Work Naturally.
I spent most of yesterday sidetracked on Carroll Quigley. All I wanted was to get a small reference about Milner’s Kindergarten because I realized that I had come up with an idea for changing the world that suspiciously resembled it. In one of the more rational articles, “From Mesopotamia through Carroll Quigley to Bill Clinton: World Historical Systems, the Civilizationist, …
Does rank and yank really work? One of the fundamental needs of rank-and-yank management is identifying weak performers. When top management presses managers to identify more, what group do you think they take from? University of Chicago researcher and social network analysis expert, Ronald S. Burt, discovered who in his network analysis at one firm: In the annual cycle preceding …
There’s an interesting article about Elliott Jaques’s work in Australia (“Come back Elliott Jaques, all is forgiven” By Helen Trinca, in Financial Review BOSS [Australia]). It includes a review of Julian Fairfield’s book, Levels of Excellence, a copy of which Glenn Mehltretter of PeopleFitgraciously provided to me when I met with him recently down in Raleigh. I’ve enjoyed the book, …
A new study of 100 manufacturing companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States supports the view that IT expenditures have little impact on productivity unless they are accompanied by first-rate management practices.………………..Companies should first improve their management practices and then invest in IT. — from “When IT lifts productivity” by Stephen J. Dorgan and John J. …
In my quest for more data about Karen Stephenson’s work, I came across an old New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, the happy camper behind The Tipping Point. The article, “Designs for Working: Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village“, originally appeared 2000 Dec 11. He starts off with a scene from the great Jane …
“Systems development surprise” by Allan E. Alter. COMPUTERWORLD, 1996 Feb 12. Alter reported on results that came out of a study done by P. J. Guinan, Jay Cooperider and S. Sawyer [“The effective use of automated application development tools”, IBM Systems Journal, 36(1), 1997 — although it may be “Software development: Processes and performance“, IBM Systems Journal, 37(4), 1998]. They …
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McKinsey Consulting came out with a CRM article the same week I read Mark Van Clieaf’s comments about how to succeed at CRM — he says to run it through Marketing before, during and after implementation. McKinsey’s piece (Anupam Agarwal, David P. Harding, and Jeffrey R. Schumacher, “Organizing for CRM“, McKinsey Quarterly) has some very amusing things to say: In …
“The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives” by Sydney Finkelstein, Ivey Business Journal, Jan/Feb 2004. I recently passed by Finkelstein’s book, on which this article is based, as I was picking up Social Life of Information, Linked and Six Degrees. (My quest for information on network theory continues.) I wish I hadn’t. This article is both fun from a “let’s …
By contrast, horizontal working-class solidarity exists to a much lesser degree in Japan than in Britain, and in this respect the Japanese would be said to be less group oriented than the British. Japanese workers tend to identify with their companies rather than with their fellow workers…. But the reverse side of the coin is a much higher degree of …
I am going out on a limb here and make a totally unsupported guess: Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization Hierarchies can be interpreted as Networks. I think that the reason everyone has been talking about Markets, Hierarchies and Networks as separate classes has to do with how the first two have been implemented and written about in the last 100-200 years. …
