Cosmides on the Dangers of "Anyone Can Be Shaped Into Anything"
A quick look at one of Leda Cosmides's answers during an interview for El Mecurio (Chile), on the idea of environmental determinism.
View ArticleJudgment of Capability (RO Work Level) Must Be On Work
You could not judge Gov. Sarah Palin's current capacity based on her interview with CBS's Katie Couric because it did not get her talking on issues on which she has concentrated before.
View ArticleManagement Accountability Hierarchy Not Always Best (Elliott Jaques’s...
Recently, a post from Tom Foster made me want to clarify something: The Management Accountability Hierachies described by Elliott Jaques are not always the most effective form of organization. Foster...
View ArticleTransitions Are Like Being Lost In The Pacific
Once we get past our teens, our cognitive capacity to handle complexity grows over time in predictable rates. This is similar to psychologist Jean Piaget’s ideas of Theory of Cognitive Development in...
View ArticleBlagojevich: Why Wilfred Brown's Ideas Still Work
“The combination of arrogance and stupidity that would prompt him to continue in these types of behaviors is just stunning,” Dr. [Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of...
View ArticleWhen Experience Won’t Hack It
At the last GO Society conference in Toronto, Owen Jacobs of the US Army talked about how the MCPA (Modified Career Path Assessment) didn’t actually measure capability but more potential. (See video of...
View Article"How To Make a Madoff"
Ben Levisohn, “How To Make A Madoff“, Business Week, December 16, 2008. You don’t have to do anything to get a Madoff. They are always with us, like the poor. The question is whether or not you will...
View ArticleElliott Jaques on How the Workplace Influences Democracy’s Development
One of the things that impressed me about Elliott Jaques when I first read him was his stated desire to build democratic feeling within workers. It may have been the influence of Wilfred Brown at...
View ArticleWilfred Brown on Democratic Society
Wilfred Brown’s structures for a decent work organization led to the speculations that I’m making this week. However, reading him again over the last two days, I’m not sure that these points are...
View ArticleUsing Requisite Organization to Manage Staff in an Evangelical Megachurch
The Rev. Dr. John Morgan is the head pastor of a growing independent Evangelical church in New Mexico that uses the mega-church model. Morgan wrote a chapter in the GO Society book (disclosure: I...
View ArticleWhy Rewarding Competitiveness Is Stupid If You Want To Make Money
Here’s a repost from 2006 that didn’t make it over. It describes a set of studies that so disturb the basic religion of MBA that it required replication across the world to get published. With minor...
View ArticleIQ and Success: What’s the Real Interaction?
Malcolm Gladwell reports that “the correlation between I.Q. and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3.” That’s more than no correlation at all but much less than we often think. (It also isn’t...
View ArticleEach Level of Work Has Its Own Key Value (Jack Fallow)
Jack Fallow had an excellent article in the recent GO Society book, Organization Design, Levels of Work and Human Capability: Executive Guide (“On Being Heard: Insights from complexity theory and...
View ArticleUsing Timespans to Solve Communication Problems
Ever wonder if timespans has any practical usefulness? Here is how I used timespans to clear up a communication problem in a global IT architecture group for an international bank. Awhile back I worked...
View Article7 Decision Making Approaches: IMAGINIST / INTUITIONIST
[I continue my notes on Kinston & Algie’s decision systems.] As we continue with our exploration of the seven approaches to decision making that were originally developed by Jimmy Algie,...
View ArticleNot All Organizations Should Be Appreciated
A few years ago, I was talking with Naga Kumar, who had been a colleague of David Cooperrider at Case Western when he was developing Appreciative Inquiry. He told me that while he like and used a lot...
View ArticleTrust Is Necessary To Society. The Glacier Model Builds Trust
There’s a fascinating paper at the IMF by social capital guru Francis Fukuyama (Social Capital and Civil Society – Prepared for delivery at the IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms) that covers...
View ArticleJob Role (Social Role) Defines Your Behaviour: Wilfred Brown & Elliott Jaques
Behavior is as much defined and limited by the role that a work inhabits as his personality and the quality of his relationships within the company. Lord Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director of Glacier...
View ArticlePostmodernism is an art of the surface; but so were the Gothics
Postmodern art, like Neoclassical art, is above all an art of the surface: an art of reflections rather than visions. It has thrived in the depthless world of high-speed offset printing and digital...
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