life crisis” and was an accomplished psychoanalyst in addition to be a …