Talking About Organizations Podcast

Join Miranda as she summarizes our discussion with Professor Henry Mintzberg - the author of Simply Managing (2013). If you are looking for a brief overview of Henry's scholarship in general and of this book in particular, this summary is for you! Please share and get more people Talking About Organizations!

A very exciting episode featuring Prof Henry Mintzberg! In this conversation we discussed Simply Managing (2013), which is an updated study of managers conducted by Henry Mintzberg based on observing 29 managers at all levels of organizations across a range of industries and organizational structures: business, government, healthcare, and pluralistic organizations such as museums and NGO’s. It is condensed version of his earlier book - Managing, which was published in 2009. Both books address management as it is actually practiced, which Henry found to be quite different from how management scholars write about it. Simply Managing is designed to be of greatest use to practitioners, with an entertaining style and lots of boldface type to emphasize key points clearly.

In Part 2 of the episode we go through the book in a more systematic way, discussing gossip, technology and some of the interpretative models proposed by the book. At the end of the episode Henry once more outlines his views on management and education.

Sit down with us for a conversation with Henry Mintzberg about management and Simply Managing!

A very exciting episode featuring Prof Henry Mintzberg! In this conversation we discussed Simply Managing (2013), which is an updated study of managers conducted by Henry Mintzberg based on observing 29 managers at all levels of organizations across a range of industries and organizational structures: business, government, healthcare, and pluralistic organizations such as museums and NGO’s. It is condensed version of his earlier book - Managing, which was published in 2009. Both books address management as it is actually practiced, which Henry found to be quite different from how management scholars write about it. Simply Managing is designed to be of greatest use to practitioners, with an entertaining style and lots of boldface type to emphasize key points clearly.

Part 1 of the episode is a more general discussion about management and key concepts covered in the book. Tune in to hear from the author himself and to learn from the human encyclopedia of management that is Henry Mintzberg!

Summary of our discussion of Banana Time (1959) by Donald F. Roy. This paper looks at how individuals, and groups of individuals, motivate and mentally stimulate themselves in the conduct of very monotonous work. Some of the key themes we covered during the full episode are: group dynamics, scientific management, importance and role of play, social cohesion, experience of time, and monotony, back then as well as right now.

A full house of management theory, Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interactions, is a classic ethnographic text set against the backdrop of a Tayloristic organization. The author, Donald Roy, provides an account of what it was like to work there for two months all the while dealing with extreme monotony, fatigue and multiculturalism.

While this work is not particularly 'heavy' in terms of theory and postulations, Roy alludes to, directly or indirectly (usually the latter) to such themes as Scientific Management, esprit de corps, Hawthorne Studies, motivation and self-actualization, time and motion studies, humour, play, and lived experience of time. Needless to say, this is an amazing text well-worth reading and re-reading.

Our very first Special episode has arrived! Join Dmitrijs and Ralph as they talk to Professors Paul Duguid of UC, Berkeley and Emma Bell of Open University about things like learning, education, unconferences, power and norms, race and gender, MOOC's, and, most of all, about whether conferences are well suited to do what they are supposed to do!

Paul Duguid and Emma Bell are exceptional scholars and fantastic people, so we really cannot recommend this conversation highly enough! Paul is most famous for shaping our understanding of how information is socially subjective, and Emma is doing some excellent work on media, power and this exciting concept of 'unconferences'.

This episode took place during the OLKC 2016 conference in St Andrews, Scotland and we thank Gail Greig, Kevin Orr and Christopher Mueller of Saint Andrews University, as well as the OLKC Board, for hosting it.

In this Summary of Episode 11, our resident High Reliability expert, Dr Ralph Soule, gives an overview of the context, the study and some of the key problems facing high-risk and high-reliability approaches to organizational design.

Ralph mentions that Bierly and Spender (1995) provide a description of submariner culture and how it comes about through formal in informal practices. The author’s note that submariner’s culture is risk-averse, shared between different ships, and the result of constant training in theory, operations, and responding to emergencies. The training emphasizes specific terminology, communication behaviors, formal hierarchy, and detailed knowledge of system design and performance. This is followed by Ralph drawing on his own extensive scientific and applied knowledge of operating high-risk systems to add that nuclear operator culture has many components not mentioned by Bierly and Spender such as:

* Balancing strict compliance with orders and procedures with questioning attitude

* Balancing respect for authority and knowledge with watch team backup

* Transparency (internal and external assessments and audits, letters to the Admiral)

* Critiques (where much tacit knowledge and assumptions are revealed, but often not written down)

* High standards for technical skill (certifications and training)

* Articulation of operator principles

* Standard operation procedures

If you would like to hear more from Ralph, or about High Reliability in general, do listen to our full episode. For those wishing to learn more, we are going to have another episode on High Reliability (Episode 21) with US Navy Admiral (retired) Tom Mercer.

Continuing on with our discussion of High Reliability Organizing with resident expert Dr Ralph Soule. In the final part we go into more detail on how High Reliability can be applied to other organizations, the role of culture and technology.

Join us for Episode 11 as we go into High Reliability Organizing (HRO) with this key 1995 article from the Journal of Management. HRO is a specialist sub-field in organization theory focused on the development of processes and mechanisms that remove and reduce instances of organizational failure. This is quite a big deal as organizations most usually operating HRO principles are nuclear reactors and propulsion, chemical processing, space operations and various forms of infrastructure! With the help of our resident High Reliability expert Ralph Soule we make sense of what HRO is and what role organizational culture plays in it!

Join us as we conclude our discussion of this amazing film that is 12 Angry Men! In part two we delve into knowledge and epistemology, power, motivation and leadership (among many other exciting areas). We also continue tracing themes from the film to our past episodes, including Scientific Management of F.W. Taylor, Motivation theories of Abraham Maslow and Elton Mayo, Organization theory of Chester Barnard and authority theory of Max Weber!