March 2005 archive

This Topic Has Moved

This topic has been sold (to be frank).

For a fascinating blog on Elliott Jaques's theories of Requistite Organization (RO) and Stratified Systems Theory (SST), see "Requisite Readings".

Other keywords that used to be referenced here:

timespan of discretion, time span, time horizon, stratum, worklevels, david billis, lord wilfred brown, capability of information processing (CIP), human capability, the Law of the Real Boss

Again, see Requisite Readings for more.

Closing Time

Hail and well met, friend! Or should I say goodbye?

It's the last old-school manasclerk's The Power Struggle blog entry. Last call went out, the curtain burned down and now there's only the cleaning up of the cans, bottles and other detritus. Time to move on from where I am to where I was.

As I'm closing up, I thought I'd hit some of the highlights of the last two years here on manasclerk's The Power Struggle, both at this address and at the socgeek one where I started on Blogger. It's a good exercise to every now and then look back upon my life and pick out which stories I wish to incorporate into my lifescript. I'm a big believer in retelling the important stories, adding the new ones to them. In no particular order or with any cardinal intent.

• Michelle Googled "Requisite Organization" one day and found my exclamation about finding Jaques for the first time.
• I found J again after, what, ten years?
• Dawn Eden went to a church I recommended and hated it. That led to her posting a series of complaints about them and their fencing the communion table. I responded by writing all the elders at that church, which I considered to be the best PCA church in the States, and by entering into the debate about fencing the communion table. Which led to many things. But it was my "big moment" in blogdom.
• Because of the Dawn Eden thing, I met Alan, who has left comments here now and then.
• Alan and I have mutual friends in Romania, which I discovered when they came over to see L and I described the then recent communion controversy. "Is that Alan ____ at Village?" The world is very small.
• Meeting Alan let me give him what he needed to move into what God wanted him to do. A side benefit was that he more than doubled his base salary. That feels good.
• I connected Big Insurance Group (BIG) with researchers from The Ohio State University and the Sam Walton Center at the University of Arkansas. BIG's IT group had never worked with the Academy before. It's a major accomplishment that will permanently alter the lives of the 9,000 people in the IT function.
• I wrote an article saying that "Christians Suck" and got some good comments from some neat people who were more gracious.
• Through Alan, I met Naga, who opens India up to me. I wonder what it would be like to live outside New Delhi...
• Through Michelle, I met Glenn.
• Glenn and Michelle advertised my RO category page in their newsletters and emails.
• Glenn and Michelle taught me how to do the CIP evaluations.
• Glenn introduced me to Rod in the Dominican Republic.
• Glenn introduced me to Linda, who, it turned out, knew my sister-in-law. The world is very small.
• I found out who Real Live Preacher was before most other people.
• I met APFG through his comments and started talking about his experiences.
• Jason came and started a bit of a stir.
• Jason's comments got a side of APFG to come out that hadn't before and it was very cool.
• Glenn introduced me to Stan Smith, who taught me Human Patterns.
• Glenn introduced me to Jon, who had already been a reader for awhile.
• One of my comments elsewhere was called "the best ever" by a guy who gets a whole lot of comments.
• I met Russell by the grace of God.
• I figured out that I cannot work below my capability, work under a boss smaller than me, engage my work and be happy all at the same time. Maybe I can do one of the first three and be happy. The secret is to not work very hard and not care.
• I am terrible at not caring.
• I am also not that good at not working hard, as surprising as that is to most people.
• There are only a handful of people in the world that I actually care about. Everyone else I just care about as instantiations of my ideas. Hard to learn but another lesson that came from blogging.
• There was nothing that I could have done about the job at INFOSEC. I was never going to succeed and it didn't matter what I did there. I was doomed. Doomed I say!
• The persona that I adopt to write a blog is not really me; it's just a blogging persona. Nothing is said that is really all that personal.
• My biggest search hits were for Witch Hunter Robin (an anime on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim) and "She Male", a topic on which I have never written. WHR beat out She Male by an order of magnitude.
• My favourite search terms were "how to ask someone to sadie hawkins" and "steve roper saunders". Saunders created Chief Yahoo in the 1930s for the Toledo Blade, which after a few of years became Steve Roper and Chief Yahoo and then Steve Roper and then Mike Nomad and Steve Roper. I read Steve Roper faithfully from fifth grade until I went to college. (True story.) I suppose that Saunders really got me with his "sell tomorrow's paper today!" trick.
• My biggest regret is not writing something about how to ask a guy to Sadie Hawkins. It would have actually been useful.
• The blog gets 10x as many hits against the comment cgi (spammers) than against the home page.
• My most popular pages have been those with that bastard Bloated Goat of Despair. This is true across months. What is y'all's fascination with him? He sends his regards, by the way.
• I get about 220 visits per week from "unique IP addresses" to the main page. Add in people who just read feeds and the number is probably about 50 readers a week.
• I am ranked third in Google's results for "Requisite Organization".
• Google ranks my site 6th for Elliott Jaques.
• Google also ranks this as the sixth site for "bloated goat". Which says something.
• I wrote some very interesting stuff about a lot of topics. Which probably puts me firmly into the "diletante" category.
• I finally got JMMJ to rethink his career.
• I learned that I won't placate others even when it's in my self-interest to so do.
• Brian married. Forced me to best man for him. And to deliver my most beloved toast ever. That bastard. And he and Sarah replicated.
• I ushered for John and Julie, too. Even read the scriptures. They have not replicated.
• Of all place, it was at the PowerPoint Church that I wrote my most personal piece, all without intending to. Nothing like being slammed by your emotions while trying to read a part.
• Through Alan, I got invited to do a series of workshops in India. One hour before that performance.
• Having people leave comments was much more exciting that I had imagined. I guess it always feels good to be in a conversation.
• I've already moved my IT and organizational garbage into their new homes.
• Because of some stuff that happened as a result of this blog, there's a whole group of people in a city I'd never really been to who have been switched back on. One of those "I can die; my life is completed" type of experiences.

And I started this to take notes, and to make sense of the job changes that I was going through. Okay, so I had to submit my resignation so that they wouldn't fire me. I only have limited understanding about that situation, even now. But I have some killer notes. Looking back, I'm amazed at some of the stuff I thought I could read and understand. It really does help to be too stupid to know that something can't be done.

I'd usually try and say something meaningful, but I can't think of anything. This past week has taken that out of me. I probably said everything that I had ever wanted to say on Thursday.

Cecil Rhodes had the right idea, my friends. Just wrong purpose. Which makes it even more important to take this site down in a few days.

So.

To the twenty-eight people who left comments, and to the other forty-five readers, thanks for stopping by.

Site Problems: Last Update

Someone at my hosting company made a change in the middle of the day to how the system works. It shouldn't have been a problem and wouldn't have been as bad if they had only told me about it beforehand. They didn't and I ended up losing my database.

For Your Information: I'm using Six Apart's Movable Type blogging server software, with a MySQL backend. I got core dump and several errors from my database:

#1017 - Can't find file: './DATABASENAME/mt_session.frm' (errno: 13)

"#1017 - Can't find file: './DATABASENAME/mt_fileinfo.frm' (errno: 13)

This was the result of file permissions being set wrong. I don't know if it was 600 when it shoul have been 700 but that's what I suspect.

Bloodshot on AccuRadio

AccuRadio has launched an alt.country subschannel, "Insurgent Country", of all Bloodshot Records all the time. The punk rockers' country label has truly become an icon.

Last Call

On 14 April 2005, this site will have been up for two years. That's not a bad run for any publication. Word, the predecessor to Wired, lasted less than a year. (We had all the issues in the office in Brussels oh so long ago.) I figure that it's about time to close up shop under this name and move on.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by.

Beckett's Fade From Grace Goes Miniseries

I wonder if the recent announcement that Beckett Comics' Fade From Grace is a five-issue miniseries stems from the earlier announcement that Beckett's other businesses have been sold to Apprise. Anyway, it's a fairly straight-forward story with Adobe Illustrator generated artwork that does a pretty decent job. Issue 4 has already hit my in-bin but has not made it up on the Beckett Comics website, leading me to believe that the fledging comics publisher will fold. Of course, they have twenty years' experience publishing other fan magazines, including what was a robust sports card related business. Markets are soft, amigos.

The other fact — that no one seems to have news about these guys — also seems interesting. I'm sure that they will make a blurb in The Comics Journal in a few months, well after they have perished. It took me months to hear that CrossGen folded, owing all sorts of people (including talent) cash.

Speaking of TCJ, they have republished some very rare White Boy strips. I've only seen them republished in the Smithsonian collection from twenty or thirty years ago. Stunning line work that makes you regret the demise of newspaper comic strips as a viable pop art form. The lengthy interview with Brian Michael Bendis ("the hardest working man in sequential art") has merit, too. The "best of 2004" list I could do without, but that's just me. TCJ is really an old fart's journal, with way too much attention paid to things that no one really reads. At least it gives me enough in the reviews to understand that certain graphic novels are just going to revolt me. "Piss Christ": already hashed that one to death. Let's move onto something interesting rather than simply reactive.

All my favourite indie artists have gone to minis for their work, meaning that they are entirely unlikely to appear around here. I suppose I can go to Comics Revolution in Evanston, but I just never have a reason to go into Chicago any longer.

Developing an Asberger's Through Emotional Signally

Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker. 2004. The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA.

Another important aspect of conversation that needs to be emphasized is the role of emotional gesturing [e.g., how you and your children are signally to each other what you feel, and regulating each other's catastrophic emotions that way so that neither of you blow up] in simultaneously supporting the creative and the logical and reality-based aspects of language. The continuous flow of emotional gestures provides a constant source of new emotions that can stir the next sequence of ideas and works. In this way, a conversation with a good friend is a shared creative enterprise. That's what makes it so much fun to just hang out and chit-chat. Because some individuals are less comfortable or gifted at expressing a full range of emotional gestures, their conversations often appear more formal and planned. Again this dynamic has been useful in therapuetic work. With children suffering from Asberger's syndrome, for example, we engage them in pleasurable emotional interactions containing more and more novelty and surprise, gradually accentuated, so that they feel secure while experimenting with new eomtional echanges. As we help a child laugh and giggle, and experience a wider range of emotions from coyness and flirtation to curiousity and mild annoyance and assertiveness, we often observe that their spontaneous verbal exchanges become much more creative and humorous. As they become more creative, they also become more capable of making inferences and engaging in higher-level abstract thinking because these also depend on generating new ideas. The key in this process is a caregiver or clinician who can challenge a child gently and gradually to experiment with a continuous flow of a broader range of emotional signals. We have found that direct work with words and concepts divorced from the world of emotional gesturing does not work nearly as well, and sometimes it's counterproductive because it leads the child more into scripts than into spontaneous and creative exchanges. [221-222]

Our rational development is dependent upon emotional play at the very earliest ages, and perhaps is a strong determinant of intelligence.

Nice Introductions

It's always nice to be introduced as "that amazing guy that I've been talking about" or anything close.

"We're off to see the wizard...."

Actually, it's Alan in New York and maybe he's the one who says this line since he used to call me "Morpheus". Long story if you haven't heard it by now.

I'm looking forward to this colloquium on leading cross-cultural change. The focus will really be how to lead multi-national outsourcing projects, with an eye towards the goal of "The US Should Be Selling To India". I've already made it clear that I support the US moving from relationship with China to one with India. But I'm a commie-hating, democracy-loving type of guy.

Interestingly, one of the guys who will be there is outsourcing advertising work to the world, which is frightening Madison Avenue. If he can pull it off (which isn't certain, for a variety of reasons) he will have the hippest, coolest, most internationally-reaching ad agency in the world.

Well, finally meeting Alan will be great after these hours on the phone. I feel like I already know him but Chase assures me he's a hoot to be with.

Eucatastrophe

It's Sunday night. We here at the PowerPoint Church had a prayer vigil, where someone was praying in our "center" (the only building we have) for 24 hours. We're a small church with a good deal of people who are driving in from a dutch community farther south to give us a much needed boost as we begin. Because of what we were supposed to pray for, I was in on the planning and execution. I was to lead the initial praying at a joint meeting on Friday night, man the information desk from midnight to 4 am so no one would be in the center alone, lead the praying on Saturday and then make a statement about the process on Sunday before the service.

Maybe I'm too rationalistic but I didn't expect much. I certainly didn't expect what happened. I'm not telling y'all anything that isn't public knowledge. If you'd showed up at the gymnasium we call "church" on Sundays, or the meeting on Saturday at the center, you'd heard the same thing. I wanted to write it down before I forget, so I can look back and say to myself, "Yep, something indeed happened back then."

I totally forgot about leading the praying on Friday, so I came absolutely unprepared. I've been asked to write the Tennebrae service and that's taken a lot of my thoughts. But I just didn't want to think about it, when it comes down to brass tacks. So I got up at the appointed time and winged it.

Well, not really. I have enough liturgical background to be able to start a long praying time together with some stuff already planned. So I went into whatever it was that I went into to start off the praying. And then I couldn't stand up and I had to grip the music stand in front of me. I asked for a time of confession. Pause. I asked for anyone who wanted to pray about this time, to ask God to bless this time to do so. And they did. About half of all there did. And they blew me away.

No reason to be dooced

Yep, no need to be dooced. And I'm not even employed by anyone else. But remember what happened to Dave when he got hit with what seems like a totally bogus lawsuit? Barristry is much more effective than battery in the States. I'm pretty sure that the latest round of legal reform will only make it harder for me to sue companies, and not for them to badger me in court for ten years, forcing me to escape to a country without an extradition treaty with the US. Unfortunately, only Cuba comes to mind, and I'm such an anti-communist.

So, it's spring cleaning here at the homestead on Al Gore's Internet.

Digital Gallery of the NY Public Library

The New York Public Library has put together an amazing digital gallery of some of their collections. Ooooo.

I recommend the automobile brochures from 1900-1910, partly because some of them are Hoosiers. Yep, back in the day we made some wonderful cars out here in the corn: The American, Haynes ("oldest automobile manufacturers in America"), Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, Cole Motor Car Co., Marmon Motor Car Co., Milburn Wagon Works, Studebaker... Oh, and did I mention Stutz? The A-C-D museum out in Auburn and the Studebaker museum in Indy are both worthwhile from what I recall. Don't know if Kokomo ever put up a exhibition for Haynes or the Appleston Brothers.

A great way to waste a whole afternoon.

US Broadcasters Won't Show the UN's New Ad on Landmines

The United Nations has put together a wonderfully disturbing ad. Apparently, the message is too to the point for Americans. It shows a girls' soccer game where one of the children steps on a landmine. There is mayhem and weeping, followed by "If there were landmines here, would you stand for them anywhere?"

It worked on me. I don't have landmines around me and I don't think about them very often. A friend of mine who has lived in Thailand knows landmines first hand and sees the issue very, very differently. Landmines are not that militarily useful compared to their cost, according to the military historians I heard talk about it. They didn't see the big problem with banning them, but the US no longer wants to ban anything, including torture, which we now subcontract out to other states.

You can view the landmine ad in Quick Time format.

"Bangalore Calling"

You have to admit that the change would make a good remake of the old Clash song. Anyway, it's not Bangalore but some other place. I've been invited to "holiday" in India at an institute there. I'm not sure how this happened. Have a conversation with someone and suddenly they start inviting you to be a part of their program halfway around the world. I've been thinking a great deal about India recently and it makes sense to finally go over and talk with some of the students there. They invited me to a colloquiem out east next week. I'm going to drop the money I don't have to go because, well, it's as good an offer as any I've had and I'll get to meet lots of people in top positions. I wonder what it would be like to be the American running the international team spread all across the world? Kumar says that having an American run the team works best for these cross-cultural teams, partly because Americans are more tolerant of other people. Really. And because we have this attitude of trusting people until they prove to be untrustworthy, a "go ahead and try because what's the worst that can happen" mindset absent in much of the world. Can you imagine a top official in a Chinese province saying that? Or a Russian business leader? In most places, success is the only option for individuals. Succeed or never play again. America is riddled with stories of failure-failure-failure-failure-Success!, including many presidents.

Changes to the Site

I will be making several changes to the site. In light of recent events (separate from stuff related to anything here), I will be moving all restoring this place to what it was originally, which is simply a place for my personal notes and reflections. I will be moving all organization- and IT-related posts to a different site. The posts concerning faith and personal issues, including my reading logs, will remain here. There will be some bleed over between the two, but I believe that this will re-bifurcate my life once again in a way that works for me.

I will not be posting a link to the new corporate site. Most of you who are interested in organizational studies already know who I am. Everyone else will be given a link via email, if I have it. There aren't that many of this type of reader anyway, so I can't imagine that it will be a large move. There are no real readers of anthing IT related so I feel entirely comfortable simply moving them without announcement.

It will obviously take time but I hope to be done within the next two weeks. I will be using a new (to me) open source CMS, which always eats up one's time on the learning curve. Oh, how I miss the days of using NCSA's web server! But that was a decade ago, and two or three careers ago.

(Web site creation, tech writing, IT project management, process redesign & ISO stuff, IT security on the web, whatever it was I did for INFOSEC. Surely that's two or three careers. I only got to "master" level at two, tech writing and IT security, proven by being invited to teach TW at a local extension university and earning my CISSP. BPR and PM was simply stuff that I was better at than everyone else they had. Of course, I'm not sure how good I would be a technical writing any longer. I was always best at speed over accuracy, being able to turn out two to three times as much as my peers — except for Amy over at CNA, who could match me page for page in output and be much more accurate. A better tech writer I've never seen, although Gary came close to her. ITSec is apparently only hard to other people.)

I will probably not announce the final cutover as I will run both concurrently.

Is the Emerging Church simply cohort dynamics?

I wonder if Emerging Church isn't just a function of a baby-bust / boom. It smells a lot like the Jesus Freak stuff, but with intellectualism. I would also bet on post-modernism as a function of reduced opportunity. It's not that intellectuals wouldn't have come up with it. I'm just wondering about the role of "generational" dynamics here.

How does it differ, as a movement, from the rise of Pentacostalism? Or the fundamentalist explosion? It seems to be very much a restoration movement, to restore the Church to some pristine state or states.

I read a bit on the Jesus Freaks. Yes, I know Larry Norman's story about the term starting in NJ as a comment rather than a derisive name. There are some interesting parallels.

I wonder how long the Emerging Church movement resists the "cult" nudge.

Update on my INFOSEC work at BIG work

In a break from writing a series of marketing pieces ("kill me. kill me now. kill me...") I remembered that I wanted to remember something that P, my "I really think you're Str IV because your interviews are so weirdly different from talking to you" pal, sent me an update.As you know, I worked at Big Insurance Group (BIG) for my old employer, INFOSEC. It didn't turn out. To be honest, I pretty much met the initial goals for the 8 month work in 45 days. Nothing will lose like success.