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12 Blogs for Christmas

Holly&Ivy

This has been a great year for the Pocketblog, seeing reading figures rise substantially and reaching the milestone of our 100th blog posting.

So, with Christmas coming at the end of the week, let’s do a round-up of some personal favourites from among this year’s Pocketblogs.

Here is something for each of the twelve days.  Enjoy!

1. Start as you mean to go on: Happiness

After some New Year’s Resolutions to start the year off, we dived into the subject of Happiness, with ‘Happiness – as simple as ABC?’ about Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy – the fore-runner of CBT.

2. … and Start Topical

We then moved into a subject that was much in the news in February; and still is.  With ‘Bankers’ Bonuses and Brain Biology’, we looked at recent neuroscience and how that relates to Adams’ Equity Theory.

3. Generations

In February too, I wrote two blogs about sociological ‘Generations X, Y & Z’ and ‘Generation Y at work’.  I followed this up by another about what comes ‘After Generation Y?’.

4. The Gemba

In May, inspiration waned for a week, so where did I go to find it?  ‘The Gemba’.  I got it back, and later that month, got idealistic in ‘Reciprocity and Expectation’ looking at the Pay it Forward ideal and the realities of Game Theory.

5. Why do we do what we do?

In the first of two blogs on how to predict human behaviour, I looked at ‘How to Understand your Toddler’ (mine actually) and Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour.  Later in the year, in ‘Predicting Behaviour’, I looked at whether a simple equation (hypothesised by Kurt Lewin) could predict all behaviour.

6. One of the Best Business Books of the Year

… according to the Journal Strategy & Business is Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters.  In ‘What Makes a Good Business Strategy’ we looked at some of his ideas.

7. The Apprentice

This year, I have been a big fan of both series and have written my own episode by episode analysis of both The Apprentice and Young Apprentice.  I also did one blog on each for Pocketblog: ‘The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership’ and, for Young Apprentice, ‘Decision Failure’.

8. Drucker Triptych

Has any one individual been as influential in establishing management as a pragmatic academic discipline as Peter Drucker?  To recognise his various achievements, I wrote a triptych of blogs over the summer:

  1. The Man who Invented Management
  2. Management by Objectives
  3. R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive

And one of Drucker’s direct contemporaries was W Edwards Deming, so I also took a look at ‘Demings’ System of Profound Knowledge’.

9. Crazy Times

Will history look on Tom Peters with the respect that it holds for Drucker and Deming?  Who knows?  But without a doubt, Peters has been influential, insightful and provocative for thirty years or more, and I am sure many of his ideas will survive.  In ‘Crazy Times Again’, I drew a line from FW Taylor (father of ‘Scientific Management’) to Peters.

10. The Circle Chart

In ‘Going Round in Circles’ I returned to management models and one of my all time favourites: Fisher and Ury’s Circle Chart. I applied it to problem solving rather than, as they did, to negotiation.

Fisher and Ury are experts on conflict resolution, as is Morton Deutsch. In ‘Conflict: As simple as AEIOU’, I looked at a fabulously simple conflict resolution model that originated in Deutsch’s International Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.

11. Two Notable Events

Two notable events made the autumn memorable for Pocketblog: one sad and one happy.

  1. In ‘A Bigger Bite’ we marked Steve Jobs’ passing
  2. With ‘Three ways to get it wrong’, we marked our hundredth blog, by looking at one of the towering social psychologists of today, Daniel Kahneman

12. And finally, our most popular topic

Tuckman’s model for group formation has proved to be our most popular topic by far this year.  We have returned to it three times, each time looking at a particular facet:

  1. ‘Swift Trust: Why some teams don’t Storm’
  2. ‘Team Performance Beyond Tuckman’
  3. ‘Tuckman Plus’ is the first of two posts.  It is the last topic post of 2011 and its companion (‘Part 2: Transforming’) will be the first of 2012

So here’s the deal

  • Have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.
  • Have a very happy and healthy New Year.
  • Be good, have fun, stay safe, and prosper.

From all at Management Pocketbooks,
our colleagues at Teacher’s Pocketbooks too,
and from me particularly.

Mike

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R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive

This is the third in my Triptych of blogs about the work of Peter Drucker.  The first two were about Drucker, himself, and about Management by Objectives.  This one is about another concept he started to develop in his 1954 book,The Practice of Management.

The Man who Invented Management

Management by Objectives

The Knowledge Worker

Drucker first coined this term in his 1959 book, Landmarks of Tomorrow, saying that:

‘management’s new role is to
make knowledge more productive’

In his earlier book, however, he had started to see the manager’s role as understanding, interpreting and making decisions about the information they can access.

But it was two later works that crystallised his thinking and made him the clear progenitor of how we now interpret the term.

The Effective Executive (1966)

In The Effective Executive, Drucker argues that knowledge workers are executive in that they use knowledge to effect (or execute) changes.  He identifies five habits of an effective executive and, in passing, I note that he used the chapter title ‘First things First’ 23 years before Stephen Covey did, when he used it as one of his seven habits.  Executives must:

  1. know how their time is being spent.
  2. on results rather than the work.
  3. build on strengths first, and then give attention to weaknesses.
  4. focus on the key areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.
  5. make effective decisions.

The Age of Discontinuity (1969)

Peter F DruckerThe Age of Discontinuity’ is the book where Drucker really develops the concept of the knowledge worker, as a breed of thoughtful, intelligent executive, every bit as much a professional as a lawyer, engineer or teacher.  They are paid to acquire and apply knowledge, make informed judgements and take responsibility for leadership.

Dull, conforming corporate clones would thenceforth be no longer needed.  Instead, knowledge will be the source of economic power – all of which came 20 years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee made his first formal proposal for what is now the World-wide Web.

Subsequent Thinking

From the early 1990s, management thinkers and futurists seized upon the concept of the knowledge worker and have spun theories, models and predictions out of it.  Indeed, this coincided with the arrival of Generation X in the workplace.  Drucker too, continued writing about the phenomenon, notably in his 1992 book, ‘Managing for the Future’;

‘The world is becoming not labour intensive,
not materials intensive, not energy intensive,
but knowledge intensive.’

We may feel energy and materials intensive in a world that seems to be running out of each, but despite being far from running out of knowledge (take a look at the fantastic web info-graphic below) there is absolutely no doubt that the world is becoming more and more knowledge intensive.

State of the Internet 2011
Created by: OnlineSchools.org

Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy

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After Generation Y?

Have you ever noticed that things seem to cluster in your life?  There seems to be a ‘time’ for certain things: one minute they are in the deep background, and the next, they emerge and keep assailing your senses.

So it has been these last few weeks for me.  Nearly a month ago, I attended an interesting talk and wrote a blog about Generation X and Generation Y, and then found out about a unified theory of all of history, based on generations.

I returned to that theme a week later, to speculate how Generation Y (born between 1980 and 2000) would behave as managers in the workplace.  But the theme could not leave me alone.

What comes after Generation Y

Continue reading After Generation Y?

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Generation Y at work

Last week, I got side-tracked in my quest to learn how Generation Y (born between around 1980 and 2000) will handle the challenge of management in the workplace.  The oldest and most talented of them are stepping up to that challenge already and we can expect a significant cohort of new Generation Y managers in our workplaces over the next few years.

Back to that highly salient topic…

Continue reading Generation Y at work

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As simple as X, Y, Z: the complexities of Generational Theories

There are an awful lot of interesting things to do with yourself, and a new one came my way last week: I discovered my local Cafe Scientifique.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept, for the price of a tea or coffee, you can listen to some of the latest ideas in science and technology at a local cafe.  Mostly, they will be presented by a visiting scientist – sometimes eminent.  You can learn whether you have one nearby, or how to start one, here if you’re in Britain, or here if you’re not.

My first Cafe

My first experience was great (thanks to Paula Kennedy for organising it) and the speaker, Professor Averil Macdonald, was excellent.  Averil talked about Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.  What makes a good talk is not so much what is said, nor how it is presented.  A good talk sets you thinking…

Continue reading As simple as X, Y, Z: the complexities of Generational Theories

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