Defragmenting our selves
I think a good way to look at the nature of boundaries between organisations is to look at communication across the boundaries. We can ask, for example, who people at the top of those organisations talk to. Who do they consider their peers? These sites are a really good resources for mapping the individuals involved…
Some years ago Jack Welch, the chairman of General Electric, came up with the idea of ‘boundaryless organisation’. He wanted to eliminate both internal and external boundaries, turning the corporation into a network with no defined edge. On the face of it this sounds like an idea a radical political group might come up with….
Most people will have noticed in the news recently that conflicts between miners and management at the Lonmin-owned Marikana mine in South Africa led to the police shooting dead 34 people. If you really want to you can watch some footage of it. Some observers say that the miners were herded into a barbed wire…
Developing a comment from a couple of weeks ago, there’s been a lot of talk among some people recently of the world being ruled by psychopaths. There’s even a facebook group called ‘Psychopaths Rule The World‘ which has an unfortunate tendency to get into conspiracy theories. On the face of it is a plausible explanation…
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who does a technical job for a large company that has brought him into contact with the senior management. His initial description of their behaviour was ‘fascistic’. I asked him to qualify this and he said they appeared to be driven by a sense of duty so hardline…
This post a copy of an email from Daz – some replies to follow below. This was an interesting read from the perspective of a relatively new employee at Valve, a games company, with regards to his view of Valve as a non-capitalist firm with no management hierarchy: Why Valve? Or, what do we need…
A Prof. Erik Olin Wright here talks about the conviction that it is impossible to challenge the nature of ‘capitalism’ (whatever we take that to mean) itself, through incremental institutional reforms within our current economic system. This is claimed by much of the far left, essentially for ideological reasons. His conclusions for the whole lecture…
I’m interested in people’s intentions within organisations, in the sense that I have often found them to be irrelevant to what the orgs do. It is easy for us to be convinced that our intentions count for a lot, yet we see orgs (the World Bank for example) that neither do what they claim to…