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Thursday, 16 October 2008
Management clich� corner
 The world is getting more and more global. That’s the way of the world. So, if you want to be world class, make the world your classroom. The Times reports on “global citizen” and top prof, Andrew Kakabadse: Andrew Kakabadse has an alphabet of qualifications and affiliations after his name (BSc MA PhD AAPSW FBPS FIAM FBAM, since you ask). I didn’t, but I’m impressed. FIAM FBAM, thank you mam. Now professor of international management development at Cranfield University’s School of Management, Kakabadse has been teaching on MBA programmes around the world since the 1970s. Truly a global citizen, he holds roles at the University of Ulster, Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona and Macquarie Graduate School of Management and Swinburne University in Australia. The world is not so much his stage as his classroom. Oysters can be taken as eaten in this global marketplace of ideas. His travel schedule is as prodigious as his output (30 books and counting) and his curiosity… His current areas of interest are leadership, governance, boardroom performance, change management, improving the performance of top executives, excellence in consultancy practice, social and public administration, organisational behaviour and international relations. The list, he laughs, is not exhaustive. Ho ho, perish the thought. But life isn’t all fun and games. Kakabadse’s most recent work, Leading the Board: The Six Disciplines of World Class Chairmen, highlights the role of chairman, which he regards as critical: “There is responsibility for the governance controls and mechanisms to ensure the business is functioning in the right way and that it has the right moral values,” he said. Six disciplines? Why not five or seven? Seven would be best, as that would give him one for each degree. Pseudo-sciences, such as “Marketing” and “Management”, abound with neat numbers of things: Porter’s Five Forces, Seven Habits of Effective Managers, and now Six Discplines of World Class Chairmen. Clearly the theorists think five, six and seven – unlike seventeen and nineteen – are memorable numbers, and fill the gaps accordingly. If ever a world class BSc MA PhD AAPSW FBPS FIAM FBAM comes up with seventeen Forces, Habits or Disciplines, then I will believe he knows what he is talking about. Otherwise his ideas belong inside the box, with all the envelopes. Posted on 10/16/2008 8:27 AM by Mary Jackson
Comments
16 Oct 2008
reactionry Adding To The Kakabadse Data Base [Hugh has written another thoughtful and entertaining comment. And now for something completely different....]
How Many Legions Has The "Hope"?
Or: Morgen Die Morgan Bank
Hugh once wondered why Barack ["Bookish"] Obama* didn't clerk for a judge after becoming President of Harvard's Law Review (pointless and self-dissserving disclosure: my First Wife made Law Review at the U. of Mn.), but he seems to have failed to note that Andrew "Kaka" aka "Bad Ass" Kakabadse was clerked for by Akakii Akakievich, who, like Putin, "understands German perfectly", and who declared before a cosmopolitan American audience, "Heute 'Six Sigma** Over Texas', Morgen die Welt!"
And what will we, what can we, Yanks do under a President Obama? Snatch a swatch of a St. Laurent overcoat off the rack at Bloomies (disclosure: ah ain't rich) ala Whittaker Chambers?***** Button up our overcoats (with the collars turned upward for disguise) ala Helen Kane? Or "button up", as might still be said by those in armoured vehicles, damn near everything possible? Or as the Old Salts used to say, "Batten down the hatches"? Or prepare to pack it in with one change of underwear for when the President of "Change" says to us, "Bundle up your coffins, 'cause it's cold way down there" or "You all "got the fire down below" as we're sent up or down to freeze or burn in some Siberiaish hellhole ala Old "Salty-Lack-of-Life"***? Or as my Dear Old Departed Dad might have said, "Batten down the Hatch Act"?****
* Aka "Barack "Break The Banks & Backs of the Taxpayers" Obama, who, like "McBailout" McCain, favors more of the same "failed policies" which have given much of the world the "flu" (and whining, self-centered Russians, at least a cold) i.e. - AAIIYYEE!! - bailing out the defaulting (granted, some defaults always occur due to unforeseen circumstances -which includes recessions and depressions) rat bastards who often fraudulently obtained mortgages which other rat bastards sold to still others. Sheesh - you'd think that the dirtbag (some "rich", some "poor") beneficiaries of CRA-induced or enabled largess were some of the primary victims, rather than some of the primary perps.
*** "salty-lack-of-life" See VN, by Andrew Field, page 370: "Sol-nezhit-yn"
(The Bushies have come under fire recently, apparently for a feeble attempt to keep Critical Legal Studies stalinoids out of internships. With respect to injecting "politics" into government jobs or programmes, rank and file Republicans are rank amateurs compared to the "Everything is Political" crowd of Democrats and their legions of "community organizers".)
***** snatch (mebbe ah should be atryin' to numbah mah footnotes)
17 Oct 2008
A.J.Blennerhassett Perhaps the world needs reminding of the three laws of capitalism: Zeroth law: Capital has no master (Karl Marx) First law: Make money at all costs. Known as the Enron law, in that it doesn't mention profit. Second law: Save money at all costs. Third law: If you can make good money delivering good service; that's good. If you can make better money delivering bad service; that's better. |