In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others. Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer: [Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of …
Recent Reading
List of what I have been reading so I can keep track. Possibly less than interesting.
Note: Basic Assumption MeNess (ba M)
Brief quotation from an 1996 article by by Lawrence, Bain, and Gould (“The Fifth Basic Assumption”, Free Associations Volume 6, Part 1 [No. 37]: 2855)
Elliott Jaques’s “Intellectual Odyssey”
Douglas Kirsner of Deakin University spoke with Elliott Jaques before he died, and wrote up the results from the perspective of another psychoanalyst. Jaques abandoned psychoanalysis but would later refer to that as perhaps going overboard. It’s an interesting read for those of you who are interested in what he thought of things at the end of his life. This …
New Church Model Isn’t: Multisite Is Regurgitation of the Model They Hated
This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy. One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s …
Accomplishment Does Not Equal Success
One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was to believe that if I had some great accomplishments that I would gain success, including things like money and community respect. This is clearly false, and I’ve recently had a series of communications with an organizational thinker that confirms it. But first let’s look at some of the …
The Powerful Are Lousy Planners
The University of Kent is reporting a forthcoming research article by social psychologists Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London on how feeling powerful affects one’s estimates. The more people felt powerful, the more optimistic their completion dates were. And it’s not just a small effect: “power drastically reduced the accuracy of forecasts with error rates soaring up …
![New York-to-Paris automobile race: [Automobile stuck in snow]](https://i0.wp.com/www.manasclerk.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/LoC-3b16110u-New-York-to-Paris-automobile-race-stuck-in-snow-c-1908-CROPa.jpg?fit=862%2C618&ssl=1)
Anchoring Means Your Low Starting Salary Gets Your Stuck In Low Paying Work
A tweet from @JaneHadfield mentioned a recent post by Cynicus Economicus, who asks “So what exactly is this optimism [about the economy] all about?” His answers are interesting, and reminded me about something I wanted to talk about here regarding jobs and the idea of anchoring. He notes that there is very little to really be happy about. Yet people are talking as if things are turning around and the risk is behind us. What’s going on?
Hidden High Potentials are “Unemployable” But He Wants Them
I’m off in the Northwest this week, working with a startup I’m helping out in Vancouver. I took the flight to Seattle and rented a car, deciding that in the end it was still a sight cheaper and I’d be able to hit both cities in one trip. We’ve decided to relocate the businesses out to this region, so I’m …
There Is No Single Best Model for Church Organization
As I continue my exploration of Christian church organization, specifically focusing on U.S. evangelicals, I need to make something clear from the outset: There is no single, perfect organizational model for all churches. You would think that this is obvious but it’s not. It’s not even obvious in business management. Elliott Jaques’s ideas of Real Boss and work levels is …