HR.com recently had an interview with Karen Stephenson, the professorial founder of NetForm and the leading thinker in social network analysis. Dr. Stephenson notoriously doesn’t publish anything, preferring to patent her ideas. I think that she has combined hierarchy and social network into something more powerful. Jaques & Co. always needed something to counterbalance the top-down mentality and social network …
What is a Team?
HR.com’s recent interview with Jon R. Katzenbach piqued my interest. Katzenbach wrote The Wisdom of Teams, among others. He was probably interviewed to shill his new book, but the idea of teams is one that intriguing. Do teams work? is really my question. Katzenbach admits that the team approach to work is tricky in implmentation: What we have learned since …
Wolfowitz on Decision-Making
In this summer’s Atlanitc has an article describing a series of interviews that Mark Bowden held with Paul Wolfowitz from September 2004 to April 2005, before the American deputy secretary of defense took his new job heading the World Bank. Wolfowitz is a fascinating thinker, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics of conservative realism. For the …
Replacing Management With Project Management Is Disastrous
CIO (Australia) Magazine had an interesting article last month by Sue Bushell on Information Technology (IT) organizations and their spectacular failure to the business [“Just Deserts”, 2005 May 5]. Bushell quoted Kathryn Cason of Requisite Organization International Institute on the problems of IT being caused by the organizational structure itself: The fact that IT has primarily been pushed into a …
Coordinating Work Is Harder Than The Tasks Themselves
This complexity level of the real business, the coordination of other people’s efforts, is the essence of management.
Cognitive Dissonance & Change
I recently completed the following article that defines the concepts of dissonance and consonance and their significance in the process of change. Cognitive Dissonance Theory for Inspiring Social Change
Retraining Mainframe COBOL Programmers to Object-Oriented Java Programming, via Requisite Organization
A few weeks ago, I talked about the basics of Requisite software developmen and organizational design affects the quality of software projects. Today, I will continue that, answering Paul’s questions about retoolling a mainframe shop to object-oriented programming (OOP). Computer solution groups within companies have different names, often from when they started. Management Information Systems (MIS) and Data Processing Center …
Mastering the new, letting go of the old
Enclosed is another article published (and reproduced with their consent) by the folks at Core International. This creation is from Ginty Burns and Rich Morgan, two of Core’s talented consultants specializing in Requisite Organization and Stratified Systems Theory. You can visit Core at their website www.coreinternational.com Here’s the article.
Effective Listening for Leaders and for Life
Do we really listen? How are effective, or ineffective, listening skills affecting your organization, the people who are employed by the organization and the results they deliver? Expanded further how are your listening skills affecting your life? Let’s start with the premise that we really don’t listen at all. Or, as a minimum at best we listen to what we …
Added Galli’s Advance Cache for WordPress
For those who are interested, we have added the Advanced WordPress Cache from Richard Galli. This should increase the speed of this part of the our site. Please let me know if there are any problems resulting from this.