20 Mar, 2010
By Leslie Pratch Henry came into a service firm at age 24 as a manager. The company’s founder and CEO held out the promise of rapid advancement for his most talented employees. Henry did well and in his second year began to display such an interest in and grasp of his boss’s work that when [...]
01 Mar, 2010
By Leslie Pratch Circumventing the Boss Now let’s look at a situation in middle management. Jeff was his boss’s star direct report. He generated useful ideas and his boss, Ken, didn’t mind giving him credit for them. He was grooming Jeff to succeed him and hoped that Jeff’s potential would encourage higher management to promote [...]
20 Feb, 2010
By Leslie Pratch Succession Planning Application The CEO of a medium-sized manufacturing company was preparing for the retirement of an executive vice president (“EVP”). He assembled a group of executives in the company who were potential successors to the EVP. All had been successful up to that point; they had made money for the company [...]
14 Feb, 2010
By Leslie Pratch How Can This Theory Be Applied? Let’s go back and see if this information can help make sense of the problems described at the beginning. Mike’s case is an easy one. He was comfortable in a Stratum IV position because he had reached a cognitive level four. But he had not reached [...]
06 Feb, 2010
By Leslie Pratch Maturation of Cognitive Capability So far, we’ve described a static system. Individuals have a certain level of cognitive power. A job requires a person to have a certain level. Everybody is either at the right level, too high, or too low. But in fact, the system is not static. For one thing, [...]
28 Jan, 2010
By Leslie Pratch Measuring the Individual: Time Horizon As one goes higher in a managerial hierarchy, the most difficult problems grow increasingly complex, and as the complexity of a task increases, so does the complexity of the mental work required to handle it. This complexity, like time span, also occurs in leaps or jumps. In [...]
20 Jan, 2010
By Leslie Pratch How Real Is Time Span? Time span is an objective measurement, like temperature. It can be measured for any task by asking the person responsible for overseeing the work, “What do you want done by when?” Too often, the target time of completion is left tacit or vague, creating anxiety and problems. [...]
08 Jan, 2010
By Leslie Pratch Characteristics of the Work Strata Here are descriptions of the work strata, as Jaques described them in Chapter 3 of Requisite Organization Stratum I (time span: one day to three months). This stratum includes first-line manual and clerical work. A task is assigned in terms of a specific, concrete output. Examples: pack [...]