Today I spent the day researching and documenting the involvement of multinational mining corporations with horrendous paramilitary groups in Colombia. I noted that, while the facts are known, each incident in which a company is involved in death threats and murder is written off as a ‘mistake’. And yet it keeps happening. On the street…
The view from the top
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…
Valve and the structure of corporations
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…
The Good Banker
The other day I met a woman just starting a career in banking in Spain, a country even more screwed by its banks than we are. She made the following statements: The problem with banks is that they have bad people at the top. We change the people at the top but it doesn’t change…
The ‘limits of possibility’ of organisational and social reform
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…
Orson Welles the accidental radical?
In this video Orson Welles makes a proposal for an organisation. The video is worth watching from about 1.30. The description of the organisation starts at 4.28 if you are particularly time-poor today. While hedging about his proposal with all kinds of caveats to show that what he is suggesting is not based on radical…
Does Avaaz make good use of social media?
What Avaaz and the likes of 38 degrees have done recently is use the internet and social media to build large national/global networks of campaign activists who can be called upon at a moments notice to do this or that. This is probably a good thing. But is Avaaz as innovative as it could be?…
Orgs as social entities and structure
One of the most important points to make about orgs is that they tend to develop internal cultures. In the case of many big organisations, including many corporations and governmental orgs, they develop a particular culture deliberately. Whether they do it deliberately or not a culture develops and within that particular attitudes and particular ethical…
The failure of intentions
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…
Temporary people in petrified orgs
This site is a way to collect my thoughts on organising as it is practiced. Some of it will be not much more than notes, other posts will be reposts of things said elsewhere, others will be more expanded. It is about the culture and methods and ethics of organisations. It will hopefully be a…