Work Naturally.
The levels of work from Requisite Organization / the Glacier Management Method / Stratified Systems Theory are routinely dismissed out of hand, almost without review. It’s an instinctive rejection rather than rational at any level. What drives this? While doing some research, I came upon Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. In it, Pinker describes …
I should change to a managed server. The new upgrade has broken things again (for example, Al Gorman is now the author of everything) and I’ll have to figure things out. It may be that my provider is automatically handling updates, which breaks my site. Anyway, enjoy the retro look for a few days until I get back and fix …
There seems to be an attitude in most of the innovation & creativity discussions that innovation is always good. At least the shareholders, management, employees and others may not want the innovation that results. Remember that unions were innovations. Also, within cultures innovation is rarely welcome. Al-Qaeda is an innovative organizational form and many of their attacks have been extremely …
vOne of the things that always seesms to surprise people who do organizational change projects (and pretty much all IT projects are organizational change projects) is that it takes longer to change things than you thought it would. While you are waiting for things to settle down, you can’t walk away or everything that you brought to them walks out …
I’ve joined a new company run by Warren Kinston to bring his voluminous set intellectual tools to a broader audience. We had been talking since the end of the Toronto conference and decided that it was a good time to pull the trigger on the startup. For a good idea of what we will be bringing out (in a more …
Besides a new appointment at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, I’ve been busy trying to get my mind wrapped around Warren Kinston’s materials. And parent a colicky baby, of course. Current reading list (for my tracking purposes): Warren Kinson, 1994. Strengthening the Management Culture (available as a PDF download from the GO Society). The Sigma Centre, London. …
What is important to recognize now is why success, such as that achieved at Southwest, can be sustained and can not readily be imitated by competitors. There are two fundamental reasons. First, the success that comes from managing people effectively is often not as visible or transparent as to its source…. Even when they are described…, they are difficult to …
Besides this blog, the GO Society also has an RSS feed that you may want to catch. I’ve somehow not found the twenty seconds it took to put it into my Google Reader aggregator. Gillian Stamp also has some good stuff at her relatively new site. Another worthwhile feed. Anyone know of any others?
In a recent flurry of emails about something else with a variety of folks, Jack Fallow discussed why he thought that the executive levels were called a “collegium” by Elliott Jaques. Fallow, who was CEO of GasWorks in the UK, believes that the nature of the work at level 5+ meant that you couldn’t have the same QQT/R management style …
Another in my belated series of summaries of the GO Society conference in Toronto, Ontario. There was a special plenary-style session on “Ethics and RO” after dinner Tuesday night. It was an interesting discussion, partly because there were definitely different value sets in the audience. If it got recorded, I doubt that it would be useful: there was a lot …
