The heyday of Action Research may have come and gone. Add it to the list of 60s enthusiasms that faded with time—alongside psychedelics, self-actualization movement, and free love. Action research has had its lasting effects but it’s faded from our contemporary moment. Indeed, intellectual history hasn’t quite known what to do with Kurt Lewin, action … Continue reading Agile Software Development As Action Research
30 Years of Technological Transformation It’s easy to look at the ways we’ve networked organizational life over the last forty years and see only a constant stream of endless changes. In retrospect, however, it’s possible to see three discreet phases to the way information and services have flowed through networks of individuals, technologies and organizations … Continue reading Introduction to the CyborgCOM: A History Lesson
A. K. Rice and Eric Miller authored one of the books at the origin of what we now call Organizational Development (OD). Their work at the Tavistock Institute usually merits a chapter in business school textbooks, as it pioneered a way of thinking about organizational life that considered the whole of an organization in an integrated way. … Continue reading The Socio-Technics and Systems Psychodynamics of Sales
Part I: Marketing and Psychoanalysis It’s well known that Freud’s nephew, Edward Barnays, was a pioneering PR man, who traded freely on his family relations to claim a special knowledge of the other’s desire. History hasn’t been kind to Barneys—his clumsy advice about how to manipulate the masses and his association with some of the CIA’s … Continue reading Digital Marketing and the Personally Identifiable Information
There’s no shortage of salesmen in literature. Death of a Salesman and Glengarry, Glen Ross come to mind, as do dozens of movies about Wall Street, and my favorite: Mathilda. But it’s not just popular fiction and media. There’s an entire industry of books that tell you how to sell. At last count, I heard there were 35,000 titles … Continue reading A Sales Literature Review
The salesman is one of the most enduring stereotypes in business. His dress, his personality, even his mindset, are seemingly eternal. His strengths—superficial likability, power of persuasion, unrelenting energy—and his weaknesses—manipulative, mercenary, ultimately empty—are the stuff of legend. He comes and goes, does things no one else wants to do, and puts himself out there for our derision … Continue reading The Cyborg Willy Loman
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