tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91156446058333841382024-03-13T21:16:17.380+01:00X de XavierUnos y ceros. A veces, en el orden adecuado.-Xvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12954073038736466058noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9115644605833384138.post-21206307662772790282009-11-13T16:10:00.007+01:002009-11-13T17:27:47.092+01:00ChangesChanges, changes, changes... Please, do not tell my mum about them, because she would be very upset with me!<div><br /></div><div>Last July I took a <b>two years leave from IBM</b>. In a very smart move (in my opinion), IBM is paying me a third of my salary during a period that is forecasted to be of low business. I am allowed to work (and I need to!), but, obviously, I cannot work for IBM's competitors. They are investing this money to get a re-energized employee or, if the employee doesn't go back, to have him leave without having to lay him off, saving quite a bit of money.</div><div><br /></div><div>I plan to take advantage of this by doing lots of learning and following some long time interests that I was performing on top of my formal role of at IBM: <b>dealing/trying to make sense of organizations and teaching</b>. </div><div><br /></div><div>So what have I being doing during this months? Besides lots of reading and learning, <a href="http://www.ganyet.com/lifestream">Ganyet</a>, <a href="http://www.vortexvisual.com/?page_id=2">Banzy</a> and I toyed with the idea of working together in super-secret super-cool project, but, after a few weeks, I did not find a way to fit my skills into their needs; it is a pity, because world domination is in their road map.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I left university, I should have made a project to become officially an engineer. I then joined IBM, and I was not disciplined enough to spend my free time finishing the project that I just started before joining. Almost 20 years later, I'm fixing that. And I'm very excited about it, because my project is about the software that should help to <b>build a community around </b><a href="http://www.1x1microcredit.org/"><b>1x1microcredit.org</b></a>, a peer-to-peer micro-lending website that will offers people the possibility to lend money at low interest rates to poor people so that they can escape poverty, just like <a href="http://www.kiva.org/">kiva.org</a>. PHP aside, I feel very lucky for being able to work in a project that is technically cool and has an even cooler goal.</div>-Xvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12954073038736466058noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9115644605833384138.post-35455793892666228322009-11-08T12:28:00.003+01:002009-11-08T12:36:49.098+01:00Peter Drucker on decentralizationYet another post about the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/work/handy/drucker.shtml">third episode</a> in <a href="http://xdexavier.blogspot.com/2009/11/handy-guide-to-gurus-of-management.html">The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management</a>.<br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/xverges/4082632572/" title="Peter Drucker on decentralization by -Xv, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2699/4082632572_66e529702b.jpg" width="400" alt="Peter Drucker on decentralization" /></a><br /><blockquote><span style="font-style:italic;">He explained, for the first time, how and why decentralization worked. He calculated that 95 per cent of all decisions in General motors at that time were taken by the divisions, leaving only the really big ones for the centre. Drucker was keen on decentralization because of its impact on what he called Human Effort, the motivation it provided to people to work and to learn. Decentralization created small pools where people felt that their contribution mattered. Those small pools also meant that there was space for young executives to make mistakes without threatening the future of the company. They were, he said, farms for growing talent.</span></blockquote>-Xvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12954073038736466058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9115644605833384138.post-68724599803705109852009-11-04T11:25:00.003+01:002009-11-04T11:41:34.750+01:00Charles Handy and Potfolio Lifes<blockquote><span style="font-style:italic;">What interested me was not the downsizing or the re-engineering itself, but the consequences for our individual working lives. Organizations, it seemed to me, would increasingly dispense with our services in our mid-lives as they concentrated on fewer and younger people in their cores, with only a few wise heads to keep the show on track. The rest of us would have to develop what I called 'portfolio' lives, a mix of different bits and pieces of work, some for money, some for fun, some for free.</span></blockquote><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/xverges/4071388785/" title="Portfolio Lifes by -Xv, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2765/4071388785_4f71277e8c.jpg" width="400" alt="Portfolio Lifes" /></a><br />That quote was from Charles Handy, in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/work/handy/handy.shtml">second episode</a> of his <a href="http://xdexavier.blogspot.com/2009/11/handy-guide-to-gurus-of-management.html">Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management</a>, hardly about management, but about society.-Xvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12954073038736466058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9115644605833384138.post-88083202461023259242009-10-30T00:10:00.007+01:002009-10-30T11:42:50.716+01:00El autor sin abuela y la teoría de la organización<div>La portada de la PDA gigante era un mal augurio. Si no fuera porque el material de la asignatura <a href="https://wwws.uoc.edu/ateneu/control/viewSubjectAteneu?campaignTypeId=UOC_Ateneu%20catala&gatId=01.019&productId=10023">Organización y administración de empresas II</a>, que curso en la UOC, está basado en gran parte en este libro, la PDA platillo volante habría sido suficiente para dejar el libro en la estantería de la biblioteca.</div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T679aggANRU/SuohRFp22XI/AAAAAAAAAOI/PeNjiplAN6w/s1600-h/Bueno.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T679aggANRU/SuohRFp22XI/AAAAAAAAAOI/PeNjiplAN6w/s320/Bueno.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5398163680816191858" /></a><div><br /></div><div> Pero, ¿qué importa una portada? Se trata de los contenido, y parezco estar en buenas manos. Al menos, el autor, <a href="http://www.iade.org/contenido.asp?idM=104&idP=10405&idB=1">Eduardo Bueno Campos</a>, no tiene la menor duda de ello; de los prólogos de la primera y segunda edición extraigo las siguientes muestas<blockquote><i>la aparición, en 1976, de la primera edición de mi obra clásica </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>esta década transcurrida ha provocado que mi cosecha intelectual y mi patrimonio científico se haya incrementado de forma destacada, con un buen número de artículos en revistas nacionales e internacionales de impacto científico, así como nuevos libros...</i></blockquote></div>Pero leo y leo y, ¡ay! , no puedo compartir el entusiasmo del autor por el mismo autor. Y, básicamente, todo se reduce a que soy incapaz de relacionar mi percepción sobre las organizaciones con las que convivo o he convivido con la mayoría de cosas de las que me habla el libro. Capítulos enteros sin entender de dónde venía el texto (¿descripción de la realidad? ¿prescripción para mejores organizaciones? ¿alguna escuela de pensamiento reconocida? ¿el propio autor? ¿palabra revelada?).<div><br /></div><div>Otro libro sobre teoría de la organización describe muy bien porque me interesa la teoría de la organización y por qué me decepciona no disfrutar leyendo o discutiendo sobre ella:</div><div><blockquote><i>all forms of collective activity - politics, the family, as well as work - are about organizations in some way. Which also means - and it is a major failing of most books to ignore this - that <b>to study organizations involves thinking about philosophy, politics, ethics and much more</b>. And behind or beyond these abstractions are <b>the lived experiences of people</b> not just working together, but joking, arguing, critizing, fighting, deciding, lusting, despairing, creating, resisting, fearing, hoping or, in short, organizing. I don't find it easy to imagine a world without organizations, but I also don't find it easy to recognize that world in the mainstream books about organizations</i></blockquote></div>He disfrutado de este segundo libro como de una novela, aunque a menudo he estado en desacuerdo con el autor <a href="http://www.wbs.ac.uk/faculty/members/chris/grey">Chris Grey</a>. Otro día, más sobre el estupendo <a href="http://books.google.es/books?id=x5jcNac8rgUC">A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations</a>.-Xvhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12954073038736466058noreply@blogger.com0