Work Naturally.
Software projects are almost always late and underdone. Most executives take it for granted nowadays that developers will turn in something other than what was requested for more than was announced. They even admit that this is one of the biggest reasons that they outsource, because the contracts with outsourcers force the organization to develop software in a rational way. …
Alan Downs is a very successful executive coach who has worked the inside of a large corporation himself. He is even the author of an intriguing memoir of sorts about axing huge numbers of the employees for the corporation. The Fearless Executive rejects the very premise of the title: there are no fearless executives, only executives who face and work …
Even though they are continuing to spend millions every year, the project has almost no chance of success for entirely organizational reasons.
this year. Regretfully, I didn’t attend but I have been pouring through the proceedings. As I promised months ago, this post highlights some of the more interesting points for those of us doing access control technologies for software systems.
Wouldn’t you know it? The last issue that I have coming to me before I was going to end my IEEE Computer Society membership and it had to be interesting. I’ve been reading Computer for several years now and I’ve gotten to the point where I just pass it on to some other IT schmuck without actually opening it. I …
We’re not happy in positions that we don’t have the ability to do nor are we successful.
What have we lost in our rejection of hierarchy?
In their book, Executive Leadership, Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement make the point that almost any personality type can be an effective manager — role that contains leadership. (They go to lengths to make it clear that leadership does not exist outside of a particular role performance.) These personality quirks are irrelevant until they become disruptive to the organization or …
The managers from a consulting firm I work with are sold on the “trusted advisor” idea. This comes from The Trusted Advisor by Charles Green, David Maister and Rob Galford (Free Press, 2000). They bantered this around in my friend’s performance review. I actually believe that trusted advisor ideas and “techniques” are solid, money-making and morally good. Unfortunately, I’m not …
http://www-marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/people/faculty/armstrong2.html#forecasting For example. Kesten C. Green has a great paper on the efficacy of role playing vs. game theory vs. individual assessment for conflicts involving small numbers of parties with a lot at stake. He finds that role playing is the only forecasting method he tested that actually predicts what will happen. http://www-marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/forecast/paperpdf/Greenforecastinginconflict.pdf Green did a study of how well …
