Transcript review

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- Time span of discretion as a tool for job evaluation just doesn't work. Elliot Jackson's discovery of the time element in work is of great significance. But as a practical tool in organizational design or job evaluation, my own experience has made me doubtful that it works.

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- Jerry Cranus is the CEO of the Levinson Institute and have been since 1990. His route towards getting to know Elliot Jackson was circuitous. He says his interest has always been in systems. In 1990 he decided to refocus the Institute on the leadership system.
- Paul Tillich: I have two photographs of myself with two of the three most important mentors in my life. The first is with Harry Levinson. Levinson created what is generally accepted modern knowledge about enlightened leadership. But their relationship gradually became more and more strained.
- At the core of what we do and my book, Accountability Leadership, is 90% Elliot Jacks. He is a man of brilliance that's unparalleled in the field of leadership. It's about both keeping your word, no surprises, and earning your keep.
- The next area in which Elliott left people to their own devices is the basis for effectiveness appraisal. The basic construct that we've ended up with in the last three or four years has just been very powerful. Clients are now beginning to use it as a basis for differential compensation.
- The final area in which I believe we've made great progress has been in the development of software. We're now working on a third generation of what I think will be the be all and the end all, and we're planning to build it as a product.
- Three years ago, Dennis Turkat, the CEO of Algoma Steel, engaged the Levinson Institute to assess his company, assess its talent and completely change its culture. With the Honeywell model, organizations that need to make rapid, dramatic changes in structure and personnel can make significant, lasting and enduring change.

- Early 90s. We had 92 different nationalities on staff. It took a bit of time to introduce some of these concepts. Some of the more difficult ones were to bring them along. It probably took longer than it would in any for profit organization.

- The three levels of requisite organization comprises three levels. The conceptual framework is the system of concepts that we use to understand the phenomena that we study. What the conceptual framework does for us is it helps us make sense of the data that we collect.

- The two main actors, the investment institutions and the corporate managements, are each under great, almost irresistible pressure to perform in the shorter term. Only exceptional firms can resist it.

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- The greatest value I've derived from Requisite organization is that I believe it's one of the most same making approaches to individual and organizational development. Our effort must therefore be directed towards making hierarchies better able to serve social and psychological as well as economic needs.

- Alf Rock is part of IBM Global Services' transformation and optimization practice. He says technologists are more architecturally inclined to looking at levels and layers in terms of OSI technology models. But when you throw technology at a sociocultural structure that is not congruent, it slides off.
- We're moving towards a purposeful, rule based culture where project managers don't turn up. Social technologies reconcile the required level of parallelism to execute. The most difficult thing in the game because who understands people is the people stream deliver that.

- It's a great honor to be back in Argentina. My wife Cynthia and I spent a good part of four years here in the early, early ninety s. Argentina has been at the forefront of experimenting and applying the principles of requisite organization and organizational design.
- The twin forces of needing, on the one hand, creative initiative and on the other, needing to maintain control are responsible for management fads. In developing requisite organization, Elliot Jacks created a leadership system that captures the basis of accountability and creativity simultaneously.
- Managers need to hold their subordinates accountable for both for what they do and how well they do it. Employees must be held accountable for performance and effectiveness. Earning one's keep is not something that can be measured, but it can be judged.
- If we try to box in people too much, we essentially rob them of the opportunity and the pleasure of adding significant value. How do we create clarity about what one is accountable for? By defining outputs clearly how much? How? When? By when?
- Elliot Jacks discovered an underlying property of structure in all managerial systems across the world. He also developed an architectural set of principles about the different functions that are necessary to conduct business. This is really about the system. It's about how do we engage people and align people.
- Well, this becomes extremely important as we're trying to align our pool of talent with our models of the organization required for strategy in two and five and ten and 20 years. And now, coming up with true strategic alignment is no longer a mystery. It's no longer witchcraft or black art. It is a straightforward, rational process.

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- Jack Fallow: As my 6th year studying business, the first I ever heard anything that made sense to me. Steve Clement: I was the translator for Elliot Wilford's work both in the army and CRA. George Riley: The first testable proposition I had in the management field was Katie Burke. Tell when it hit you.
- Ron Cappell first came across Elliot Jack's work in 1988. Ricardo Gutierrez translated General Theory of Bureaucracy two years later. Peter Koflowitz discovered Elliot Jacks while teaching at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology.
- Paul Holmstrom recalls meeting Elliot Jakes in early 90s. He says Jakes insulted Whirlpool by saying they were not Requisite. Rolf Lundgren taught Brander how Requisite works. Brander says it was the most exasperating experience of his career.
- Don Folk first met Elliot Jackson in 1993 when he was a business unit manager for a Fortune 500 company. Jackson's ideas for bringing science into management were not clear at all how to put them into practice. In 1995 Jackson joined the Levinson Institute and has been working with time spin ever since.
- Maria Raquel Popovich: I was starting my PhD, and any theory is useful. What is relationship between CEO and corporate governance? All these people in the network helped me to understand the theory and to complete the PhD.
- Sandy Cardillo: Training and development is my third career. In her first career she was a family consumer scientist, traveling jewelry buyer. Cardillo is fascinated by Elliot's methodology and how he developed his thinking. She says it is like the perfect use of grounded theory.

- Thinking of as an exploration. So we'd like this to be a dialogue. We're going to propose some things. I've always found it fascinating, this separation between business and human resource stuff. There's a lot of interesting dichotomies to manage around this.
- HR work at level four and level five is often not clearly articulated and not clearly understood. Many organizations do not appreciate that there is such a thing as four and five. Even if they do, it is very difficult to find a qualified four level capacity person to fill the roles.
- HR has a huge component of their work, which is straight service delivery. On the other hand, HR has a significant, I think, stewardship role. A lot of this stewardship work enters into this whole realm of governance. Getting clarity around HR would go a long way to elevating and supporting the type of work.
- A lot of HR folks have said in the last while what we really need to be is strategic partners. One of the key questions I would have, and it's back to the is yes, but what does the line client want from you?
- To be successful, to move beyond the traditional range in HR is that you have to be what he calls now a credible activist. Most HR people can't do that because they don't understand anything about business. The work of HR is either not clear to HR itself or clear alignment between between HR and the client.

- My comments are of an entirely different nature, and they come kind of takes off from Catherine's comments this morning thing. And I just want to give you my own it's really my own personal journey on the topic of the presentation.
- In part, he's looking at the prevalent use of personality tests for recruitment. Two thirds of them are with insurance agents who are in business for themselves. There are many ways of coming to value the work and the role.
- In accountability, the key relationship aspect is will I be considered acceptable? Catherine: There's quite a texture to values. This stuff applies to when you're inside an organization, it applies to your work outside. The question is its relevance inside the organization.
- The key point in this is accountability. It takes a culture only changes when there's something. It's bumping into something in the environment that's forcing a change. A manager holding me to account for a certain type of behavior makes me value that behavior.
- So for me, I've got a fair amount of green in my culture. When I explain levels theory or whatever, I just need to do it in a context that matches that in my organization. If I'm trying to explain hierarchies in a green culture, I need to be much more cognizant of where people are coming from.
- My view is that you just have to not actually present that piece of work in a different way. If you're working in an orange culture, you somehow got a link alignment to success. You need to put a lot of structure around your alignment session.

- In our first conference in 2005, we had a session on measuring and researching what we do. The potential for being able to track various important indicators related to HR and other things that may be very interesting. But despite it being online, inexpensive, fairly easy to do, our consultants companies are not yet hitting on it.
- A task should account for 5% or more of someone's work. The average we find is ten or twelve. Where task alignment is important is in situations where there's lack of clarity between stratum one and stratum two work. Potential annual cost savings works out to about $10,000 per professional.
- We've got 23 research projects that are going into the book. The single most important factor in organization design is the manager direct report relationship. The third one is financial performance. There is a huge potential for improvement in organizations.
- Time span correlates very highly with other job evaluation systems. The advantage of time span is that you've got clear boundaries. The bulk of clients have not taken time span as their new job evaluation system. There is no relationship between span of control and employee satisfaction.
- A better manager direct report alignment leads to a better relationship with manager. Research shows that the relationship with the manager is related to customer satisfaction, financial performance. There are some specific things that are doable to make those situations different and better.
- In terms of our work, we do use compensation, but we don't use Felt Fair pay. When we go into an organization and do an assessment, we like the idea of having converging data to understand the roles.

- The author talks about strategic uncertainty and approaches to strategic uncertainty. Many organizations failures were all the more nearly complete precisely because their strategies were so great. The future was fundamentally uncertain in ways that there was simply no way to define.
- From a behavioral perspective success and failure are in fact twins. High commitment positions are also systematically associated with mere total failure. The resolution of the strategy paradox is to separate the making of strategic commitments from the management of strategic uncertainty.
- Things about Time Rising is related to an archetypal hierarchy. The core of that assistant I believe lies in finding a way to separate making strategic commitments from managing strategic uncertainty. How do you commit but remain adaptable?
- We need to separate ourselves from the notion that strategy is exclusively about commitment. At the lower levels, with the shorter time horizons, there is fundamentally less strategic uncertainty. As you move up this hierarchy, you do in fact, have to make strategic commitments in the face of uncertainty.
- When organizations are forced to think exclusively about the short term they do not manage the strategic uncertainty they face. Each operating division is forced to manage the trade off between risk and uncertainty itself. My hope is that by applying the principles of requisite organization in a slightly altered form something that I call requisite uncertainty.