taylorism

IT job postings ask for the wrong thing

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My report “Job Postings – Hiring for IT’s Past” published today on Gartner.com. This Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) report is a wake-up call for IT organizations because it shows that most IT organizations are hiring for the wrong requirements. In late 2011 and early 2012 we sampled current job postings in six major job […]

Failures in Communication – Don’t Tell Me! Engage Me!

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For frequent readers, you know that I tend to look at issues through a humanistic lens.  Many of my client inquiries start with a request for the best way to represent “x”, or the way to describe something so that people will do “y”.  Instead, I like to think about “What are you trying to […]

Luck, Serendipity, and the Contextual Strategist

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Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that leaves us in awe of the randomness of life? In that context, strategy […]

i-i-i is about Focusing on the Individual and Not Yourself

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The “i” generation – not quite the selfish focused gang that was recently called out in the UK by its Chief Rabbi and noted by c|net’s Chris Matyszczyk. Like prior generational movements, this one too is misunderstood. The “i” generation is about the importance of the individual which is profoundly different than focusing selfishly on […]

Context breaks Taylor’s hold on strategy

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Last week’s post “Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine” called for the end of Taylorism. Thankfully, I am not the first to call for the end of Taylorism or to write about human characteristics which businesses frequently ignore. There are many before me who have added significant insights into this debilitating management doctrine and all […]

‘Ba’, Cynefin, place and architecture

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Just been reading (via Tweet by Bill Ives) a post by Anne Marie McEwan on ‘Loosening the Taylorist Stranglehold on the Workplace‘. Within a much larger context in a very good article, this one brief section caught my attention:
The Japanese concept of ‘ba’ came up in one of the face-to-face conversations. … Nonaka et al say that […]