The End of Management Alchemy

By Darwin Mott

The liberation of our workplaces through humor, reality, and the findings of scientific research are central themes running through these stories. Before modern medicine came blood-letting, leaches, and witch-doctoring. Before physics, the philosopher’s stone and a world that was flat. Currently, the management of our employment systems is stuck in an alchemy-to-science transitional and nonsensical state (like the image on the front cover). Alchemy is evident in the management fads that keep coming back around with different names, like unicorns on a carousel. This book puts an end to all that. And it’s about time!

And it is actually “Time” - the Time Span that a Real Boss states as needed and accurate for a subordinate role (or employee) to perform a Real Task, for example – that turns out to be the great liberator.

So you can forget about all the passing fads. Let this primer start you on a 10-step journey to a happy and productive hierarchy, with a healthier bottom line. And with your

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darwin Mott Consulting Ltd.
• Release date: Feb 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994942814

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MOTT

Copyright © 2016 Darwin Mott.

Art Work by Diana Hume

With the Foreword by

Rebecca Cason and Kathryn Cason

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Soft Cover: 978-0-9949428-0-7

Ebook: 978-0-9949428-1-4

Darwin Mott Consulting Ltd.

3078 Cranbourn Crescent Regina, SK. S4V3B3 Canada

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Darwin Mott Consulting Ltd.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/21/2015

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Art Work by Diana Hume

1.   The World: She’s-a Round

2.   "Like Talking to Gordie Howe

3.   …Something to Do With Time?

4.   Time Clarifies Who is Your Boss?

5.   Can’t We Get Some Managers With Some Backbone?

6.   Time to Demystify Leadership

7.   Replacing The Iron Fist…

8.   You Can’t Pay Frank More Then Me: He Has No Responsibility!

9.   If You Want It Safe, Use the Systems …

10.   4-in-1 Systems of Accountability & Trust

11.   A Vision for Your Workplace

Afterword: The 4 Afters

About the Author

About the Artist

To our grandchildren: that their worlds of work be better than ours.

With special acknowledgements to Rebecca Cason, Kathryn Cason, our immediate and extended families, the late George Reilly, and the late and great Dr. Elliott Jaques - who will someday be remembered as The Father of Management Science

Foreword

With charming humor, a lifelong passion for hockey, and straight forward candor, Darwin Mott illustrates work-related problems in employment organizations with stories that bring common situations to life. He then examines them in light of the principles of Elliott Jaques’ Requisite Organization. Through this science-based lens the reader is invited to de-myth their understanding of people and organizations. Mott’s story-telling will guide you to rethink the alchemy-laden beliefs that remain so prevalent in our employment organizations.

Mott combines work-life anecdotes, hockey truths and the requisite foundations of management science into a fun read that is serious – or a serious read that is fun – either way you, the reader, scores on all counts!

We think you will enjoy The End of Management Alchemy and perhaps re-live some of your own work experiences with enhanced clarity. We wish for you the reader to someday have the experience of saying Yes! I am finally having fun at work.

This sense of ‘having fun at work’ can occur when the knowledge and tools of applied science replace the false promises of alchemy. Let this entertaining book be your introduction to the foundations of a scientific approach to management:

• An equivalent to the thermometer—time span of discretion measure of level of work complexity

• Dynamic and precise concepts and models and systematic taxonomy

• Leadership processes within a requisite structure

• Understanding of human capability and its maturation over time

• Social justice in the workplace

• Felt fair pay from bottom to top

Say Yes! to gaining new insights into the scientific principles which impact every employing organization type, size and mission: be it a hospital, government agency, family owned business, financial institution, publicly-traded corporation (in any industry), or any other organization that employs individuals for a wage or salary.

Join with the author and colleagues around the world in working to bring an end to management alchemy. Let’s build on this foundation to bring trust-inducing, practical and sustainable science-based enlightenment in one of the most crucial areas of modern society, our employment institutions.

Rebecca Cason, President and

Kathryn Cason, Co-founder

Requisite Organization International Institute

The Elliott Jaques Requisite Organization Library

For additional resources, please visit: www.requisite.org

Image1.jpg

Darwin Mott (left) and Elliott Jaques caught having fun at work at the Fall 2001 Working Seminar of Requisite Organization International Institute in Austin, TX.

Preface

Why do I want to write a book about the emergence of management science? Well, right about the time that this farm kid got pretty disillusioned about working in a big bureaucracy, I read a general theory on bureaucracy. After growing up in a small Saskatchewan farming community (before the days of many corporate farms), earning a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a professional hockey career, I went to work for a large mining company. A year later I was working in their Human Resources Department, and was shocked to learn how little science was at work in HR development work. You might say I was in the early stages of my own mid-life crisis, when I borrowed and read, then bought and re-read, the book A General Theory of Bureaucracy by Elliott Jaques. To then, Jaques had perhaps been better known as the person who had coined the phrase mid-life crisis than for his, I believe, more important Requisite Organization works (also known as Stratified Systems Theory or SST).

Call it what you will, these research findings have the potential to show us the way to a worldwide creative society utilizing - and underpinned by - our work organizations or employment systems. This is especially true if we more fully embrace Jaques’ concepts of work done by humans as, not mental or physical work, but as whole system living organism work. If you are not interested in such altruistic and lofty goals, perhaps you do want to be well ahead - maybe decades ahead - of your competition in terms of the provision of effective managerial leadership that impacts your organization’s bottom line.

These stories about time and the emergence of management science have been rattling around in my head (I mean my whole system living organism) for most of my life. So I decided to put them to paper. Rather than read this, you are welcome to take a more traditional route right away, as I did in the early 1980’s, by starting into the extensive writings of the late Elliott Jaques and