Some more from the email wasteland. I have a habit of emailing myself stuff when I’m researching on a machine not my own, so that I can have it. I have no idea where this is from, really. It must have been hardcopy research rather than online. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll find it. Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Sutton, Robert I. …
McKinsey interview with Ratan Tata of Tata Group
Tata Consultancy just won the Chrysler IT contract, worth billions. It’s probably a good time to look again at McKinsey Quarterly’s interview with Ratan Tata from 2005. The Indian mega-corporations have some different ways of thinking than their US competitors, holding values that oddly sound more democratic. Well, India is the world’s largest democracy with a robust (and admittedly sometimes …
Upgrade No-Joy: Articles Are Gone
Figures. If you are reading the feed, you can’t see anything. Will work it out.
New Upgrade, Different Look
I’ll work this out sooner or later, but I haven’t gotten around to it. (When I was a kid, my mom gave me a wooden coin labeled “toit” just so that I, in her words, “got a round toit.”) Anyway, this is now black and white for no good reason.
“Compensation plans should look more like royalty streams”
From “The Wrong Incentive” by Roger Martin, Baron’s, Dec 23, 2003: How, then, should incentive compensation be structured? It should be based exclusively on features of the real market — sales, costs, investments, margins, profits. These are items over which management and employees have some control and their actions can be directly linked to such items. Compensation plans should look …
Why the Big Baboon Doesn’t Always Win
Neurologist Robert Sapolsky is an interesting character. The Edge has an interesting piece by him, which seems to be fairly stream of consciousness. Sapolsky, of couse, has done some fascinating field research on baboons and lab research into the inner workings of the brain, and a little of both all the time. In the Edge pice, Sapolsky writes about what …
What Makes a Good Ontology
Since we’ve been talking about naming, and Glenn Mehltretter posted such a great example in his comment, it’s a good time to consider Ontologies. Since Kinston’s Taxonomy is what the knowledge management people would call an ontology, I’ve been looking at them. Barry Smith of the Basic Formal Ontology project at Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) …
Business Writing Speaks Truth, Albeit Unintentionally
While sorting through my notes, I came upon the following, which was published by some self-important systems architects at a major financial institution. They were later all “made redundant”, poor sots. But perhaps their habit of writing without ever saying anything (see previous post) didn’t help their company succeed. The Detail Recommendation List is a collection of recommendations that have …
On Naming: It’s For Survival
Warren talks a lot about the power of naming, that until you get the all the names right in a particular framework of the Taxonomy, the whole thing seems wrong somehow. He’s not the only one to recognize the power of naming, of course. The Bible’s Adam starts naming things almost immediately, and it’s important enough that it is about …
Why Work Levels Are Rejected: Others Are Selfish Fallacy
While reading the excellent and highly recommended book by Heath & Heath, Made to Stick, I came upon this passage about Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs: Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to employees: Think of what that $1,000 means: a down …