♟️Strategic Management: The Good (Just the Quotes)

"Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages." (Samuel Johnson, "The Idler", 1801)

"For any manager to utilize graphic methods for visualizing the vital facts of his business, in the first place it must be impressed upon his that the method will produce the results for him and then he must know how to get up a chart correctly, and last, but far from least, he must know what the essential facts of his business are. Charts, in themselves, mean little and like many another force for the accomplishment of good, if misdirected, may result unprofitably." (Allan C Haskell, "How to Make and Use Graphic Charts", 1919)

"The fine art of executive decision consists in not deciding questions that are not now pertinent, in not deciding prematurely, in not making decision that cannot be made effective, and in not making decisions that others should make. Not to decide questions that are not pertinent at the time is uncommon good sense, though to raise them may be uncommon perspicacity. Not to decide questions prematurely is to refuse commitment of attitude or the development of prejudice. Not to make decisions that cannot be made effective is to refrain from destroying authority. Not to make decisions that others should make is to preserve morale, to develop competence, to fix responsibility, and to preserve authority.

From this it may be seen that decisions fall into two major classes, positive decisions - to do something, to direct action, to cease action, to prevent action; and negative decisions, which are decisions not to decide. Both are inescapable; but the negative decisions are often largely unconscious, relatively nonlogical, instinctive, 'good sense'. It is because of the rejections that the selection is good."" (Chester I Barnard, "The Functions of the Executive", 1938)"

"Good management are rarely overcompensated to an extent that makes any significant difference with respect to the stockholder's position. Poor management are always overcompensated, because they are worth less than nothing to the owners." (Benjamin Graham, "The Intelligent Investor", 1949)

"If charts do not reflect actual organization and if the organization is intended to be as charted, it is the job of effective management to see that actual organization conforms with that desired. Organization charts cannot supplant good organizing, nor can a chart take the place of spelling out authority relationships clearly and completely, of outlining duties of managers and their subordinates, and of defining responsibilities." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)

"While good charting will attempt, as far as possible, to make levels on the chart conform to levels of importance in the business enterprise, it cannot always do so. This problem can be handled by clearly spelling out authority relationships." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)

"To say a system is 'self-organizing' leaves open two quite different meanings. There is a first meaning that is simple and unobjectionable. This refers to the system that starts with its parts separate" (so that the behavior of each is independent of the others' states) and whose parts then act so that they change towards forming connections of some type. Such a system is 'self-organizing' in the sense that it changes from 'parts separated' to 'parts joined'. […] In general such systems can be more simply characterized as 'self-connecting', for the change from independence between the parts to conditionality can always be seen as some form of 'connection', even if it is as purely functional […]  'Organizing' […] may also mean 'changing from a bad organization to a good one' […] The system would be 'self-organizing' if a change were automatically made to the feedback, changing it from positive to negative; then the whole would have changed from a bad organization to a good." (W Ross Ashby, "Principles of the self-organizing system", 1962)

"The successful manager must be a good diagnostician and must value a spirit of inquiry." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Psychology", 1965)

"Good mission statements focus on a limited number of goals, stress the company's major policies and values, and define the company's major competitive scopes." (Philip Kotler, "Marketing Management", 1967)

"In most management problems there are too many possibilities to expect experience, judgement, or intuition to provide good guesses, even with perfect information." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Science", 1967)

"Good results without good planning come from good luck, not good management." (David Jaquith, "The Time Trap", 1972

"To be productive the individual has to have control, to a substantial extent, over the speed, rhythm, and attention spans with which he is working […] While work is, therefore, best laid out as uniform, working is best organized with a considerable degree of diversity. Working requires latitude to change speed, rhythm, and attention span fairly often. It requires fairly frequent changes in operating routines as well. What is good industrial engineering for work is exceedingly poor human engineering for the worker." (Peter F Drucker, "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices", 1973)

"Any approach to strategy quickly encounters a conflict between corporate objectives and corporate capabilities. Attempting the impossible is not good strategy; it is just a waste of resources." (Bruce Henderson, Henderson on Corporate Strategy, 1979)

"Executive stress is difficult to overstate when there is a conflict among policy restrictions, near-term performance, long-term good of the company, and personal survival." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"[Organizational] change is intervention, and intervention even with good intentions can lead to negative results in both the short and long run. For example, a change in structure in going from application of one theory to another might cause the unwanted resignation of a key executive, or the loss of an important customer. [...] the factor of change, acts as an overriding check against continual organizational alterations. It means that regardless of how well meant a change is, or how much logic dictates this change, its possible negative effects must be carefully weighed against the hoped-for benefits." (William A Cohen, "Principles of Technical Management", 1980)

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world." (John Updike, "They Thought They Were Better", TIME magazine, 1980)

"Because the importance of training is so commonly underestimated, the manager who wants to make a dramatic improvement in organizational effectiveness without challenging the status quo will find a training program a good way to start." (Theodore Caplow, "Managing an Organization", 1983)

"It seems to me that we too often focus on the inside aspects of the job of management, failing to give proper attention to the requirement for a good manager to maintain those relationships between his organization and the environment in which it must operate which permits it to move ahead and get the job done." (Breene Kerr, Giants in Management, 1985) 

"Managers who are skilled communicators may also be good at covering up real problems." (Chris Argyris, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"Operating managers should in no way ignore short-term performance imperatives [when implementing productivity improvement programs.] The pressures arise from many sources and must be dealt with. Moreover, unless managers know that the day-to-day job is under control and improvements are being made, they will not have the time, the perspective, the self-confidence, or the good working relationships that are essential for creative, realistic strategic thinking and decision making." (Robert H Schaefer, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"Some management groups are not good at problem solving and decision making precisely because the participants have weak egos and are uncomfortable with competition." (Chris Argyris, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"The chain of command is an inefficient communication system. Although my staff and I had our goals, tasks, and priorities well defined, large parts of the organization didn't know what was going on. Frequent, thorough, open communication to every employee is essential to get the word out and keep walls from building within the company. And while face-to-face communication is more effective than impersonal messages, it's a good idea to vary the medium and the message so that no one (including top management) relies too much on ''traditional channels of communication." (William H Peace, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"The source of good management is found in the imagination of leaders, persons who form new visions and manifest them with a high degree of craft. The blending of vision and craft communicates the purpose. In the arts, people who do that well are masters. In business, they are leaders." (Henry M. Boettinger, Harvard Business Review on Human Relations, 1986)

"Employees are most apt to deal with their problems when they believe that they will be helped in good faith." (Paul V Lyons, "Management", 1987)

"Good people can fix a lot of flaws in poor planning, but it's never the other way around." (Roland Shmitt, "Government Executive", 1987)

"Some people are excited about learning a new piece of software. Other people get very depressed. Good managers anticipate both situations they involve the persons to be affected in the process of selecting a particular program, and they provide time and resources for training. Training is the key in both cases." (Jonathan P Siegel, "Communications", 1988)

"Pressure can also make managers act out of character. Degrees of panic will cause a normally good manager to lose self-confidence and focus. Under stress, even a good plan can be abandoned." (Wheeler L Baker, "Crisis Management: A Model for Managers", 1993)

"Managers must clearly distinguish operational effectiveness from strategy. Both are essential, but the two agendas are different. The operational agenda involves continual improvement everywhere there are no trade-offs. Failure to do this creates vulnerability even for companies with a good strategy. The operational agenda is the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practice. In contrast, the strategic agenda is the right place for defining a unique position, making clear trade-offs, and tightening fit. It involves the continual search for ways to reinforce and extend the company’s position. The strategic agenda demands discipline and continuity; its enemies are distraction and compromise." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different. Operational effectiveness is about things that you really shouldn't have to make choices on; it's about what's good for everybody and about what every business should be doing. " (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"An effective leader leaves a legacy; they leave their footprints on the road for others to follow. A good leader develops themselves and they develop others. They bring people together rather than divide them." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Good leaders are ethical, responsible and effective. Ethical because leadership connects you to others through shared values. Responsible because leadership means self-development and not simply giving orders, however charismatically, to get others to do what you want. Effective because shared values and goals give the strongest motivation for getting tasks done. There are no guarantees, but this sort of leadership will bring you closer to people and give you the greatest chance of success." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Managing [...] used to be about planning and control. Top management decided what was to be done, middle management worked out how to do it and everyone else did as they were told. This model assumed, of course, that top management knew what needed to be done, that the orders had time to percolate their way down and that, like a good army, the lower ranks would obey." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens, people feel centered and that gives their work meaning." (Warren Bennis, "Managing People Is Like Herding Cats", 1999)

"Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping." (Dee Hock, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", 1999)

"Data have to be filtered in some manner to make them intelligible. This filtration may be based upon a person's experience plus his presuppositions and assumptions, or it may be more formalized and less subjective, but there will always be some method of analysis. If experience is the basis for interpreting the data, then the interpretation is only as good as the manager's past experience. If the current situation is outside the manager’s experience, then his interpretation of the data may well be incorrect. Likewise, flawed assumptions or flawed presuppositions can also result in flawed interpretations. However, in the absence of formal and standardized data, most managers use the scat-of-the-pants approach. and in the end, about all they can say that some days appear to be better than others." (Donald J Wheeler," Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos" 2nd Ed., 2000)

"I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"Project failures are not always the result of poor methodology; the problem may be poor implementation. Unrealistic objectives or poorly defined executive expectations are two common causes of poor implementation. Good methodologies do not guarantee success, but they do imply that the project will be managed correctly." (Harold Kerzner, "Strategic Planning for Project Management using a Project Management Maturity Model", 2001)

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter." (Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", 2005)

"Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles." (Anthony Daniels, "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy", 2006)

"Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the company's operating model. The operating model is the desired state of business process integration and business process standardization for delivering goods and services to customers." (Peter Weill, "Innovating with Information Systems Presentation", 2007)

"Whereas strategy is abstract and based on long-term goals, tactics are concrete and based on finding the best move right now. Tactics are conditional and opportunistic, all about threat and defense. No matter what pursuit you’re engaged in - chess, business, the military, managing a sports team - it takes both good tactics and wise strategy to be successful." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates Chess", 2007)

"A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business." (Bill Gates, "Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy", 2009)

"A good strategy is one that takes into account not only the requirements of the position, but also the opponent's strategy and tactics. Strategy lies between science and art. It supports the ability to evaluate positions, recognize patterns and imagine adequate plans." (Mihai Suba, "Dynamic Chess Strategy", 2010)

"And even if we make good plans based on the best information available at the time and people do exactly what we plan, the effects of our actions may not be the ones we wanted because the environment is nonlinear and hence is fundamentally unpredictable. As time passes the situation will change, chance events will occur, other agents such as customers or competitors will take actions of their own, and we will find that what we do is only one factor among several which create a new situation." (Stephen Bungay, "The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results", 2010)

"Almost by definition, one is rarely privileged to 'control' a disaster. Yet the activity somewhat loosely referred to by this term is a substantial portion of Management, perhaps the most important part. […] It is the business of a good Manager to ensure, by taking timely action in the real world, that scenarios of disaster remain securely in the realm of Fantasy." (John Gall, "The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small"[Systematics 3rd Ed.], 2011)

"Clearly, total feedback is Not a Good Thing. Too much feedback can overwhelm the response channels, leading to paralysis and inaction. Even in a system designed to accept massive feedback" (such as the human brain), if the system is required to accommodate to all incoming data, equilibrium will never be reached. The point of decision will be delayed indefinitely, and no action will be taken." (John Gall, "The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small"[Systematics 3rd Ed.], 2011)

"Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, 'vision', planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011)

"Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while strategy is undoubtedly a good thing to have, it is a hard thing to get right. […] So what turns something that is not quite strategy into strategy is a sense of actual or imminent instability, a changing context that induces a sense of conflict. Strategy therefore starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different." (Lawrence Freedman, “Strategy: A history”, 2013)

"You can only look so far, and so you better just keep looking frequently. That’s the most important element of strategy: You understand the direction you’re going, but you also know what you’re going to do in the next six months. Most companies will do a pretty good job many times about the direction, but then they never break it down to shorter metrics. Intel did a super job on that. When you ask why [we] succeeded, this is one of the reasons." (Les Vadasz, 2013)

"Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others." (Nigel Cumberland, "Secrets of Success at Work: 50 techniques to excel", 2014)

"Good governance is less about structure and rules than being focused, effective and accountable." (Pearl Zhu,  "Digitizing Boardroom: The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards", 2016)

"Good mission statements have five major characteristics. (1) They focus on a limited number of goals. (2) They stress the company’s major policies and values. (3) They define the major competitive spheres within which the company will operate. (4) They take a long-term view." (5) They are as short, memorable, and meaningful as possible." (Philip Kotler & Kevin L Keller, "Marketing Management" 15th Ed., 2016)

"No methodology can guarantee success. But a good methodology can provide a feedback loop for continual improvement and learning." (Ash Maurya, "Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth", 2016)

"Decision trees are considered a good predictive model to start with, and have many advantages. Interpretability, variable selection, variable interaction, and the flexibility to choose the level of complexity for a decision tree all come into play." (Ralph Winters, "Practical Predictive Analytics", 2017)

"Random forests are essentially an ensemble of trees. They use many short trees, fitted to multiple samples of the data, and the predictions are averaged for each observation. This helps to get around a problem that trees, and many other machine learning techniques, are not guaranteed to find optimal models, in the way that linear regression is. They do a very challenging job of fitting non-linear predictions over many variables, even sometimes when there are more variables than there are observations. To do that, they have to employ 'greedy algorithms', which find a reasonably good model but not necessarily the very best model possible." (Robert Grant, "Data Visualization: Charts, Maps and Interactive Graphics", 2019)

"If you do not conduct sufficient analysis and if you do not have firm technical knowledge, you cannot carry out improvement or standardization, nor can you perform good control or prepare control charts useful for effective control." (Kaoru Ishikawa)

"The traditional approach to leadership values decision-making conviction and consistency; good leaders 'stick to their guns'. By contrast, the emerging approach recognizes that in fast-changing environments, decisions often need to be reversed or adapted, and that changing course in response to new information is a strength, not a weakness. If this tension is not managed wisely, leaders run the risk of seeming too rigid, on the one hand, or too wishy-washy on the other." (Jennifer Jordan et al, "Every Leader Needs to Navigate These 7 Tensions", Harvard Business Review, 2020)

♟️Strategic Management: The Bad (Just the Quotes)

"To say a system is 'self-organizing' leaves open two quite different meanings. There is a first meaning that is simple and unobjectionable. This refers to the system that starts with its parts separate" (so that the behavior of each is independent of the others' states) and whose parts then act so that they change towards forming connections of some type. Such a system is 'self-organizing' in the sense that it changes from 'parts separated' to 'parts joined'. […] In general such systems can be more simply characterized as 'self-connecting', for the change from independence between the parts to conditionality can always be seen as some form of 'connection', even if it is as purely functional […]  'Organizing' […] may also mean 'changing from a bad organization to a good one' […] The system would be 'self-organizing' if a change were automatically made to the feedback, changing it from positive to negative; then the whole would have changed from a bad organization to a good." (W Ross Ashby, "Principles of the self-organizing system", 1962)

"The definition of a problem and the action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals or groups that discovered the problem have of the system to which it refers. A problem may thus find itself defined as a badly interpreted output, or as a faulty output of a faulty output device, or as a faulty output due to a malfunction in an otherwise faultless system, or as a correct but undesired output from a faultless and thus undesirable system. All definitions but the last suggest corrective action; only the last definition suggests change, and so presents an unsolvable problem to anyone opposed to change." (Herbert Brün, "Technology and the Composer", 1971)

"The dogma of delegation is simple - the Sixth Truth of Management again: either the delegatee is capable of running the operation successfully by himself or he isn't. This handy formula relieves the top executive of any responsibility except that of finding, supervising, and" (at the appropriate time) moving the men who are doing all the work. He Can then truly manage by exception: he does not get worked up over operations that are going well, but concentrates on the plague spots, where everything, including the management, is going badly." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)

"Managers sometimes justify the stick by pointing to better results, with the assumption that the threats caused the improvements. Alas, this is unlikely. One event coming before another does not automatically mean that the first is the cause of the second; the rooster does not make the sun rise every morning, although it may think it does. Bad results are much more likely to improve than get worse due to the simple law of statistics known as regression: results average out over time. Poor performance will eventually improve even when left to itself." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Managers are incurably susceptible to panacea peddlers. They are rooted in the belief that there are simple, if not simple-minded, solutions to even the most complex of problems. And they do not learn from bad experiences. Managers fail to diagnose the failures of the fads they adopt; they do not understand them. […] Those at the top feel obliged to pretend to omniscience, and therefore refuse to learn anything new even if the cost of doing so is success." (Russell L Ackoff, "A Lifetime Of Systems Thinking", Systems Thinker, 1999)

"It’s tempting to view the multitude of monster projects gone bad as anomalies, excrescences of corporate and government bureaucracies run amok. But you will find similar tales of woe emerging from software projects big and small, public and private, old and new. Though details differ, the pattern is depressingly repetitive: Moving targets. Fluctuating goals. Unrealistic schedules. Missed deadlines. Ballooning costs. Despair. Chaos." (Scott Rosenberg, "Dreaming in Code", 2007)

"A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business." (Bill Gates, "Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy", 2009)

"A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011)

"A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge. It is not defined by the pay grade of the person authorizing the action." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"Our minds, especially our intuitions, are not equipped to deal with a probabilistic world. Risk and prediction are widely misunderstood, […] All decision making in a probabilistic world involves estimating the likelihood of an event and how much we will value it" (affective forecasting). Humans are bad at both - ​​​​​ particularly at the former. […] In business, understanding the psychology of risk is more important than understanding the mathematics of risk." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change",  2015)

"The bad news is that companies tend to focus on three out of the four elements of the balanced scorecard and emphasis is skewed away from the customer component, which is the least understood and believed by many to be the least quantifiable." (Alan Pennington, "The Customer Experience Book", 2016)

♟️Strategic Management: The Ugly (Just the Quotes)

"The concept of leadership has an ambiguous status in organizational practice, as it does in organizational theory. In practice, management appears to be of two minds about the exercise of leadership. Many jobs are so specified in content and method that within very broad limits differences among individuals become irrelevant, and acts of leadership are regarded as gratuitous at best, and at worst insubordinate." (Daniel Katz & Robert L Kahn, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966)

"Planning and management by objectives have their point as devices for compelling thought, so long as executives don't forget that any plan worth making is inaccurate; the longer a plan takes to write, the worse it is - just because of its consumption of time. And the more they change plans to suit events, the better they will manage - if you've made a mistake, you had better admit it." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)

"[...] when a variety of tasks have all to be performed in cooperation, synchronization, and communication, a business needs managers and a management. Otherwise, things go out of control; plans fail to turn into action; or, worse, different parts of the plans get going at different speeds, different times, and with different objectives and goals, and the favor of the 'boss' becomes more important than performance." (Peter F Drucker, "People and Performance", 1977)

"The first rule is that a measurement - any measurement - is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. […] If you do not systematically collect and maintain an archive of indicators, you will have to do an awful lot of quick research to get the information you need, and by the time you have it, the problem is likely to have gotten worse." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The obsession with methodologies in the workplace is another instance of the high-tech illusion. It stems from the belief that what really matters is the technology. [...] Whatever the technological advantage may be, it may come only at the price of a significant worsening of the team's sociology." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)

"Managers sometimes justify the stick by pointing to better results, with the assumption that the threats caused the improvements. Alas, this is unlikely. One event coming before another does not automatically mean that the first is the cause of the second; the rooster does not make the sun rise every morning, although it may think it does. Bad results are much more likely to improve than get worse due to the simple law of statistics known as regression: results average out over time. Poor performance will eventually improve even when left to itself." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"A blame culture is corrosive, eroding the team ethos that is vital for success. If they fear that they will be pilloried or punished for their mistakes, your colleagues will start worrying more about how to protect their back than doing what’s best for the team and wider organization. In the worst cases, this can even lead to lying, setting up fall guys, and other dysfunctional behavior." (Paul Butcher, "Debug It! Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code", 2009)

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while strategy is undoubtedly a good thing to have, it is a hard thing to get right. […] So what turns something that is not quite strategy into strategy is a sense of actual or imminent instability, a changing context that induces a sense of conflict. Strategy therefore starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different." (Lawrence Freedman, “Strategy: A history”, 2013) 

"Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others." (Nigel Cumberland, "Secrets of Success at Work: 50 techniques to excel", 2014)

"The passage of time and the action of entropy bring about ever-greater complexity - a branching, blossoming tree of possibilities. Blossoming disorder" (things getting worse), now unfolding within the constraints of the physics of our universe, creates novel opportunities for spontaneous ordered complexity to arise." (D J MacLennan, "Frozen to Life", 2015)

♟️Strategic Management: Relationships (Just the Quotes)

"The insights gained and garnered by the mind in its wanderings among basic concepts are benefits that theory can provide. Theory cannot equip the mind with formulas for solving problems, nor can it mark the narrow path on which the sole solution is supposed to lie by planting a hedge of principles on either side. But it can give the mind insight into the great mass of phenomena and of their relationships, then leave it free to rise into the higher realms of action." (Carl von Clausewitz, "On War", 1832)

"An Organization Chart is a cross section picture covering every relationship in the bank. It is a schematic survey showing department functions and interrelations, lines of authority, responsibility, communication and counsel. Its purpose is 'to bring the various human parts of the organization into effective correlation and co-operation'." (John W Schulze, "Office Administration", 1919)

"The pattern of personal characteristics of the leader must bear some relevant relationship to the characteristics, activities, and goals of the followers. [...] It becomes clear that an adequate analysis of leadership involves not only a study of leadership but also of situations." (R M Stodgill, "Journal of Psychology", 1948)

"The most elementary aspect of administration is organization the structure of social institutions and their constituent parts, the composition of economic enterprises and their various branches, the organization of governmental agencies and their numerous departments. As it is mainly a matter of structure, organization bears the same rudimentary relationship to administration as does the science of anatomy or skeletology to the field of medicine. An administrative organization can be sketched and charted just as the human body can be physically depicted. Apart from its graphic convenience and its 'teachable' quality, however, what intrinsic relationship does organization bear to administration?" (Albert Lepawsky, "Administration: the art and science of organization and management", 1949)

"Organization planning is the process of defining and grouping the activities of the enterprise so that they may be most logically assigned and effectively executed. It is concerned with the establishment of relationships among the units so as to further the objectives of the enterprise." (Ernest Dale, "Planning and developing the company organization structure", 1952)

"[...] authority - the right by which superiors are able to require conformity of subordinates to decisions - is the basis for responsibility and the force that binds organization together. The process of organizing encompasses grouping of activities for purposes of management and specification of authority relationships between superiors and subordinates and horizontally between managers. Consequently, authority and responsibility relationships come into being in all associative undertakings where the superior-subordinate link exists. It is these relationships that create the basic character of the managerial job." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)

"If charts do not reflect actual organization and if the organization is intended to be as charted, it is the job of effective management to see that actual organization conforms with that desired. Organization charts cannot supplant good organizing, nor can a chart take the place of spelling out authority relationships clearly and completely, of outlining duties of managers and their subordinates, and of defining responsibilities." (Harold Koontz & Cyril O Donnell, "Principles of Management", 1955)

"It is probable that one day we shall begin to draw organization charts as a series of linked groups rather than as a hierarchical structure of individual 'reporting' relationships." (Douglas McGregor, "The Human Side of Enterprise", 1960)

"Linking the basic parts are communication, balance or system parts maintained in harmonious relationship with each other and decision making. The system theory include both man-machine and interpersonal relationships. Goals, man, machine, method, and process are woven together into a dynamic unity which reacts." (George R Terry, "Principles of Management", 1960)

"The leadership and other processes of the organization must be such as to ensure a maximum probability that in all interactions and all interactions and all relationships with the organization each member will, in the light of his background, values, and expectations, view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains his sense of personal worth and importance." (Rensis Likert, "New patterns of management", 1961)

"In some firms role relationships prescribed by the chart seemed to be of secondary importance to personal relationships between individuals." (Joan Woodward, Industrial Organization: Theory and practice", 1965)

"In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system." (Jay W Forrester, "Urban dynamics", 1969)

"The systems approach to problems focuses on systems taken as a whole, not on their parts taken separately. Such an approach is concerned with total - system performance even when a change in only one or a few of its parts is contemplated because there are some properties of systems that can only be treated adequately from a holistic point of view. These properties derive from the relationship between parts of systems: how the parts interact and fit together." (Russell L Ackoff, "Towards a System of Systems Concepts", 1971) 

"Managing upward relies on informal relationships, timing, exploiting ambiguity, and implicit communication. And the irony of it all is that these most subtle skills must be learned and mastered by younger managers who not only lack education and directed experience in benign guerilla warfare but are further misguided by management myths which contribute to false expectations and a misleading perception of reality." (Richard T Pascale & Anthony G Athos, "The Art of Japanese Management", 1981)

"Every company has two organizational structures: the formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday living relationship of the men and women in the organization." (Harold Geneen & Alvin Moscow, "Managing", 1984)

"Most managers are reluctant to comment on ineffective or inappropriate interpersonal behavior. But these areas are often crucial for professional task success. This hesitancy is doubly felt when there is a poor relationship between the two. [...] Too few managers have any experience in how to confront others effectively; generally they can more easily give feedback on inadequate task performance than on issues dealing with another's personal style." (David L Bradford & Allan R Cohen, "Managing for Excellence", 1984)

"It seems to me that we too often focus on the inside aspects of the job of management, failing to give proper attention to the requirement for a good manager to maintain those relationships between his organization and the environment in which it must operate which permits it to move ahead and get the job done." (Breene Kerr, Giants in Management, 1985) 

"Operating managers should in no way ignore short-term performance imperatives [when implementing productivity improvement programs.] The pressures arise from many sources and must be dealt with. Moreover, unless managers know that the day-to-day job is under control and improvements are being made, they will not have the time, the perspective, the self-confidence, or the good working relationships that are essential for creative, realistic strategic thinking and decision making." (Robert H Schaefer, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"Architecture is defined as a clear representation of a conceptual framework of components and their relationships at a point in time […] a discussion of architecture must take into account different levels of architecture. These levels can be illustrated by a pyramid, with the business unit at the top and the delivery system at the base. An enterprise is composed of one or more Business Units that are responsible for a specific business area. The five levels of architecture are Business Unit, Information, Information System, Data and Delivery System. The levels are separate yet interrelated. [...] The idea if an enterprise architecture reflects an awareness that the levels are logically connected and that a depiction at one level assumes or dictates that architectures at the higher level." (W Bradford Rigdon, "Architectures and Standards", 1989)

"Leadership is always dependent upon the context, but the context is established by the relationships." (Margaret J Wheatley, "Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World", 1992)

"Although the concept of an enterprise architecture (EA) has not been well defined and agreed upon, EAs are being developed to support information system development and enterprise reengineering. Most EAs differ in content and nature, and most are incomplete because they represent only data and process aspects of the enterprise. […] An EA is a conceptual framework that describes how an enterprise is constructed by defining its primary components and the relationships among these components." (M A Roos, "Enterprise architecture: definition, content, and utility", Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, 1994)

"Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships - marriages, families, and organizations of every kind - together." (Stephen Covey, "First Things First", 1994)

"A strategy is a set of hypotheses about cause and effect. The measurement system should make the relationships (hypotheses) among objectives" (and measures) in the various perspectives explicit so that they can be managed and validated. The chain of cause and effect should pervade all four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"[Schemata are] knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information." (Paul J DiMaggio, "Culture and Cognition", Annual Review of Sociology No. 23, 1997)

"The Enterprise Architecture is the explicit description of the current and desired relationships among business and management process and information technology. It describes the 'target' situation which the agency wishes to create and maintain by managing its IT portfolio." (Franklin D Raines, 1997)

"Leadership has long been associated with authority - we tend to concentrate on the leader, to think of them as innately superior in some way, and take the followers for granted. But formal authority is only one possible part of leadership. Many leaders do not have it. In some cases, perhaps ‘companionship’ better describes the relationship between leader and followers." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"An information system architecture typically encompasses an overview of the entire information system - including the software, hardware, and information architectures" (the structure of the data that systems will use). In this sense, the information system architecture is a meta-architecture. An enterprise architecture is also a meta-architecture in that it comprises many information systems and their relationships (technical infrastructure). However, because it can also contain other views of an enterprise - including work, function, and information - it is at the highest level in the architecture pyramid. It is important to begin any architecture development effort with a clear definition of what you mean by 'architecture'." (Frank J Armour et al, "A big-picture look at enterprise architectures", IT professional Vol 1" (1), 1999)

"Enterprise architecture is a family of related architecture components. This include information architecture, organization and business process architecture, and information technology architecture. Each consists of architectural representations, definitions of architecture entities, their relationships, and specification of function and purpose. Enterprise architecture guides the construction and development of business organizations and business processes, and the construction and development of supporting information systems." (Gordon B Davis, "The Blackwell encyclopedic dictionary of management information systems"‎, 1999)

"The key element of an organization is not a building or a set of policies and procedures; organizations are made up of people and their relationships with one another. An organization exists when people interact with one another to perform essential functions that help attain goals." (Richard Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2002)

"Organization charts are subject to important limitations. A chart shows only formal authority relationships and omits the many significant informal and informational relationships." (Harold Koontz and Heinz Weihrich, "Essentials Of Management", 2006)

"Enterprise architecture is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise's future state and enable its evolution. The scope of the enterprise architecture includes the people, processes, information and technology of the enterprise, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment. Enterprise architects compose holistic solutions that address the business challenges of the enterprise and support the governance needed to implement them." (Anne Lapkin et al, "Gartner Clarifies the Definition of the Term 'Enterprise Architecture", 2008)

"Systems thinking is a mental discipline and framework for seeing patterns and interrelationships. It is important to see organizational systems as a whole because of their complexity. Complexity can overwhelm managers, undermining confidence. When leaders can see the structures that underlie complex situations, they can facilitate improvement. But doing that requires a focus on the big picture." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2008)

"One advantage that decision tree modeling has over other pattern recognition techniques lies in the interpretability of the decision model. Due to this interpretability, information relating to the identification of important features and interclass relationships can be used to support the design of future experiments and data analysis." (S D Brown, A J Myles, in Comprehensive Chemometrics, 2009)

♟️Strategic Management: Relations (Just the Quotes)

"The art of management has been defined, 'As knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way.' No concise definition can fully describe an art, but the relations between employers and men form without question the most important part of this art. In considering the subject, therefore, until this part of the problem has been fully discussed, the remainder of the art may be left in the background." (Frederick W Taylor, "Shop Management", 1903)

"The writer has found, in analyzing and diagnosing organization and accounting work, that charts can express more on one page than is sometimes expressed in several chapters of writing, and has been the author and originator of many methods of charting industrial expressions. It is necessary, as a first step, for analytical and other purposes, to make a chart expressing all of the relations governing the organization of a business so as to show the very foundation upon which all authorities, accounting, and business transactions are based and conducted. There have been more failures scored both personally and financially for lack of these very elements in a business than by reason of any other one thing. As well try to build a house without a foundation as to try to conduct a business, especially a manufacturing business, without proper organization." (Clinton E Woods, "Organizing a factory", 1905)

"The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism." (Philip Selznick, "Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation", 1957) 

"The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization." (Paul Hersey & Kenneth H Blanchard, "Management of Organizational Behavior", 1972)

"The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system [...] simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems." (Jerry Fodor, "Modularity of Mind", 1983)

"The formal structure of a decision problem in any area can be put into four parts: (1) the choice of an objective function denning the relative desirability of different outcomes; (2) specification of the policy alternatives which are available to the agent, or decisionmaker, (3) specification of the model, that is, empirical relations that link the objective function, or the variables that enter into it, with the policy alternatives and possibly other variables; and (4) computational methods for choosing among the policy alternatives that one which performs best as measured by the objective function." (Kenneth Arrow, "The Economics of Information", 1984)

"Culture [is] a pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)

"Action often creates the orderly relations that originally were mere presumptions summarized in a cause map. Thus language trappings of organizations such as strategic plans are important components in the process of creating order. They hold events together long enough and tightly enough in people's heads so that they act in the belief that their actions will be influential and make sense." (Karl E Weick, "Organizational culture as a source of high reliability", 1987)

"Formulation of a mathematical model is the first step in the process of analyzing the behaviour of any real system. However, to produce a useful model, one must first adopt a set of simplifying assumptions which have to be relevant in relation to the physical features of the system to be modelled and to the specific information one is interested in. Thus, the aim of modelling is to produce an idealized description of reality, which is both expressible in a tractable mathematical form and sufficiently close to reality as far as the physical mechanisms of interest are concerned." (Francois Axisa, "Discrete Systems" Vol. I, 2001)

🤖〽️Prompt Engineering: Copilot Unabridged (Part 40: How Disruptive Is AI as a Technology?)

Prompt Engineering Series

Prompt: "write a blogpost of 600 words on how disruptive is AI as technology"

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most transformative and disruptive technologies of the modern era. It is reshaping industries, automating processes, and redefining human interactions with machines. While AI brings efficiency, innovation, and economic growth, it also raises concerns about job displacement, ethical dilemmas, and security risks. Understanding AI’s disruptive nature is crucial for navigating its impact on society.

1. AI’s Disruption Across Industries

AI is revolutionizing multiple sectors, leading to both opportunities and challenges:

• Healthcare: AI-powered diagnostics improve accuracy, but automation may reduce the need for human radiologists and pathologists.
• Finance: AI-driven trading algorithms optimize investments, yet they also introduce risks of market instability.
• Retail: AI personalizes shopping experiences, but automation threatens traditional retail jobs.
• Manufacturing: AI-powered robotics enhance efficiency, yet they replace human labor in factories.

AI’s ability to streamline operations and reduce costs makes it highly disruptive, forcing industries to adapt or risk obsolescence.

2. AI’s Impact on Employment and Workforce Dynamics

One of AI’s most significant disruptions is its effect on employment. While AI creates new job opportunities in data science, AI development, and cybersecurity, it also eliminates traditional roles in sectors like customer service, transportation, and manufacturing.

• Automation replaces repetitive tasks, reducing demand for human workers.
• AI-driven hiring processes change recruitment dynamics, making job searches more competitive.
• Reskilling becomes essential, as workers must adapt to AI-integrated industries.

Governments and businesses must invest in workforce retraining to mitigate AI-induced unemployment.

3. AI’s Ethical and Security Challenges

AI’s disruptive nature extends beyond economics - it raises ethical concerns and security risks:

• Bias in AI algorithms: AI models trained on biased data can reinforce discrimination in hiring, healthcare, and law enforcement.
• Privacy concerns: AI-driven surveillance and data collection raise questions about personal security.
• Cybersecurity threats: AI-powered hacking tools exploit vulnerabilities, making digital security more complex.

Without strong ethical guidelines and security measures, AI’s disruption could lead to unintended consequences.

4. AI’s Role in Decision-Making and Governance

AI is increasingly used in government policies, legal judgments, and corporate strategies, raising concerns about autonomy and accountability:

• AI-driven governance: Governments use AI for predictive policing and policy analysis, but transparency is crucial.
• AI in legal systems: AI assists in legal research, yet its role in judicial decisions remains controversial.
• AI-powered corporate decision-making: Businesses rely on AI for strategic planning, but human oversight is necessary.

Balancing AI automation with human judgment is essential for ethical governance.

Conclusion: AI’s Disruption Requires Responsible Management

AI is undeniably disruptive, reshaping industries, employment, ethics, and governance. While its advancements bring efficiency and innovation, they also introduce challenges that require proactive solutions. Governments, businesses, and researchers must develop ethical AI policies, invest in workforce adaptation, and ensure AI remains a tool for progress rather than an unchecked force.

Disclaimer: The whole text was generated by Copilot at the first attempt. This is just an experiment to evaluate feature's ability to answer standard general questions, independently on whether they are correctly or incorrectly posed. Moreover, the answers may reflect hallucinations and other types of inconsistent or incorrect reasoning.

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post

🤖〽️Prompt Engineering: Copilot Unabridged (Part 37: How AI Can Increase Unemployment)

Prompt Engineering Series

Prompt: "write a blogpost of 600 words on how AI can increase unemployment"

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming industries, automating processes, and reshaping the global workforce. While AI offers efficiency and innovation, it also presents significant risks to employment, potentially leading to widespread job displacement. As AI-driven automation replaces human labor, concerns about unemployment, economic inequality, and workforce adaptation continue to grow.

1. AI-Driven Job Displacement

One of the most immediate ways AI increases unemployment is through automation, where machines and algorithms replace human workers. Industries most affected include:

• Manufacturing: AI-powered robotics reduce the need for factory workers.
• Retail and customer service: AI chatbots and self-checkout systems replace human employees.
• Finance: AI automates investment decisions, reducing demand for financial analysts.

A report by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2030, up to 375 million workers worldwide may need to switch occupations due to automation.

2. AI’s Impact on Low-Skilled Jobs

AI disproportionately affects low-skilled and repetitive jobs, making it harder for workers in these roles to transition to new employment. Examples include:

• Warehouse workers replaced by AI-driven logistics systems.
• Data entry clerks replaced by automated processing software.
• Truck drivers replaced by autonomous vehicles.

Without proper workforce retraining, AI-induced unemployment could widen economic inequality.

3. AI’s Role in Economic Inequality

AI benefits corporations that can afford advanced automation, but it disadvantages smaller businesses and low-income workers. AI-driven automation:

• Increases profits for large corporations, widening the gap between wealthy and struggling businesses.
• Reduces wages for workers, as AI replaces human labor.
• Limits economic mobility, making it harder for displaced workers to find new opportunities.

Without proper regulation, AI could exacerbate income inequality, leading to social unrest and economic polarization.

4. AI’s Influence on Hiring Practices

AI-powered recruitment platforms streamline hiring but also eliminate human judgment, leading to:

• Automated resume screening, which may overlook unconventional career paths.
• AI-driven hiring biases, reinforcing discrimination in employment decisions.
• Reduced personal engagement, making job seekers feel disconnected from employers.

While AI improves efficiency, it removes the human element from hiring, making employment less accessible.

5. AI’s Role in Financial Market Instability

AI-driven algorithms dominate stock trading, investment strategies, and financial predictions. While AI enhances efficiency, it also introduces risks:

• AI-powered trading systems can trigger market crashes due to rapid, automated decision-making.
• AI-driven financial models may misinterpret economic trends, leading to poor investment choices.
• Over-reliance on AI in banking could create vulnerabilities in financial security.

AI’s influence on financial markets requires strict oversight to prevent economic instability.

Conclusion: AI’s Economic Risks Require Careful Management

While AI offers efficiency and innovation, its negative economic impact - job displacement, inequality, financial instability, and hiring biases - must be addressed. Governments, businesses, and researchers must develop policies that balance AI’s benefits with economic sustainability, ensuring AI serves society rather than disrupting it.

Disclaimer: The whole text was generated by Copilot at the first attempt. This is just an experiment to evaluate feature's ability to answer standard general questions, independently on whether they are correctly or incorrectly posed. Moreover, the answers may reflect hallucinations and other types of inconsistent or incorrect reasoning.

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post

#️⃣Software Engineering: Mea Culpa (Part VII: A Look Forward)

Software Engineering Series

I worked for more than 20 years in various areas related to ERP systems - Data Migrations, Business Intelligence/Analytics, Data Warehousing, Data Management, Project Management, (data) integrations, Quality Assurance, and much more, having experience with IFS IV, Oracle e-Business Suite, MS Dynamics AX 2009 and during the past 3-7 years also with MS Dynamics 365 Finance, SCM & HR (in that order). Much earlier, I started to work with SQL Server (2000-2019), Oracle, and more recently with Azure Synapse and MS Fabric, writing over time more than 800 ad-hoc queries and reports for the various stakeholders, covering all the important areas, respectively many more queries for monitoring the various environments. 

In the areas where I couldn’t acquire experience on the job, I tried to address this by learning in my free time. I did it because I take seriously my profession, and I want to know how (some) things work. I put thus a lot of time into trying to keep actual with what’s happening in the MS Fabric world, from Power BI to KQL, Python, dataflows, SQL databases and much more. These technologies are Microsoft’s bet, though at least from German’s market perspective, all bets are off! Probably, many companies are circumspect or need more time to react to the political and economic impulses, or probably some companies are already in bad shape. 

Unfortunately, the political context has a broad impact on the economy, on what’s happening in the job market right now! However, the two aspects are not the only problem. Between candidates and jobs, the distance seems to grow, a dense wall of opinion being built, multiple layers based on presumptions filtering out voices that (still) matter! Does my experience matter or does it become obsolete like the technologies I used to work with? But I continued to learn, to keep actual… Or do I need to delete everything that reminds the old?

To succeed or at least be hired today one must fit a pattern that frankly doesn’t make sense! Yes, soft skills are important though not all of them are capable of compensating for the lack of technical skills! There seems to be a tendency to exaggerate some of the qualities associated with skills, or better said, of hiding behind big words. Sometimes it feels like a Shakespearian inaccurate adaptation of the stage on which we are merely players.

More likely, this lack of pragmatism will lead to suboptimal constructions that will tend to succumb under their own structure. All the inefficiencies need to be corrected, or somebody (or something) must be able to bear their weight. I saw this too often happening in ERP implementations! Big words don’t compensate for the lack of pragmatism, skills, knowledge, effort or management! For many organizations the answer to nowadays problems is more management, which occasionally might be the right approach, though this is not a universal solution for everything that crosses our path(s).

One of society’s answers to nowadays’ problem seems to be the refuge in AI. So, I wonder – where I’m going now? Jobless, without an acceptable perspective, with AI penetrating the markets and making probably many jobs obsolete. One must adapt, but adapt to what? AI is brainless even if it can mimic intelligence! Probably, it can do more in time to the degree that many more jobs will become obsolete (and I’m wondering what will happen to all those people). 

Conversely, to some trends there will be probably other trends against them, however it’s challenging to depict in clear terms the future yet in making. Society seems to be at a crossroad, more important than mine.

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post

🧮ERP: Implementations (Part XVIII: The Price of Partnership)

ERP Implementations Series

When one proceeds on a journey, it’s important to have a precise destination, a good map to show the road, the obstacles ahead, and help to plan the journey, good gear, enough resources to make it through the journey, but probably more important, good companions and ideally guides who can show the way ahead and offer advice when needed. This is in theory the role of a partner, and on such coordinates should be a partnership based upon. However, unless the partners pay for the journey as well, the partnership can come with important costs and occasionally more overhead than needed. 

The traveler’s metaphor is well suited to ERP implementations and probably many other projects in which the customer doesn’t have the knowledge about the various aspects of the project. The role of a partner is thus multifold, and it takes time for all the areas to be addressed. Typically, it takes years for such a relationship to mature to the degree that it all develops naturally, at least in theory. Conversely, few relationships can resist in time given the complex challenges resulting from different goals and objectives, business models, lack of successes or benefits.

Usually, a partnership means sharing the risks and successes, but more importantly, building a beneficial bidirectional relationship from which all parties can profit. This usually means that the partner provides a range of services not available in-house, allowing customers to pull resources and knowledge on a need-by basis, providing direction and other advice whenever is needed. A partner can help if it has the needed insight into the business, and this implies a minimum of communication in respect to business decisions, strategies, goals, objectives, requirements, implications, etc. 

During sales pitches and other meetings, many service providers assume themselves the role of partners, however between their behavior and the partner role is usually a considerable gap that often may seem impossible if not difficult to bridge. It’s helpful to define as part of the various contracts the role of partnership, respectively the further implications. It’s helpful to have a structure of bidirectional bonuses and other benefits that would help to strengthen the bond between organizations. A framework for supporting the partnership must be built, and this takes time to be implemented adequately. 

Even if some consultants are available from the early stages of the partnership, that’s typically the exception and not the norm. It’s typical for resources to be involved only for the whole duration of a project or less. Independently of their performance, the replacement of resources in projects is unavoidable and must be addressed adequately, with knowledge transfer and all that belongs to such situations. Moreover, it needs to be managed adequately by the serve provider, however resources can’t be replaced as the parts of an engine. The planning and other activities must consider and accommodate such changes.

Also the replacement of partners in mid of the project is possible and this option should be considered as exception in projects and planned accordingly. The costs of working with partners can be high and therefore organizations should consider the alternatives. Bringing individual resources in projects and even building long-term relationships with them can prove to be a cost-effective alternative. Even if such partnerships are more challenging to manage, the model can offer other advantages that compensate for the overhead of managing them.

Outsourcing resources across geographies or mixing models can work as well. Even if implementations usually don’t allow for experiments, they can still be a feasible alternative. The past successes and failures are usually a good measure of what works and doesn't for organizations. 

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post 

🧮ERP: Implementations (Part XI: Tales from the Crypt)

ERP Implementations Series

One can seldom meet more frighteningly strange stories than the ones told by people who worked in ERP implementations. Such projects attempt to model an organization’s main functions and processes, independently on whether the focus is on production, finance, supply chain, services, projects or human resources. Because they tend to touch all important aspects of a business, such projects become so complex and political that they are often challenging to manage and occasionally are predestined to failure by design.

For the ones who never participated in an ERP implementation, imagine an average project and the number of challenges associated with it, and multiply it by 10 or a similar number that reflects the increase in complexity with the translation to broader scales. The jump in complexity can be compared with the jump from putting together a bed after a scheme to building a whole house using the same level of detail. The scale can further increase by moving from a house to a whole building or a complex of residential houses. Even if that’s technically achievable, a further challenge is how to build all this in a short amount of time, with minimal costs and acceptable quality levels.

With the increase of scale, imagine the amount of planning and coordination that needs to be achieved to avoid any delays. Even if many plan with the "first-time right" objective in mind, inherent issues are often unavoidable, and an organization’s agility can be measured on how robustly it can handle the foreseeable and unforeseeable challenges altogether. Of course, there are many approaches that allow one to minimize, defer or share the risks, or even opportunities, though there’s usually an important gap between one’s planning and reality!

This doesn’t mean that such projects are unmanageable! Everything can be managed to some level of detail and within some tolerance margins, however many organizations are tempted to answer complexity with complexity, and that’s seldom the right approach! Ideally, complexity should be broken down to manageable parts, though that’s challenging to do when one doesn’t know what is being done. That’s why many organizations search for partners with which to share the risks and success, though that works if the customer, and its partners can stir the same ship toward common destinations, at least for the main itinerary if not for the whole duration of the trip.  

Unfortunately, as happens in partnerships that diverge toward distinct goals, the misalignment and other similar factors resulting from this divergence can lead to further challenges that increase the complexity of ERP implementations even more. Ideally, a partner should behave like the mechanics at a pitstop, though that’s utopic especially when they must be always available and this for the whole duration of the project. So, all parties need to compromise somehow, and, even if there are general recipes that can be used, it’s challenging to make everybody happy!

Often in an ERP implementation is defined from the beginning whose needs are the most important, and from there one can build a whole hierarchy of scenarios, models and analyses that should show the right path(s). There’s a lot of knowledge that can be carried out between projects, respectively, between the different phases of a project, though there will always be surprises and one should be prepared for them! Same as the captain must occasionally change the course to avoid or fight storms or other hazards, so must the corresponding structure act when this is the case! Occasionally, each team member may be in the position to act like a captain and raise to expectations, though project designs must allow for this!

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post

🗄️Data Management: Data Governance (Part III: Taming the Complexity)

Data Management Series

The Chief Data Officer (CDO) or the “Head of the Data Team” is one of the most challenging jobs because is more of a "political" than a technical role. It requires the ideal candidate to be able to throw and catch curved balls almost all the time, and one must be able to play ball with all the parties having an interest in data (aka stakeholders). It’s a full-time job that requires the combination of management and technical skillsets, and both are important! The focus will change occasionally in one direction more than in the other, with important fluctuations. 

Moreover, even if one masters the technical and managerial aspects, the combination of the two gives birth to situations that require further expertise – applied systems thinking being probably the most important. This, also because there are so many points of failure that it's challenging to address all the important causes. Therefore, it’s critical to be a system thinker, to have an experienced team and make use adequately of its experience! 

In a complex word, in which even the smallest constraint or opportunity can have an important impact especially when it’s involved in the early stages of the processes taking place in organizations. It relies on the manager’s and team’s skillset, their inspiration, the way the business reacts to the tasks involved and probably many other aspects that make things work. It takes considerable effort until the whole mechanism works, and even more time to make things work efficiently. The best metaphor is probably the one of a small combat team in which everybody has their place and skillset in the mechanism, independently if one talks about strategy, tactics or operations. 

Unfortunately, building such teams takes time, and the more people are involved, the more complex this endeavor becomes. The manager and the team must meet somewhere in the middle in what concerns the philosophy, the execution of the various endeavors, the way of working together to achieve the same goals. There are multiple forces pulling in all directions and it takes time until one can align the goals, respectively the effort. 

The most challenging forces are the ones between the business and the data team, respectively the business and data requirements, forces that don’t necessarily converge. Working in small organizations, the two parties have in theory more challenges to overcome the challenges and a team’s experience can weight a lot in the process, though as soon the scale changes, the number of challenges to be overcome changes exponentially (there are however different exponential functions in which the basis and exponent make the growth rapid). 

In big organizations can appear other parties that have the same force to pull the weight in one direction or another. Thus, the political aspects become more complex to the degree that the technologies must follow the political decisions, with all the positive and negative implications deriving from this. As comparison, think about the challenges from moving from two to three or more moving bodies orbiting each other, resulting in a chaotic dynamical system for most initial conditions. 

Of course, a business’ context doesn’t have to create such complexity, though when things are unchecked, when delays in decision-making as well as other typical events occur, when there’s no structure, strategy, coordinated effort, or any other important components, the chances for chaotic behavior are quite high with the pass of time. This is just a model to explain real life situations that seem similar on the surface but prove to be quite complex when diving deeper. That’s probably why a CDO’s role as tamer of complexity is important and challenging!

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post

🗄️Data Management: Data Governance (Part I: No Guild of Heroes)

Data Management Series

Data governance appeared around 1980s as topic though it gained popularity in early 2000s [1]. Twenty years later, organizations still miss the mark, respectively fail to understand and implement it in a consistent manner. As usual, the reasons for failure are multiple and they vary from misunderstanding what governance is all about to poor implementation of methodologies and inadequate management or leadership. 

Moreover, methodologies tend to idealize the various aspects and is not what organizations need, but pragmatism. For example, data governance is not about heroes and heroism [2], which can give the impression that heroic actions are involved and is not the case! Actions for the sake of action don’t necessarily lead to change by themselves. Organizations are in general good at creating meaningless action without results, especially when people preoccupy themselves, miss or ignore the mark. Big organizations are very good at generating actions without effects. 

People do talk to each other, though they try to solve their own problems and optimize their own areas without necessarily thinking about the bigger picture. The problem is not necessarily communication or the lack of depth into business issues, people do communicate, know the issues without a business impact assessment. The challenge is usually in convincing the upper management that the effort needs to be consolidated, supported, respectively the needed resources made available. 

Probably, one of the issues with data governance is the attempt of creating another structure in the organization focused on quality, which has the chances to fail, and unfortunately does fail. Many issues appear when the structure gains weight and it becomes a separate entity instead of being the backbone of organizations. 

As soon organizations separate the data governance from the key users, management and the other important decisional people in the organization, it takes a life of its own that has the chances to diverge from the initial construct. Then, organizations need "alignment" and probably other big words to coordinate the effort. Also such constructs can work but they are suboptimal because the forces will always pull in different directions.

Making each manager and the upper management responsible for governance is probably the way to go, though they’ll need the time for it. In theory, this can be achieved when many of the issues are solved at the lower level, when automation and further aspects allow them to supervise things, rather than hiding behind every issue. 

When too much mircomanagement is involved, people tend to busy themselves with topics rather than solve the issues they are confronted with. The actual actors need to be empowered to take decisions and optimize their work when needed. Kaizen, the philosophy of continuous improvement, proved itself that it works when applied correctly. They’ll need the knowledge, skills, time and support to do it though. One of the dangers is however that this becomes a full-time responsibility, which tends to create a separate entity again.

The challenge for organizations lies probably in the friction between where they are and what they must do to move forward toward the various objectives. Moving in small rapid steps is probably the way to go, though each person must be aware when something doesn’t work as expected and react. That’s probably the most important aspect. 

So, the more functions are created that diverge from the actual organization, the higher the chances for failure. Unfortunately, failure is visible in the later phases, and thus self-awareness, self-control and other similar “qualities” are needed, like small actors that keep the system in check and react whenever is needed. Ideally, the employees are the best resources to react whenever something doesn’t work as per design. 

Previous Post <<||>> Next Post 

Resources:
[1] Wikipedia (2023) Data Management [link]
[2] Tiankai Feng (2023) How to Turn Your Data Team Into Governance Heroes [link]