OrgIntelligence Quotes

"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things." (Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974)

"Not all the smart people work for you." (Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems)

"To read the history of modern intelligence failures is to get the nagging feeling that men at the top are often out of touch, that good intelligence is difficult to come by and enormously difficult to listen to; that big decisions are very delicate but not necessarily deliberative; that sustained good judgement is rare. Bemoaning the decline of meaningful action, T.S. Eliot once spoke of a world that ends 'not with a bang but a whimper'. What we have to fear is that the bang will come, preceded by the contemporary equivalent of the whimper - a faint rustle of paper as some self-convinced chief of state, reviewing a secret memo full of comfortable rationalizations just repeated at the final conference, fails to muster the necessary intelligence and wit and miscalculates the power and intent of his adversaries." (Harold Wilensky, Organizational Intelligence, 1967)

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." (Ludwig Wittgenstein 1946)

"If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things." (Larry Page, January 2013)

Organizational Intelligence Forum - Spring 2013

In association with Unicom, I am trying to put together an Organizational Intelligence Forum, possibly on April 25th to coincide with the Performance Management Forum.

Unicom is also planning another Enterprise Architecture Forum in London on March 21st. These generally attract a good audience of senior IT management from blue chip organizations. At the previous Forum in September, we had case studies from finance, oil and higher education. Anyone wishing to present a case study at the next event, please contact me or Unicom.

Those outside the UK may wish to plan a trip to London to coincide with these events.

These events are part-funded by commercial sponsorship and vendor exhibitions. Please contact me or Unicom for a vendor information pack.

OrgIntelligence Blogs

Blogposts on the OrgIntelligence topic appear on various blogsites. I have now created a consolidated feed for all blogposts on this topic.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/orgintelligence

On this page, you will also find instructions for subscribing on a range of web-based news readers. Alternatively, if you wish to receive new blogposts by email, please register with Feedblitz.

http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=871334

The following graphic shows the last five headlines.

Organizational Intelligence eBook

I have put a draft of my Organizational Intelligence book onto the @LeanPub platform. This is now available in PDF, ePUB and MOBI.

http://leanpub.com/orgintelligence

I'm also hoping to get a draft of my Business Architecture book up soon, but this is going to take a bit longer because of the large number of diagrams.

If you work for a large company and can claim the book on expenses, please consider paying the full price. Otherwise, early readers can get the book for $15, paid via PayPal. LeanPub takes a small cut and I get the rest.

The idea of the LeanPub platform is to provide financial and moral support to authors during the development process. A variable pricing scheme encourages readers to subscribe to a book at an early stage and get full access to the book as it develops. I'm also hoping to get a lot of detailed questions, comments and suggestions.


Many thanks to Tom Graves for introducing me to LeanPub. As he states in his blog on Publishing Tetradian e-Books via LeanPub, there are a few constraints and minor bugs in the platform at present; so if you are thinking of using it, please feel free to talk to Tom or myself.

Organizational Intelligence Workshop Dates 2012

We have four dates planned for 2012. Also available as in inhouse (customized) workshop, which can be combined with an assessment of the current state of your organization and the development of an action plan.

1 March 2012
31 May 2012
20 September 2012
22 November 2012

Public courses are at Unicom's offices in Uxbridge, Middlesex. Booking and detailed course description via Unicom. http://unicom.co.uk/orgintelligence

See also comments from previous delegates

Organizational Intelligence Workshop November 24th

Our next one-day workshop on Organizational Intelligence will be run on November 24th, and will be preceded by a two-day Business Architecture Bootcamp. Location probably West London (location tba). .

• Business Architecture Bootcamp, November 22nd-23rd
• Organizational Intelligence, November 24th

See also comments from previous delegates.

Workshop recommendations

Here are some of the comments from previous workshops

"I found this course to contain a high density of interesting, useful and new ideas from a teacher who has some depth. I would recommend it to people interested in improving their organization."	Tom Gilb  teacher author consultant [wikipedia blog @imtomgilb]
"Do you care if your organization is intelligent? If you do and are in UK, attend one of @richardveryard seminars on organizational intelligence."	Carmen A. Medina  former CIA Director for the Center for the Study of Intelligence [blog @milouness]
"The workshop was very useful and fits in closely with the work we are developing here particularly in relation to segmentation and customer intelligence."	Paul Johnson  Mersey Travel
"The workshop in December was extremely valuable and as a result of the experience I was able to place some of the organisational development issues we're facing at Durham Constabulary into a different context."	Paul Unsworth  Durham Constabulary

For future dates and bookings, please visit http://unicom.co.uk/orgintelligence/