Mike Rollings

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Entries Tagged as 'Behavior'


IT job postings ask for the wrong thing

by Mike Rollings  |  April 5, 2012  |  1 Comment

My report “Job Postings – Hiring for IT’s Past” published today on Gartner.com. This Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) report is a wake-up call for IT organizations because it shows that most IT organizations are hiring for the wrong requirements. In late 2011 and early 2012 we sampled current job postings in six major job [...]

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Inversion of Control

by Mike Rollings  |  February 14, 2012  |  Comments Off

According to Wikipedia, inversion of control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice whereby the object coupling is bound at run time by an “assembler” object and are typically not knowable at compile time using static analysis. The binding process is achieved through dependency injection. In practice, Inversion of Control is a style of software construction [...]

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Failures in Communication – Don’t Tell Me! Engage Me!

by Mike Rollings  |  January 3, 2012  |  2 Comments

For frequent readers, you know that I tend to look at issues through a humanistic lens.  Many of my client inquiries start with a request for the best way to represent “x”, or the way to describe something so that people will do “y”.  Instead, I like to think about “What are you trying to [...]

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Luck, Serendipity, and the Contextual Strategist

by Mike Rollings  |  December 27, 2011  |  Comments Off

Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that leaves us in awe of the randomness of life? In that context, strategy [...]

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i-i-i is about Focusing on the Individual and Not Yourself

by Mike Rollings  |  November 21, 2011  |  Comments Off

The “i” generation – not quite the selfish focused gang that was recently called out in the UK by its Chief Rabbi and noted by c|net’s Chris Matyszczyk. Like prior generational movements, this one too is misunderstood. The “i” generation is about the importance of the individual which is profoundly different than focusing selfishly on [...]

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Steve Jobs – Preparing Us for One More Thing

by Mike Rollings  |  November 2, 2011  |  Comments Off

This weekend I read Steve Jobs eulogy written by his sister Mona Simpson. Anyone with a beating heart can appreciate it and will be touched by it. The love shared between them is apparent, as is the love he had for his family and his life’s work. Yet he was always preparing us for one [...]

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Fight inertia and resurrect entrepreneurs

by Mike Rollings  |  July 18, 2011  |  Comments Off

All organizations at some time in their history have experimented, gained knowledge, and operationalized it – experimentation is synonymous with entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs test many theories as they launch an idea. They are not afraid of making errors and learning from their mistakes. As they refine ideas and gain more knowledge through experimentation, they eventually reach [...]

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Context breaks Taylor’s hold on strategy

by Mike Rollings  |  April 26, 2011  |  1 Comment

Last week’s post “Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine” called for the end of Taylorism. Thankfully, I am not the first to call for the end of Taylorism or to write about human characteristics which businesses frequently ignore. There are many before me who have added significant insights into this debilitating management doctrine and all [...]

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Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine

by Mike Rollings  |  April 18, 2011  |  11 Comments

Over the last 239 years, organizations have been applying hierarchy, and top-down command-oriented management. This mindset erupted with the dawn of the steam engine in 1771, and in the late 1800s it was honed to razor sharpness by Frederick Winslow Taylor – the father of efficiency thinking and the science of productivity. Taylor’s work is [...]

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Taylorism – A Pox upon Agile

by Mike Rollings  |  April 11, 2011  |  Comments Off

This past Thursday my colleague Kirk Knoernschild pointed out a blog post by Alistair Cockburn about Taylorism creeping into the world of agile. Alistair’s post ignited a discussion within Gartner’s IT1 team reflecting on how it applied to our own agile work practices. What follows are some of my insights about the dangers of Tayloristic [...]

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Category: Altered States Applications Cloud Economy Human Behavior IT Governance Management Strategic Planning Transformation Uncategorized     Tags: , , , , , ,