In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way? Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level …

Insuperordination Read more »

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects. The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. …

Work-in-progress – two more books Read more »

What’s the point of competition, in a business-context? Perhaps more to the point, what is competition in a business-context? And why? Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are …

Competition-against or competition-with? Read more »

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a …

Making plans, sort-of Read more »

One of the points that came up in the previous posts on the management-architecture theme is that most management-structures are top-down, which doesn’t fit well with the ‘everything is just another service’ nature of most service-architectures – especially at a …

Rebalancing top-down management-architectures Read more »

What do I mean when I say that, in a service-oriented architecture of the enterprise, we need to view management and the like as ‘just another service’? This came up in a comment to the previous post ‘Why are the …

Management as ‘just another service’ Read more »

Trust is the core of the enterprise in action. So why do so many businesses and other organisations seem to go out of their way to destroy that trust? And what can we as enterprise-architects do to make it work …

Trust and the enterprise Read more »

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray! 🙂 (I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is …

Yabbies – a novel Read more »

This one’s been brewing for a while, but the final trigger to get it down in writing was a tweet from yesterday evening: RT @vernaallee: RT @timkastelle: Good post & important point by @jorgebarba – It matters how you play …

Strategy, tactics, operations and emotion Read more »

If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with …

Responsibility versus anti-possession as response to disaster Read more »