Category: Articles
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Empowerment or “Shifting the Burden?”
In the last few years, the nation’s largest hotel chains have loosened the reins on employees. The industry, which was badly overbuilt in the…
Unlocking Organizational Routines That Prevent Learning
Organizational life is awash with incongruities. In one organization the CEO told the world, “Product X is our top priority,” even as the development…
Using “Growth and Underinvestment” for Capital Planning
The book The Day the Universe Changed tells of a man who once commented to the philosopher Wittgenstein that medieval Europeans must have been…
Individual and Team Empowerment: Human Dynamics at Digital
The meeting was in full swing. Key players from management, technical leadership, engineering, and marketing had assembled to discuss several critical strategic product decisions.
Delays-Making the Invisible Visible
At one point in the book The Machine that Changed the World (Womack, Jones, and Roos, 1990), the authors compare the way cars are…
A Systemic Look at Tax Reform
There are four questions to ask about any new tax proposal. Will it be simple? Will it be fair? Will it raise enough money…
The Organizational Learning Goal at Ford’s EFHD
Electrical and Fuel Handling (EFHD), the smallest division at Ford Motor Company, employs about 7,000 people and does approximately $1.5 billion in sales annually.
School Vouchers: Another Form of “Success to the Successful”
I don’t know how any parent could stand to send his or her child off to a crumbling, dirty school with underpaid teachers and…
The Tragedy of Our Times
Gordon Brown, former dean of the MIT School of Engineering, used to say, “To be a great teacher is to be a prophet —…
Creating the World Anew
In May I had the honor to give a talk at a major international conference on systems approaches to management in Vienna, as part…