Category: Management
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The unachievable “Higher Level”
Thinking about “higher level,” it’s funny how words and phrases first enjoy popular attention and use, then become utterly devalued through overuse, and finally descend into the condition of allergen (at least for me) to which I (again, me) have a palpable histamine response. It’s happened with “freedom” and “patriot,” words that are effectively meaningless…
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Why Capitalism (1): The Pre-Capitalist West
The development—creation and evolution—of Capitalism was hardly preordained. But it is too easy to look backward and conclude that where are now was inevitable. Nothing is inevitable. So why then? The question warrants a look at conditions leading to the birth of capitalism. We will eventually need to dedicate time to capitalism’s evolution to…
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Asymmetric policy action: cars and drivers
I would offer to write a brief piece for Policy Options, The Walrus, or some other such magazine but have no desire to spend the time documenting the self-evident, which will be obvious later, just to appear “well researched.” Instead, I’ll write here and content myself with distributing the link. Here’s the premise. Governments of all sorts…
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Gwyn Morgan: the apologist
I read this op-ed piece in the Globe & Mail this past weekend by retired CEO Gwyn Morgan. Before I could respond in the G&M comments section, there were approximately 400 comments which, using the first 50 or so as a sample set, were about 90% on the side of pillorying the man. To their…
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“User Experience” is nonsense
God damn Steve Jobs! It’s hard to dredge from memory or history another huckster who left behind such a legacy of dreck. Jobs was a tireless promoter who innovated relentlessly and—as legend would have it—single-handedly changed the face of the consumer world from personal computing to animated movies to music consumption and mobile telephony/computing. Love…
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Holacracy… old wine new bottles
Found this article in the Globe and Mail (Say goodbye to hierarchy, hello to holacracy) about the disappearance of hierarchy at some “cool” businesses (such as Zappos). It’s essence is per the following definition: Holacracy is a social technology or system of organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a fractal holarchy of self-organizing…
