When is LO inappropriate? LO13804

Gray Southon (gsouthon@ozemail.com.au)
Mon, 2 Jun 1997 08:07:44 +1000 (EST)

Replying to LO13788 --

I sense in this discussion a tendency to equate "service" jobs with
MacDonalds and Taco making. The implication being that "real" jobs are
about technology and production.

There seems to be a reluctance for many not to consider the whole area of
professional service, information management industries which are now
starting to dominate industry. These have special demands such as a high
levels of specialisation, life-time committment to careers, some intrinsic
problems with team processes, professional conservatism, external
definition of standards, and great difficulty in establishing performance
measures.

Please don't limit our concept of service to McDonalds!!

Gray Southon

At 03:41 AM 31/5/97 -0400, Stever Robbins wrote:

>I think it's a profoundly important question. If organizations become
>flatter, and there is only 1 manager for every N employees, it doesn't
>leave much room to move up. Maybe there are other ways of
>advancing/changing ones job, but face it--in a Taco Bell with a 1:100
>manager/front-line worker fan out ratio, just statistically, 99% of the
>jobs are taco-flipping. If 100 of those taco-flippers reach a stage in
>their job development where they have the skills to do more, there simply
>isn't room for all those skills to be applied. It seems to me like the
>equivalent of traditional hierarchical advancement, only in the knowledge
>domain. (E.g. there's only one CEO, so very few people are ever able to
>make it there, whether or not they have the skills. Often, the ones who
>have the skills and don't get the job simply leave.)

Gray Southon
Consultant in Health Management Research and Analysis
15 Parthenia St., Caringbah, NSW 2229, Australia
Ph/Fax +61 2 9524 7822, mobile +61 414 295 328
e-mail gsouthon@ozemail.com.au
Web Page: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~gsouthon/

-- 

Gray Southon <gsouthon@ozemail.com.au>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>