by Michael Baranovsky (GDL 1.2) Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where it seemed like the jackals were circling one of their own injured? I was sitting in a meeting with the department heads of an IT outsource account in Chicago. We had just finished listening to a dry run of some help desk training. It hadn’t …
Where to Read More About “Work Levels” (and How They Affect You!)
You may have been sitting there, listening to me prattle on and on about this Work Levels -slash- Levels of Work -slash- Requisite Organization -slash- Real Boss -slash- whatever and have gotten to the point where your eyes are getting glazy or, more likely, they’re starting to glance about for someone else to talk to. You think they might be …
Luc Hoebeke on Koldo Saratxaga, IRIZAR and Pride in Your Work
A little teaser for the forthcoming Part 2 of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian organizational expert and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioner’s Guide. In this 30-second excerpt, Hoebeke talks about the most important thing Koldo Saratxaga did to help IRIZAR create a high-performance, team-focused work culture. If you’re not Spanish or Basque, you probably have …
ANN: Now read us on your iPhone & Blackberry, too!
I’ve implemented a little addon that will let you read Requisite Writing on your iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device. I’ve been delighted by how it works on my Blackberry Curve. If you have an iPhone, would you consider testing out this page’s permalink and leave a comment below? The addon is “WordPress PDA & iPhone Plugin” by Imthiaz Rafiq, …
Working Where You Don’t Fit Can Make You Sick
Let’s return to something Mary wrote in a comment about my post, “Knowing Who You Are Can Get You Out of Underachievement“: When I read “Underachievers, Are You Simply Out of Flow” and then Andrew Olivier’s “Our Working Journey and Stress”, I could hardly believe my eyes. I diagnosed myself immediately. I have been on 2 sick leaves, the last …
“What’s With This ‘Coding’?” A bit of personal manifesto
One of the problems with having grown a blog out of one’s own thoughts (and conversations with friends) is that the early stuff always looks a little questionable. Last time, I linked to a post from 2004 October in which I used some of the technical language about the Capability of Information Processing coding. The language rightly raised some eyebrows. …
You Can’t Move Forward In Your Career Until First You Leave
You complain about being stuck where you are, thinking it can somehow work out. To find right-fitting work, Hidden High Potentials have to move forward and leave their past behind. A quick comment from Wilfred Brown, at the time retired both CEO of Glacier Metal Company and Minister of State at the Board of Trade (UK), makes the point that …
How Ed Went from $35k to $115k in an Afternoon
Four years ago, I posted about the difference between Closed-Sector and Open-Sector careers. It’s worth looking at again, because your choice of career will affect the choices that you have. A brief excerpt: If your first appointment in a Closed-Sector Career matters, it may be used as a proxy for capability. I may assume that you are low-capability because you …
Retraining Mainframers to Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
I’m going through my old email archives, and discovered a note from a project I ran to help a very large US property & casualty insurer to better retool their mainframe-oriented programmers (procedural using COBOL) to client-server paradigms (mostly Object-Oriented Programming using Java). It was an interesting project because the dirty secret was that some people were better than others. …
What You Might Do vs. What You Can Do
I have been muddying up the difference between what you can now do and what you could do now, say with the right training; between the size of your capability bucket and how much is in it. One is current capability while the latter is your current capacity. Glenn Mehltretter of PeopleFit reminded me in a comment he left on …