By Carter McNamara on May 14, 2012
(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International. This is the fourth blog post in a six-part series about the history of Organization Development, “On the Shoulders of Giants.” NOTE: Most of what I have learned about Frederick Taylor I received from my long-time OD colleague, Marvin Wseibord, both in personal conversations and [...]
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By Carter McNamara on April 13, 2012
(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, with Billie Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This is the third blog post in a six-part series about the history of OD.) Introduction to this Blog Series In the first part of this series, we explored some of our ancient ancestors in the [...]
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By Carter McNamara on March 19, 2012
(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, with Billie Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This is the second blog post in a six-part series about the history of OD.) Introduction to this Blog Series In our work as OD practitioners, whose shoulders are we standing on? Whose ‘conceptual DNA’ runs [...]
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By Carter McNamara on March 5, 2012
(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, and Billie Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This is the first blog post in a six-part series about the history of OD.) Introduction to this Blog Series In our work as OD practitioners, whose shoulders are we standing on? Whose ‘conceptual DNA’ runs [...]
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By Carter McNamara on January 30, 2012
Why It’s Important for Us to Know Our Paradigms, Theories and Models Paradigms, theories and models – we all have them and work from them. Many of us don’t know it. But we really should. When we practitioners in human development (consultants, coaches, trainers, etc.) come to conclusions about our clients and their organizations, we [...]
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By Carter McNamara on December 10, 2011
In a project, whether you are conducting a formal, systematic assessment or just doing a rather informal assessment, your natural approach to gathering and processing information will influence how you work. The Myers-Briggs folks provide some useful dimensions to consider. (Myers-Briggs is a registered trademark of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.), Intuitive Versus Sensing Approaches to [...]
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By Carter McNamara on November 16, 2011
As a consultant, you work with clients to solve problems. Or, perhaps your philosophy is to help them address “priorities,” rather than “problems.” In any case, it’s extremely important to understand your own approach and how it affects others, especially your clients when working with them. Different people have quite different preferences and approaches for [...]
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By Carter McNamara on October 26, 2011
There’s a lot of money available to help small businesses, and it seems like there’ll be more available as we work to make more jobs. So OD in small businesses might be even more worthwhile. About half of our clients are small organizations. My experience of the differences of between OD in small and large [...]
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By Carter McNamara on October 15, 2011
Free Advice Too Often Backfires On You During a recession when potential clients are more reluctant to pay consultants for services, it can be very enticing for consultants to do almost anything to win contracts, even to do a lot of free consulting — to give away what the consultants otherwise would be paid for. [...]
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By Carter McNamara on April 7, 2011
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