Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Wilfred Brown”
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.
Lord Acton described how leadership changed over time, and explains despotism pretty well. It applies to corporations.
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.
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.
The GO Society has quietly put up the Exploration in Management training films. These films, produced for the Glacier Institute of Management and narrated by Lord Wilfred Brown, the retired Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company and Prochancellor of Brunel University, show how the radical ideas Brown developed with Dr. Jaques work from a manager’s point of view. I’m glad …
I’ve been talking about how Wilfred Brown, management (heck, all-round) genius, made this series of films in the 1970s. Here’s an excerpt I pulled from the first film. This gives you a flavor of the series. The information is fascinating, especially when you know that Brown actually implemented these ideas at Glacier Metal Company.
Plus you get to hear Mr. Brown say “hear-ar-ky”.
Not the famous tenor but the Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company. I noticed that there wasn’t one up there, so I added one. I need to set up a disambiguation page to separate out the two Wilfred Browns. (Actually, there are several famous WBs in the late twentieth century.) It’s odd that the entry for Elliott Jaques had no …
Alistair Mant, Chairman, Socio-technical Study Group, spoke at the 2005 GO Society Conference in Toronto about his experiences and work with Wilfred Brown, the chairman of Glacier Metal Company, where the ideas about work levels were originally worked out. Mant makes the point that well before Dr. Jaques and his Tavistock colleagues came onto the scene, Brown was working to …
Lots of people these days have a problem with work hierarchies, and with good reason. Their experience of them is that bosses micro-manage or change the rules to suit themselves. They take over as much of your life as they can, and have no loyalty to anyone but themselves. Sadly, this is indeed the case in many situations. But that’s …
(The next post today will address the Underachieve issue directly. This one describes why Wilfred Brown is important to listen to. We’ll refer to these things later.) As Paul Holstrom pointed out, my telling of the story about the Glacier guys coming up with Timespan was a bit off. They had been having a pint and were talking about the …
