From Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, an interestingly balanced if slightly dull biography of the General who became President of the American States. The unthinkable had become thinkable. The South, unable to manage either transition to a postslavery economy or irrevocable economic decline, was now talking only to itself as it sought to defend the indefensible, slavery, and deny …
Marcel on Communities of Practice in 1952
I’ve been reading Thomas Fleming’s extended essay on the requirements of morality and why provincialism should trump any call to universalism (“Save my family” trumps “Save the world”), The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition. It’s an interesting read. I’ll review it when I’m done. He quotes Gabriel Marcel, from Man Against Mass Society …
Knowledge and Abstraction
I’ve been reading KM articles and discussions lately. Again. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of the problem of different levels of abstraction. Just because I’m in Software Development doesn’t mean that I want the same level of detail as the guy down the hall. I tend towards big picture thinking, wanting to see the details of the program, …
Communities of Practice as the Basis of Silos
I am simply trying to get this down. Communities of practice, left unmolested in a small organization, formalized and evolved (i.e., changed into the new form of) the functional silo. That’s why getting rid of the functional silo is so difficult: they keep on coming back. Walk with me on this one. When a company is small, below the magical …
Implementation for BIG
Let’s play “Let’s Pretend”! Or, if you want to be more grown-up, let’s follow Einstein’s lead and perform a “thought experiment” using a set of hypothetical situations, following a set of changes through to the end. Big Insurance Group (BIG) is a horribly non-requisite organization. There are too many layers or too few, depending on where you are. Managers who …
The High Mode Problems of Hidden High Potentials
Let’s meander for awhile, talking about what the experience of being a hidden high potential, what Elliott Jaques called “high mode individuals”. “High mode” means someone who will be in Stratum 6 or higher at 65-70 yrs, and Higher Mode means Stratum 9 or higher, and Really-High Mode is someone at Str 11 or more. God help anyone who is …
High Mode and Learned Helplessness
As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been listening to Peter Block’s The Right Use of Power, an audio book (more a talk, really) that deals with issues from Stewardship and that are more fully developed in The Answer to How is Yes, which I’ve also been rereading. I’m interested in how his ideas intersect with Elliott Jaques’s theories of bureaucracy. Block …
Do 360-Degree Feedback Programs Work? Some Validation Evidence
While at the PeopleFit “Assessing Raw Talent” class this last week, I heard that it is common for people to overestimate the CIP (Elliott Jaques’s idea of Complexity of Information Processing) of persons who have a lower CIP and to underestimate their subordinates who have a higher CIP than they do. I figured that they were simply citing Wood’s article. …
Why We Over-Estimate In Evaluations
While at the PeopleFit “Assessing Raw Talent” class this last week, I heard that it is common for people to overestimate the CIP (Elliott Jaques’s idea of Complexity of Information Processing) of persons who have a lower CIP and to underestimate their subordinates who have a higher CIP than they do. I figured that they were simply a 2002 article …
CIP and Representative vs Direct Democracy
I’ll be posting some random, unsubstantiated thoughts after the great PeopleFit course in Raleigh last week. If CIP is real, then having a representative democracy (like the United States and Canada both do) is superior to direct democracy. The people are capable of choosing the biggest leader, even if he or she is much bigger than they are. Of course, …