Work Naturally.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
