Some notes from Living In The Labyrinth of Technology by Willem H. Vanderburg. (University of Toronto Press, 2005). Citing Galbraith’s earlier work, to argue for Ellul’s rise of technique. The argument is that the corporation has to create a technostructure, a group of committees of technical expertise, because the endeavour is so complex that no one person understands it. The …
The Power of SAP To Control Your Business
That’s not you controlling your business through SAP but SAP running you. From Ron May’s excellent email newsletter, The May Report, of 2006-Jan-17: The best interview I conducted was with a guy from Kellogg who explained how Kellogg was somewhat boxed into the decision to go with SAP because Keebler already had it and they had just bought Keebler, so …
Change your motivation? Change your interpretation!
Amazon’s self-help categories are filled with books by so-called experts who tell you that what you really need to correct this or that deficiency is to change. You need to become motivated by these things, they tell you. Before you spend years trying to follow this wretched advice, here’s a hard learned lesson and I’m giving it to you for …
Why the ‘Who’ in meetings matters: A Requisite Organization approach
What happens when people in a meeting are different stratum (per Elliott Jaques’s requisite organization theory), knowing each other well enough to have some experience of each other’s capacity? Who leads? If certain people talk, does the conversation die? Does the meeting have to be facilitated by the highest stratum person? Will it be regardless, at least effectively? This got …
How To Judge a CEO’s Capacity to Do That Job
You can get a pretty good idea of how risky a CEO’s tenure will be to overall shareholder value by looking at interviews he or she gave before taking on that top job, and assessing these via Elliott Jaques’s “complexity of information processing” (CIP) method. This often gives you some really good data. I’ve decided to start measuring the interviews …
Measuring CEOs’ Capacity for Information Complexity (Requisite Organization)
I’m announcing my intention to code the interview Charlie Rose did with Lee Raymond, outgoing CEO of ExxonMobil. Raymond is a remarkable thinker and I believe illustrates strong high-mode characteristics in this interview. What caught my attention was his use of the timespans. He mentioned research that Exxon did into alternative fuels back in the early 1980s. Rose considered that …
Using Mobile Phone Numbers For ID
In an attempt to thwart spammers, Google Mail has started using mobile phone numbers to provide customers with gmail invitations. This is an interesting development, one that has been predicted for at least since the miniaturizaion of mobile telephones. With number portability in the United States, this finally becomes a possibility for many corporations. Mobile numbers stay with you. Although …
Jaques’s Null Hypothesis
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the null hypothesis for RO. There would have to be one that’s pretty clearly testable. Some thoughts: A StrX person can create a StrX+1 organization. This is a weird one that you just won’t test, since why would you try something that you think will fail? Maybe a historical analysis. …
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Requisite Organization Case Study: Sustained Double-Digit Growth At Specialty Chemicals Co.
When Tony Stark took Specialty Chemicals – a division of Conglomerate, Inc. – the group had had 0.2% growth over the last seven years. So how did it turn into sustained double-digit growth the year after he arrived?
“Low-Hanging” Means “Pick Last”
It’s odd that an agricultural phrase (“low-hanging fruit”) came into business usage. Most of our business metaphors come from the military. It’s not a good fit. Agriculture would be, I’d reckon. From what I know from talking to successful farmers and gardeners, it’s a hard life full of risk. You have weather, sure, but you also have changes from plot to plot. You don’t just have to worry about which landrace will work on your soil but which will work best when it’s wet in the spring, dry in the summer and wet at harvest. All rice are not the same. You must predict the unpredictable (weather), rally forces to react to outside actions (war, markets, catastrophic atmospheric events), create adequate reserves while not having so much that they go to waste. Most of the time, there aren’t known good decisions. You have to make decisions in uncertainty, relying on the wisdom of the past and your own experience. Even non-modern farming has these issues.