Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 421, features Tom on vanity metrics (“feel good, less useful”), Steve Tendon discussing TameFlow, and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Leadership Patterns and Anti-Patterns – The Growler”. Ever deal with a “crusty” leader who used an “unwelcoming” attitude […]
Through ten years of working with dozens of companies, we have seen a lot of good and some not so good developments related to Enterprise Architecture. In recognition of those 10 years, those dozens of companies, and continued success, we would like t…
Through ten years of working with dozens of companies, we have seen a lot of good and some not so good developments related to Enterprise Architecture. In recognition of those 10 years, those dozens of companies, and continued success, we would like t…
I try to be disciplined about my writing (picking themes, creating a backlog, collecting notes and links on those topics, etc.), but it seems like serendipity won’t be denied, no matter what I do. On the same day that XKCD published this cartoon, Erik Dietrich published “Software Architect as a Developer Pension Plan”. While I […]
My interest in leadership, how it works and how it fails, goes back a long way. Almost as soon as I learned how to read, history, particularly military history, has been a favorite of mine. Captains and kings, their triumphs and their downfalls, fascinated me. The eleven years I served with the Henrico Sheriff’s Office […]
My previous leadership type, the Growler, was hard to classify as it had aspects of both pattern and anti-pattern. The Great Pretender, however, is much easier to label. It’s clearly an anti-pattern. Before entering the working world full-time, I worked in the retail grocery business (both of my parents also had considerable industry experience, both […]
Prior to starting my career in IT (twenty years ago this month…seems like yesterday), I spent a little over eleven years in law enforcement as a Deputy Sheriff. Over those eleven years my assignments ranged from working a shift in the jail (interesting stories), to Assistant Director of the Training Academy, then Personnel Officer (even […]
Unless you’re living under a rock, it’s a near certainty that you’ve seen at least one Downfall parody video (although I hadn’t realized just how long these had been around until I started working on this post…time flies!). There’s a reason why they’ve managed to hang on as a meme as long as they have. […]
According to Wikipedia, a party leader is the most powerful official within a political party. I think this statement is debatable. Party leaders in recent history have had varying degrees of power and influence over their own party members, let alone the wider political system.
Writing in The Atlantic during the election campaign, @jon_rauch expressed strong opposition to the conventional view of party leadership.
The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. … There no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon. …
This is not only a problem of leadership and individual agency, but also a question of the nature of the political party as a viable system with collective agency and intelligence. Rauch continues
The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms.
The relationship between the politician and the party has always been problematic – consider Winston Churchill who changed party allegiance twice before becoming party leader. But the root cause of this problem is unclear.
Political parties are what things look like when you put politicians in charge.— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) August 3, 2016
@DavidAllenGreen or they are machines for turning people into politicians— Sean Owen-Moylan (@SeanOwenMoylan) August 3, 2016
Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane (The Atlantic, July 2016)
Wikipedia: Party Leader (retrieved 4 Feb 2017)
Related posts
Political parties and organizational intelligence 1 (May 2012)
Political parties and organizational intelligence 2 (June 2015)
According to Wikipedia, a party leader is the most powerful official within a political party. I think this statement is debatable. Party leaders in recent history have had varying degrees of power and influence over their own party members, let alone …
Gregory Brown tweeted a great series on the problem of distance last week: It’s amazing how much information can be conveyed in nine tweets. It’s amazing how many aspects of a very complex socio-technical undertaking, software development, are affected by this concept of distance. I would argue that this concept of distance applies likewise to […]
Many organisations talk about ‘developing new leaders’. What they mostly mean in practice is ‘developing new managers’. Which is unfortunate, because they’re not the same… The blunt reality is that most organisations I see have an absurd surplus of managers,…