Organization design blog

On Sunday, March 11, yesterday, I started to write the final chapter of my new book. It's a great relief to see the index hoving into view after six months of sitting here at my laptop – the post PC era has overtaken me while I've been writing. If the post PC era has also overtaken you for the moment you can listen to Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, talking about this in a TechCrunch interview. As soon as I finish the book I'll have to ditch my PC and get whatever the post PC era item is. Or will I be succumbing to a mere fad if I do that?

How do I know whether the post-PC era statements are a fad or a trend? What is the difference? You'll be able to find out when the book is published at the end of the year, because management fads and trends are the topic of Chapter 8 – the one I've spent the last day and a half working on. Well, some of the time I haven't been directly working on it. I've been 'researching' the various management jargon generators seeing if I can come up with a management fad of my own. The generators are great fun and there are lots of them. Just type into your search bar 'management jargon generator' and you'll get a list of them. Then you can spend quite a while feeling amused at things like "This is no time to bite the bullet with our parallel incremental contingencies" or "Our exploratory research points to knowledge-based management alignment," at least I felt amused until I then cast a critical eye over what I had written in the chapter and decided to go and get a cup of tea.

Continue reading...

Yesterday I arrived in London from Washington DC on United Airlines flight 918. In May 2010 United announced that it was going to buy Continental and at the time the NY Times commented:

"Combining Continental and United would also create a global behemoth. Continental would bring its strong presence in Latin America and Europe, while United has strong positions in Asia, including China and Japan."

Nevertheless in August last year the deal won approval and was completed in October 2010.
I've flown a few times on United since then and been looking for any signs of the acquisition from a passenger standpoint. The first obvious thing is the logo change, and the adverts that assure us that that things are going well. What other things have I noticed?

Continue reading...

Day 2 of the Organization Development program raised a lot more questions from the participants. The deep interest in the topic from the group members is fantastic, and really caused me to think more about the content of the program. Three questions I thought might merit a whole session in any revised version were:

How do you get OD work as an internal consultant? Oddly, this question was raised by a colleague of mine a couple of weeks ago. What the questioner wanted to know was should he wait for line managers to call him because they had a problem or opportunity that they thought he could help them with, or should he go out into the organization and actively search for work. And if the latter how do you do this?

Continue reading...

Recently I've spent a lot of time 'standing behind the yellow line' in immigration queues waiting to have my passport stamped to be let into a country. I've also stood waiting behind people to check out at the supermarket, get money from an ATM, board buses, and buy movie tickets.

I looked at the queues to get into the World Expo country pavilions and decided that it wasn't worth my time for the pay-off. Instead I enjoyed my Expo experience of walking through the landscaped gardens there, watching the people, and seeing the pavilions from the outside.

Now I've just read an article on 'balking behavior'. Business management professor Pen-Yuan Liao of the National United University in Miaoli, Taiwan makes the point that:

No one enjoys queuing, so even small reductions in waiting time will result in better quality of service and lead to enhancing customer loyalty and so increased sales

Continue reading...

Yesterday I went to a Giant food store in my locality. I don't normally go there. But it's owned by Ahold, a Dutch Company, and I'd just met someone who works for them, so I wanted to see for myself what they'd said about it.

Giant is the same distance from where I live as my other choices of food stores: Safeways, Wholefoods, and Yes Organic so I have a several choices when it comes to food shopping. Thinking about the four I wondered how I compared them. Why did I choose one over another, why hadn't I gone to Giant before?

Right around this time an article dropped into my email How Categories and Environment Create Satisfied and Well-Informed Consumers. It's a summary of a new Pitt/USC study to be published in the June issue of Journal of Consumer Research .

Continue reading...