Blanton et al. did a small study in one metropolitan area of IT professionals, measuring variables that the earlier literature on professional obsolescence and how they interact with these IT pros keeping up (professional development to avoid obsolescence).
Hierarchy versus Emergence in Organizations
Hierarchies are emergent phenomena. One of the things that has bothered me with the several “postmodern” discussions about organizational life has been the disregard for hierarchies often expressed by them. Flat oranizations are superior to hierarchical ones, they say, because inforrmation and knowledge flows more freely between equals. I agree that information and knowledge flows better between equals but I …
You Need All Levels of People For Success
People who can see the whole complexity of the project “need to be paired with people that can deal with the details at other levels,” says Jack Vinson. Absolutely. Looking back on what I have written, I haven’t made that entirely clear. Everyone is important and necessary for the group to succeed. We need each other, each of us working …
Simplifying Project Costing & Staffing with Requisite Organization’s Time Span of Discretion
I don’t think that I am going out on a limb when I say that short time horizons of project managers, sponsors and planners is the leading cause to the disastrous failure rate of IT projects… As Michelle says, “you want a consultant whose current capability at least equals that called for by the entire project, not just the time span of the planning phase.””
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, …
On Elliott Jaques’s Detractors
Have the detractors of Elliott Jaques ever bothered to read his work on Requisite Organization and Stratified Systems Theory (SST) before they condemned it?
It All Comes Together
Mètis — “practical intelligence, using conjectural and oblique knowledge, which anticipates, modifies and influences the fate of events in adversity and ambiguity” according to Baumbard — has reminded me of something that I read some time back. This led me to see some connections between knowledge management, Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization and wisdom. (And thanks to jmmj for conversation on …
Elliott Jaques on Complexity, Simplicity and How It Won’t Get Easier
We’re not happy in positions that we don’t have the ability to do nor are we successful.