From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:
On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites
The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.
A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.
The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.
For the article…
Training the Next Generation of Knowledge Workers: Readings for Effective Secondary Education & Workplace Learning Practices an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from The Organisation imprint.
In today’s shifting global economy and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organization, how do we train the rising generation of knowledge workers with the knowledge, skills, and the ability to perform and add value in a hyper-intensive competitive global marketplace?
What are the methods and strategies for effectively preparing the future knowledge worker generation? What needs to be done in our institutions of higher learning? What initiatives and methods need to be adopted by organizations for greater engaged learning and transference of knowledge to practical application in the workplace? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to organizational learning and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to management academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professions of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to train the next generation of knowledge workers that will drive an enhanced competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy.
From The Economist
It is
hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.
But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.
To Read More…
From The Economist
• London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.
• Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.
• No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.
To Read More….
Globalization, Labor & the Transformation of Work: Readings for Seeking a Competitive Advantage in an Increasingly Global Economy an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from The Organisation imprint.
“Globalization” is a key concept that represents a wide range of complex processes in our modern world. These processes have wide sweeping impacts on the international political economy, international capitalism, and the ability for organizations of all types to gain and maintain a competitive advantage and successfully compete in an increasingly global economy. Additionally, increasing “globalization” over the past several decades has changed the dynamics of an increasingly international labor force, how organizations compete for this labor, their internal labor dynamics, and ultimately how they do business. As such, the nature of work and the workplace has also shifted dramatically over the past several decades.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to “globalization” and its wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to academics and students interested in the interplay between macro global processes and the more micro organizational and individual impacts, while also instructing managers, policy makers, and practitioners of all types interested in the role that “globalization” is playing in shifting international labor dynamics and the transformation of the modern workplace.
From The Economist
Henry Hazlitt, one of the great popularisers of free-market thinking, once said that good ideas have to be relearned in every generation. This is certainly true of good ideas about business. A generation ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did an excellent job of making the case in favour of business. Today it looks as though the case needs to be made all over again.
It is hardly surprising that business has fallen from grace in recent years. The credit crunch almost plunged the world into depression. The new century began with the implosion of Enron and other prominent firms. Some bosses pay themselves like princes while preaching austerity to their workers. Business titans who once graced the covers of magazines have been hauled before congressional committees or carted off to prison.
Business people have been at pains to point out that it is unfair to judge all of their kind by the misdeeds of a few. The credit crunch was the handiwork of bankers (who lent too much money) and policymakers (who fooled themselves into thinking that they had abolished boom and bust). Corporate criminals like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Denis Kozlowski were imprisoned for their crimes. Avaricious bosses like Angelo Mozilo, who pocketed more than $550m during his inglorious reign at Countrywide, are exceptions. The average American boss is actually paid less today than he was in 2000.
To Read More…
From, Matt Pressman Vanity Fair.
AOL went from pioneering powerhouse to laughed-at laggard when changing technologies made their business model of charging people for e-mail accounts and Internet access obsolete. So now
they are remaking the company with an entirely different strategy: selling ads against original content produced by an army of well-paid professional journalists. Unfortunately, that’s the same business model that has driven America’s newspapers to the brink of ruin.
When most people think of AOL, they think of it as the e-mail provider for people who aren’t with it enough to switch to a free service such as Gmail. But while the bulk of AOL’s revenue still comes from its old-school subscribers, the company’s future is in the content business (with a sideline in social networking). In advance of its long-awaited split from Time Warner, which will occur next month, AOL has been on a hiring-and-acquisition spree. It now owns upward of 75 niche blogs and news sites, including DailyFinance.com, Engadget.com, and Fanhouse.com, staffed in large part by reporters who used to work in print. C.E.O. Tim Armstrong said at a conference last month that AOL employs more than 3,000 journalists.
To Read More…
From Schumpeter, in The Economist.
In the normal run of things the management world is divided into dozens of mutually suspicious tribes—theoreticians versus practitioners, publicity-hogging gurus versus retiring academics, supporters of “scientific” management versus advocates of the “humanistic” sort. But this month has seen unusual comity: the leaders of all the management tribes came together to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, a man who is often described as “the father of modern management” and “the world’s greatest management thinker”.
The celebrations took place all around the world, most notably in Vienna, where Drucker was born, in southern California, where he spent his golden years, and in China, where he is exercising growing influence. The speakers were not limited to luminaries of management: they also included Rick Warren, the spiritual guru of the moment in America, Frances Hesselbein, a former head of the American Girl Scouts, and David Gergen, an adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.
To mark the centennial, the Harvard Business Review put a photograph of Drucker on its cover along with the headline: “What Would Peter Do? How his wisdom can help you navigate turbulent times”. Claremont Graduate University in California, where Drucker taught, boasts not one but two institutions that are dedicated to keeping the flame alive: the Peter Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and the Drucker Institute. The institute acts as the hub of a global network of Drucker societies that are trying to apply his principles to everything from schools to refuse collection. It also produces a “do-it-yourself workshop-in-a-box” called “Drucker Unpacked”.
Why does Drucker continue to enjoy such a high reputation? Part of the answer lies in people’s mixed emotions about management. The management-advice business is one of the most successful industries of the past century. When Drucker first turned his mind to the subject in the 1940s it was a backwater. Business schools were treated as poor relations by other professional schools. McKinsey had been in the management-consulting business for only a decade and the Boston Consulting Group did not yet exist. Officials at General Motors doubted if Drucker could find a publisher for his great study of the company, “Concept of the Corporation”, on the grounds that, as one of them put it, “I don’t see anyone interested in a book on management.”
Read more here…
The Economist writes in praise of the ideas of Russ Ackoff,
Today’s crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure, primarily in the financial system but also of our economic and political systems. Mr Ackoff spent most of the past half-century as the premier evangelist of systemic thinking, which he contrasted with the reductionist, atomistic thinking that had long dominated humanity’s approach to problem-solving in his view. Time and again, he would point out, decision-makers faced with crises failed to heed Albert Einstein’s warning that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
More…
From Tim Hindle, The Economist.
Matrix management is a structure for running those companies that have both a diversity of products and a diversity of markets. In a matrix structure, responsibility for the products goes up and down one dimension and responsibility for the markets goes up and down another. This leaves most managers with a dual reporting line: to the head of their product division on the one hand, and to the head of their geographical market on the other.
Despite the potential confusion that this duality creates, matrix management was enormously popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Leading the fashion was Philips, a Dutch multinational electronics company, which first set up a matrix structure after the second world war. It had national organisations (NOs) and product divisions (PDs), and for a while they operated successfully as a network. The network was held together by a number of coordinating committees, which resolved any conflict between the two.
Read more…
Oct 19th 2009 From Economist.com
It aims to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production
Lean production is the name given to a group of highly efficient manufacturing techniques developed (mainly by large Japanese companies) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Lean production was seen as the third step in an historical progression, which took industry from the age of the craftsman through the methods of mass production and into an era that combined the best of both. It has been described as “the most fundamental change to occur since mass production was brought to full development by Henry Ford early in the 20th century”.
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The methods of lean production aim to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production. In lean-production systems a manufacturer’s employees are organised in teams. Within each team a worker is expected to be able to do all the tasks required of the team. These tasks are less narrowly specialised than those demanded of the worker in a mass-production system, and this variety enables the worker to escape from the soul-destroying repetition of the pure assembly line.
By Cosma Shalizi American Scientist
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street. Justin Fox. xviii + 382 pp. Harper Business, 2009. $27.99.
The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox, is an account—popular but thorough—of the roots, rise, triumph and ongoing fall of the theory of efficient markets in finance. This school of thought is an exemplary specimen of a type of social science that flourished after World War II: It has mathematical models at its center, has supposedly been empirically validated by statistical analyses, is indifferent to history and to institutions, and takes as an axiom that people are intelligent, farsighted and greedy. Unlike many economic theories, the efficient-market school has been influential beyond academia. It helped reshape ideas about how companies should be run, how executives should be paid, and indeed how the economy should be regulated (or not) to promote the general welfare. (In comic-book form: A mild-mannered social science by day, at night efficient-market theory puts on a cloak of ideology and struggles for the Capitalist Way.) The theory contributed, arguably, to setting up the crisis that has gripped the world economy since 2007. Its story is of much more than just scholarly interest.
More…
Accommodation for the 2010 Management Conference in Montréal, Canada may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
A new analysis of the original data from the famous Hawthorne Studies by Steven D. Levitt, and John A. List questions the conclusion found in most textbooks.
The “Hawthorne effect,” a concept familiar to all students of social science, has had a profound influence both on the direction and design of research over the past 75 years. The Hawthorne effect is named after a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The first and most influential of these studies is known as the “Illumination Experiment.” Both academics and popular writers commonly summarize the results as showing that every change in light, even those that made the room dimmer, had the effect of increasing productivity. The data from the illumination experiments, however, were never formally analyzed and were thought to have been destroyed. Our research has uncovered these data. We find that existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable data patterns prove to be entirely fictional. There are, however, hints of more subtle manifestations of a Hawthorne effect in the original data.
Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, The Organisation.
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Maria E. Burke, University of Salford, Salford, UK
www.ManagementConference.com
Dr. Burke’s research is based in the area of Information Management. She currently holds a position at the University of Salford’s Business School within the Information Systems Group which was awarded a 6* rating in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. In addition she is a Visiting Fellow at the Jagiellonian University in Poland and has held visiting posts with the Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Budapest University of Technology and the Nicholas Copernicus University in North Poland. More…
Richard Harris, University of Glasgow, UK
www.ManagementConference.com
Richard Harris is the Alec Cairncross Chair of Applied Economics and the Director of the Centre for Public Policy for Regions at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests include micro-analysis of firm/plant level productivity in the UK using panel data; differences in (UK) regional performance; evaluation of government industrial policy; and, relative performance of UK SMEs. Future research includes Gibrat’s law - estimates for UK industry; Evaluation methodology for impact of government assistance on TFP; and, Relative performance of family-owned SMEs. More…
The London Review of Books has recently published The Money that Prays, an article by Jeremy Harding about banking in the Islamic world and how it fares in the economic downturn.
Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in 2008. Both have come under some nervous scrutiny in 2009 but their ability to weather the recession that has set in behind the credit crunch is not at issue.
Accommodation for the 2009 Management Conference in Boston, USA may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
26 - 29 July 2010
HEC Montreal, Montreal, Canada
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/
On Wednesday, 24 June 2009 - Museum of Fine Arts Tour
Join us at the Museum of Fine Arts. We’ll enjoy a private one-hour tour of the Museum’s rich and extensive collection led by a trained guide.
On Friday, 26 June 2009 - Heart of the Freedom Trail Walking Tour
Join us after the last session for the perfect introduction to Boston.
On Saturday, 27 June 2009 - North End Walking Tour
Relax after a successful conference and join us for a walk through America’s oldest neighborhood.
For more information please see the Conference website.
Join us at the Prudential Center Top of the Hub Restaurant and Skywalk for our conference dinner at one of Boston’s finest dining destinations.
For more information please see the Conference website.
Marcus Breen, Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Cynthia Lee, Professor of Management and Organizational Development, College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston, Masssachusetts, USA
Kathrin Zippel, Assoc. Prof. of Sociology, Sociology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
We are pleased to announce that The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus.
Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database; one of the largest in the world.
Verna Allee, President, Value Networks LLC, Martinez, CA, USA
Susan Bolt, Coordinator Teaching and Learning, Curtin Business School, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
David P. Boyd, Professor, Management and Organizational Development Group, College of Business, Northeastern University, College of Business Administration, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
24-27 June 2009
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
www.ManagementConference.com
Congratulations to Susan Bolt, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of knowledge, culture and change in organisations.
Tina’s paper ‘Building the Capacity of Learning Professionals through an Infusion of Formal and Informal Learning’ can be accessed in the online bookstore: http://ijm.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.28/prod.844
Paper Abstract: The success of many organisations depends on their capacity to learn and because of this learning professionals in the fields of education and training are often engaged to build workforce capacity. The success of this scenario depends on the expertise of these learning professionals, but how is their capacity built? Formal learning is typically standardised, centrally controlled and vertically integrated approaches to the transmission of knowledge through organised curriculum modules that can lead to a qualification. Informal learning is more horizontally integrated, dynamic and occurs when people make a conscious effort to learn from their experiences and engage in individual or group reflection (Burns, 2002; Foley, 2004). In the past formal and informal learning were considered separately but an infusion of formal and informal learning may be a more appropriate approach in this new economy. This paper, based on results from an interpretive study investigating professional development in large Australian organisations in 2007, explores the professional development experiences of staff employed in training and educational organisations. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, using mixed methods, were conducted with staff from all levels of these organisations to investigate the relationship between adult learners’ professional development and organisations’ change agenda. Results indicated that in some situations there was considerable blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning experiences. The conclusion is made that a balkanised approach to professional development is insufficient to build the capacity of learning professionals in the 21st Century and a more dynamic approach that moves flexibly between formal and informal learning approaches is recommended.
Paper submissions are now open for Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.
You will first need to submit a presentation proposal for the conference as either an attending or virtual participant. If accepted you will be able to submit your full paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal.
Please check the submission guidelines prior to submitting your paper.
