I don’t think that Elliott Jaques was right about high moders’ distribution in society. They certainly seem much more prevalent than his published numbers. If I know a handful of mode 7s and 8s, then they can’t be all that rare: I don’t get around that much. I think the issue comes in where they work. High moders are prevalent in IT because the field is so poorly managed. High capacity people can continue to work as technical experts, even though they don’t get paid well. It’s odd how many times I’ve seen a Str4 or 5 person working for a Str2 manager.
Global Organization Design Conference 2007: highly recommened
The bi-annual Global Organization Design Conference is coming up in Toronto, July 16-19. Subtitled “Designing Organizations for Value-Creation, Sustainability, and Social Well-Being”, the conference proved to be of value to me two years ago. The bullshit level is amazingly low for conference. People are there who are using the theory in their own organizations, from large multinationals to entrepreneurial operations …
Luc Hoebeke on the IT’s Tower of Babel
It’s interesting to consider that most people will interpret my title as being the mishmash of too many languages spoken in IT. Actually, that’s not the point of the story: Babel was disrupted because they all spoke one language. It’s in part a warning about the futility of single, monolithic human solutions. Hoebeke, in “Against Scarcity in Science and Knowlege …
Your Idea “Craves Light, Likes Crowds, Thrives on Crossbreeding, Grows Better For Being Stepped On” (LeGuin)
Ursula K. LeGuin, the noted science fiction author, uses her stories to talk about issues of the day. What’s interesting is when she throws out a side comment that is loaded with great stuff. In The Dispossessed (1974), LeGuin talks about why people need to be colocated to spur cross-disciplinary “open source” conversations that drive innovation: It was a revelation, …
Managing a Church of High-Moders
One of the guys I interviewed for my CIP training class with PeopleFit was a local Christian Reformed pastor, whom I had hoped would give me an example of Stratum 3. Instead, he gave me what seemed clearly Stratum 5. An example: ME: [REV], I’d love to hear what you think is the most critical issue facing y’all today. REV: …
Is Emotional Intelligence a Bankrupt Concept?
In a recent comment to a Jim Heskett post on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge blog (“Neuro Economics: Science or Science Fiction?“), Dick Meza of Chapman University College said: Emotional Intelligence in the past few years has had to suffer through similar scrutiny like “The Fadification of Emotional Intelligence” or “Business Susceptibility to Consulting Fads: The Case of EI.” Both …
“It is often not the job that burns you out, but the organization.”
InformIT has an interesting article on recent research out of Wharton by Sigal Barsade and Lakshmi Ramarajan (“More than Job Demands or Personality, Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout” Dec 8, 2006). Barsade and Ramarajan were especially interested in health care because many of the lower-level jobs in that industry tend to be difficult, and because a lot of …
High-Moders and Hierachies
Although I’ve been called away these past few weeks with a family emergency, I’ve been thinking about the points that Christine Baker of Requisite Development raises in her recent comments on “Writing a Level-3 CV” on the careers of high-moders. She points out that options today are greater for them than in the past: There is another point to make …
Power of Intrinsic Motivation
It’s the problem that management wants HR to solve: how do we get these people motivated to do what we want them to do. Even then I knew the answer: the only way to make someone do something that they don’t want to do is to coerce them. You make the reason for them doing it outside them.
There are other ways, of course, but they mean reframing the problem to be sensical to the person. And you have to give them a voice in their own life. Otherwise, you end up with non-motivated workers.