Work Naturally.
I got the Red Cover edition of Elliott Jaques’s book today. I could have saved some cash and ordered it from Australia, but I figured that the Friends To The North would ship more quickly. And they did: it arrive a week and a half after my ABEBooks order. I have no idea what the Red Cover edition comes from. …
[I’ve updated this post with 2013 December information at the bottom] Starbucks has arrived in my town and even though it is inconveniently located, it will thrive and in the end drive the old downtown coffee house out of business. Starbucks, while not necessarily making decent coffee, does do several other things right. When I lived in Chicago and worked …
I’ve been thinking lately about the role of “time span of discretion” findings of Elliott Jaques and his colleagues in the results of social science. For example, Nancy M. Schullery reviews some of the literature about success and argumentativeness in “Argumentative Men: Expectations of Success” (The Journal of Business Communication, October 1999): Individuals with the personality predisposition of high argumentativeness …
I went searching for more information about David Billis’s Worklevels. It turns out that Tata Sons, a Indian consortium of sorts of 80 companies, has implemented Billis’s worklevels in a new management system. The article is, of course, from Tata, but it covers some interesting ground on how a company would implement a SST-based organizational structure. If someone has any …
Mark Van Clieaf is all for paying someone for what they are doing but he believes that CEOs are delivering only short-term value, at the expense of the company’s long term viability. And, if his numbers are correct, most US CEOs aren’t even delivering short term value: their companies are not making more than they are spending.
Mark Van Clieaf recently sent me an article he’s written (“Executive Accountability and Excessive Compensation: A New Test For Director Liability”). He and his colleagues have done a study of 700 Fortune 500 companies — representing 80% of the US stock market — and found some troubling things about CEO compensation and even the entire executive team and Board. It …
Writing about Çatalhöyük has led me to do some other reading, which led me to the Llanos de Moxos of the Beni in Bolivia. It’s amazing: a massive culture that stretched around the size of the Midwest of America but that not too many people talk about. Science had an interesting article about William Denevan’s work in the Beni. There’s …
Science had a great article on Çatalhöyük (there are various spellings) a few years ago that reviews the latest research, as of 1998 [“THE FIRST CITIES: Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities”, DOI: 10.1126 / science.282.5393.1442]. There’s even a website of the latest excavations at Çatalhöyük. Be warned, though: it’s not that exciting. The Science article should keep your …
Both formal structural organizational methods and informal, emotive and emergent methods must be fostered to have a firm that not only invents but innovates.
From Brown and Duguid’s The Social Life of Information Well, duh. Wish I had thought of that. The current cry for “cross-functional teams” results from the inability of the organization to manage its divisions. The local divisions will occur in any group that gets larger than about 12. Put fifty people in a church even and you will get a …
