Work Naturally.
Some time ago, I was complaining to my own executive coach about how I wasn’t getting rich when he leaned in, looked me straight in the eye, and shot the truth right to the heart of it all: “Maybe you’re not getting all that because you don’t want it” “You’re a smart guy,” he said. “If you wanted to be …
Here’s part two of my interview with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian management thinker and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioners Guide. Hoebeke (pronounced, more or less, “HOO-bay-kuh”) is a RO-heretic: he likes General Theory of Bureaucracy and the original work, but thinks pretty poorly of Requisite Organization. See Part 1 for his particular departures.
(This is a reply to Marcy’s last comment that got out of hand. I guess I’m working through some of these ideas in the non-work environment.) Marcy, I never delete anything unless it’s known spam or using some really abusive language. (I did take down my most popular post because it was attracting too much foul language; and I have …
A colleague sent an announcement for the Oliver Wyman Journal. They had an article on succession planning (“Bench Strength: How are you developing your highpotential leaders?” by Steve Krupp) that had some interesting thoughts on the problem. The CEO must own and sponsor the process. No major initiative within an organization will succeed unless the CEO champions the efforts…. General …
Looking at Marcy’s comment on my last post (Is Your Giftedness Making You Sick?, I admit that what I wrote is almost unreadable. But I’m trying to say something big without having to get into all the ins and outs that I talk about for work. The point is that if you are what I call in one of the …
“Marcy” recently wrote about looking for a new psychotherapist in Northern Indiana, and talked about some judgments that she had about some of her previous therapists who didn’t fit with her. One of Marcy’s old therapists, with whom she did good work, wrote a book with the late Warren Rule, an Adlerian who for years was at Virginia Commonwealth; this …
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 …
The last time I made a pass at the forthcoming book on how to get your career out of its rut, I took a part-time (36 hr/wk) job at a US retailer of consumer electronics. I learned a great deal there about theft and sales, but I also noticed something strange: no one ever minded when I bought them coffee. …
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 …
As I continue to attempt to understand the history of the Glacier Project, I’ve been reading about Wilfred Brown’s work in there political sphere to gain some of this. Because he was a socialist and socialism dominated the political landscape of the UK during this time, it is probably hard to separate out. Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson mention Wilfred …
