Managing Complexity was the topic for this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna a few weeks ago. Complexity overwhelms the old style of command and control management, but the followers of Drucker offer better alternatives. I wish could have attended, but I will have to be satisfied summarizing based on the writings of others. Continue reading
Why not get rid of management entirely? That was the thesis of Doug Kirkpatrick’s talk at the Building Business Capability conference this week about the Morning Star Company, a company which has tried the radical approach of being entirely flat, and having no managers are all. Far from failing, they have become the largest company in their domain (tomato processing). In Dec 2011, Harvard Business Review called them the world’s most creatively managed company. Continue reading
Two webinars, an interview/podcast, and a number of relevant links — all in the past couple of weeks. Here are the links Continue reading
What is the limit of automation? We often think that automation is limited by the technical ability to construct the automation. It is not surprising that automation decreases the ability for those people to do the same job manually. Is there then a point that we should avoid automation in order to retain viable knowledge workers? Continue reading
A new study from Oxford says that 47% of the jobs in America are at risk of automation. There is a lot of fear that a job automated is equivalent to a job eliminated. It is the same fear that fueled the Luddites, however history shows that fear to be misplaced then, as it is now. Automation drives a transformation of the workplace, not an elimination. Continue reading
As part of the research for the last keynote I gave, I wanted to see how well known management gurus recommend supporting knowledge workers to be more effective. What I found was surprising and well understood at the same time. Continue reading
Harold Jarche has a controversial slide cast this week titled “Subversive thoughts” which explores the relationship between the trends for supporting knowledge work, and the role of management as it is traditionally defined. Continue reading
There is an article in Harvard Business Review this month about how companies are beginning to organize knowledge workers in a new way. The concept has been called a “flow-to-the-work organization” and it reflects a new way of thinking about how knowledge workers are held in relation to the company. Continue reading
I have written many times about how culturally we have a tendency to want to simplify problems, and solve the separate parts, and this is reductionism. Scientific management is based on this idea, and it is one of the ideas that leads to problematic BPM implementations when your the process is truly complex. In this post I consider where reductionism cam from. Continue reading
Is your organization running too smoothly? Is everything being handled with a minimum of fuss? Perhaps you need a ‘Business Crisis Inducer’ is a tool that causes randomized crisis events to challenge your organization. Sound crazy? It is not as crazy as you might first think. Continue reading
Thinking Matters 