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Category Archives: Management

Leadership 7s – Episode 1 – S01E01

03 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by Martyn Jones in business strategy, Good Strategy, Information Management, IT strategy, leadership, Leadership 7s, Management, project management

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Leadership 7s S01E01

This is the first in a series of management talking points. The name Leadership 7s has been influenced by the great game of rugby, which is was the emblematic game of my youth and a passion of the home country of my Mom and Dad, Wales.

In fact, much of what I learned about leadership in my formative years came from fundamentally social influences such as rugby union.

So, today I want to address seven talking points that deal with aspects of leadership, coaching and management.

Lions led by donkeys: Intense mediocrity in uncool Britannia

02 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Martyn Jones in 4th generation Data Warehousing, behaviour, deceit, Good Strategy, goodstrat, influencers, IT strategy, leadership, Management, Process, project management, Stories, Strategy, tactics

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” — Andrew Carnegie, American Businessman and Philanthropist

Why is it the case that in order to become a successful manager in the UK that one must embrace parochial miserableness, abject meanness and byzantine nastiness?

More to the point, why has management in the UK become a politically barren, ethically bereft and dehumanising game of intense mediocrity?

Continue reading →

The Digital Document Lifecycle

01 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Martyn Jones in data architecture, Data governance, data management, ECM, good start, Good Strat, Good Strategy, governance, Management, Martyn Jones, Martyn Richard Jones, Uncategorized

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Tags

Content Management, ECM, Good Strat, Martyn Jones, Strategy

The Digital Document Lifecycle

MARTYN RICHARD JONES

To begin at the beginning

This is a story of the life of a digital document. Its purpose is to explain the process of analysing, designing, building, testing and delivering content rich business artefacts in today’s digital age.

Continue reading →

Strategic Fit – Function Drives Form

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Architecture, awareness, Management, Strategy

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Tags

accountability, awareness, business analysis, constraints, Data Warehouse, modelling, opportunities, organisational awareness, Strategy

Strategic fit express the degree to which an organization is matching its resources and capabilities with the opportunities in the external environment.

The matching takes place through the practice of pre-strategy analysis.

That stated, it is very easy to fall into the trap of simplifying the high level concepts and overstating the intricacies and interdependence of strategic-fit factors. Continue reading →

The Great Information Struggle: Us and Them

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Architecture, Assets, business, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Management, Value

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Big Data, Business, business intelligence, Data Marts, enterprise data warehousing, hadoop, information management, knowledge, knowledge management, Risk Management

In the dim and distant past most organisations struggled along with what they euphemistically referred to as Information Systems.

They were Information Systems with no overall design, no elements of management and no architecture.

Information Systems were built to show how the company had been performing in the immediate past, and that was it. Continue reading →

The ‘Right’ Management Stuff: Lions ‘lead’ by donkeys

11 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Management, project management

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Behavioural Economics, Commercial IT, IT business, IT Strategy, Organisational Autism, project management, Risk Management

Peter Drucker once stated that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.

That is one of the guiding principles in my professional role as strategist, leader and coach.

I work in business and IT.

With engineers, administrators, managers and executives.

I occasionally read blogs and forum posts related to my areas of interests.

A question appeared on a popular forum for Project Managers.

It asked, when it comes to successful Project Management, “what is more important, the right people or the right process?”

You get a lot of questions like that in IT.

It’s probably the same for other jobs.

A lot of the replies to the question were terse, mind-numbing and vacuous.

Other replies read like concatenations of fortune cookie quotes based on someone’s idealistic and flawed notion of management.

There were answers in favour of people over process, process over people and others that put “right process” and “right people” on an equal footing.

I didn’t get the impression that people were addressing the question from a position of knowledge and experience.

No one asked any questions.

No even the hint of one.

Though the obvious questions were there, staring at them in the face.

But no one asked.

  • What do you mean by “right”?
  • What do you mean by “right process”?
  • What do you mean be “right people”?
  • Why are you asking this question?
  • What do you hope to get out of this?

Everyone assumed that there was a common understanding about what “right”, “right people” and “right process” mean in a project context.

Because people didn’t ask the obvious questions, they couldn’t move on to the more subtle and substantial questions.

They couldn’t move upstream or downstream.

Wherever they stood their position was untenable.

They didn’t have the social skills, the creativity or the intelligence to step back from the question.

They were stuck in the trivial, the hackneyed and the simplistic.

They answered with clichés, vagaries and baloney.

So what we had, was a long-life thread of ill-informed responses to a vague question.

It was if you’d asked a group of unthinking patriots what was better for the country, “the right people” or “the right political system”.

But it goes deeper than that.

Politicians who are reduced to talking about rights and wrongs, without being able to pony up any rational explanations, are quite rightly derided for being shallow and removed.

In IT we think it’s a sign of considered professionalism.

But regurgitating motivational slogans that are well passed their use by date is not professionalism.

The unquestioning subservience to trite, populist and unrealistic management dogma is not professionalism.

Acting as if project management were some bizarre super-hero Hollweird invention is not professionalism.

Needing to break everything down into right and wrong, good and bad, black or white, etc. is the height of arrogant superciliousness.

What is worse than arrogance or ignorance, is when they go hand in hand.

It’s just not on.

If IT was an army, it wouldn’t be the professional modern army of today. But an army lead by well-meaning, socially inept and multiply-challenged incompetents. The sort of army that would march a battalion of the “right people” to their certain death, or the sort of people who would see instrumental reason as being the “right process”.

“Lions lead by donkeys”.

Students of European history – say from 1934 to 1945 – might make the connections.

If you can’t define what you mean by “right”, you may as well be discussing the sex of angels.

If some people can’t even ask the obvious questions, then what the feck are they doing managing projects?

Never mind, life is too short to fret the inadequacies and excesses of IT.

As Lucius Seneca was want to say “A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant”.

Just who are you to tell us? Consultant Manager as Leader and Coach

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Management

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Tags

Big Data, Business Management, Data Warehouse, Dogma

Sometimes I get asked in to support the manager of a failing project.

Most of the time I get to take over a failing project, with or without the previous manager’s involvement.

Occasionally I am called in to act as a Project Manager for clients who have brought in Systems Integrators and Management Consultants to do most of the project work.

Continue reading →

Don’t fight the Bull, Isolate it – Deliberately avoiding the evident

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Banking, Best principles, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Executive, Management, Methodology

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Tags

Banking, Behavioural Economics, Big Data, business intelligence, Business Management, Demagogism, Dogma

Much of my consulting work is done in the Financial Industry.

I was there when the crisis was prepared, when it was baked and when it was brought out of the oven.

There are many theories about what went wrong.

Most of them are misleading, misinformed or simply crap.

Mainly to protect the guilty.

Continue reading →

Big Data and the 7 Habits of a Highly Successful Catalan Sheepdog

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Best principles, Big Data, Creativity, Executive, Knowledge, Management

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Tags

Analytics, Behavioural Economics, Big Data, Dogma, Economics, Financial, Goal Setting, Marketing, Strategy

Hi, I’m Ricky Jonesy-Innit, boss of Becci Boo Investments.

Last week we said goodbye to our best commodity trader.

He’d been with us for years.

Continue reading →

Creativity and Corporate IT: Plumbers not Artists

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Architecture, Best principles, Creativity, Data Warehouse, Dogma, Excellence, Management, Offshoring, Outsourcing, Strategy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Behavioural Economics, business strategy, Creativity, IT Strategy, Organisational Autism, Strategy

Like many people around the world I have certain expectations.

When I want some artwork done for a sales campaign, yes, I expect the people that I commission to show a lot of creativity.

When I want to read a novel, go to the theatre or simply chill-out watching a movie, yes, I do expect some degree of creativity.

Continue reading →

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