Work Naturally.
David Wastell, who was Senior Lecturer in information systems at University of Manchester, points out that information systems development (ISD) projects are learning endeavors, a movement from one state to another. This learning therefore creates organizational anxiety. He says that models and other IT project deliverables can function as emotional transitional space, using the Tavistock use of the term. ISD …
You would think that when you install a successful total quality management (TQM) program, you would see some great side-effects going throughout the organization. But that’s not always true. Installing any new system is tricky and sometimes doing something “good” leads to performance problems.
If you missed on of Jack Fallows’s presentations at the GO Society conference last August, you will be pleased to hear that he will be publishing a portion of his work as a chapter in the new book coming out this fall from that group. It won’t have his spiffy Flash animations to illustrate his points (very spiffy, IMO) but …
A second kind of evidence to suggest that the evolving success of the system has a powerful developmental effect on the leadership comes from the way members of high-performing systems talk about the early formative period of the system. There are consistent statements such as, “We had no idea things would turn out like this”; “In the early years, we …
Elliott Jaques talks about time span of discretion — the time from a decision to when that work decision comes due — as a way to measure how “big” a role is. This is related to your personal time horizon, how far you can think into the future to handle uncertainty and complexity. Lots of people disagree with it. What’s …
Just to let y’all know: the GO Society has finally put up the books by Wilfred Lord Brown, Minister of Health and CEO of Glacier Metals. Lord Brown had a different take on the work that Jaques did for him, and it’s interesting to read an owner’s accounts of how to run a business. The books now online include some …
What’s wrong with RadioShack? I asked my middle-schoolers on Sunday what they thought about RadioShack. Josh, one of my gadget-happy boys, seem to understand what RadioShack executives don’t. “RadioShack isn’t about anything,” he said. “I mean, are they a cellphone company? Parts? You just don’t know what they’re about. They never have anything you want, either. “And,” he added, “the …
For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he would get so lost in his own equations that he would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves. According to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, he wasn’t …
I was looking up something else (the use of books of hours in medieval church practice, to be honest) and somehow came across Bennis’s description of the “requisite” organization from the mid-1980s. I wondered if the term, which seemed to match Dr. Jaques’s use, was his own or something borrowed. Turns out it’s borrowed (see the quotation below). But I …
Let’s take a look at something I wrote awhile back while we wait for Al to come back on! A recent post by Michael Bates, the Tulsa-based urban planning, on the work of Jane Jacobs had me searching for an old post of my own Malcolm Gladwell’s article discussing how companies are trying to look like Jacobs’s description of Greenwich …
