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- In terms of assessing individuals and their level of capability. It's still is an area that we struggle with, that I struggle with because people are very complex. The bigger challenge for me was when I moved from that role of business development, HR and legal and became the president of the company.
- How do you use this in terms of growing organization? We have now probably doubled the size of the company in people in the past four years. How do you make sure you're getting the right people into the right roles and then going back and reassessing?
- The next challenge is going to be as we get larger. You have to start thinking more in a more systematic way in succession planning. One challenge is always having to come back to the 80 20 rule. Compensation needs to be fair and equitable across an organization.
- I need to have more customer interaction than I have. I need to put more of my time on the orientation for everyone. Another challenge is making sure I have a personal relationship with each one of them. And I really need to be looking in terms of where is that next group of management going to come from.
- It was a great privilege to have worked directly with Elliot Jacks. He was a person who could always make you think. Today, this is one of the biggest challenges in the role I have. It's finding those kinds of moments.

- Requisite organization for Novus management system. As we've grown so much, training has become increasingly important training. Corporate governance and segregation of duties have become very important. We're looking now at trying to move the training into a different phase.

- Thad Simons is the President and CEO of Novus International. Novus is an animal health and nutrition company. Two thirds of its sales are outside of the US. Simons says he has never had any management training. He credits HR manager Sabrina Hamilton for his success.
- The Nova's Vision is helping to feed the world. Today we tie those same concepts into principles of sustainability. A part of that was using Requisite organization. It took a lot of work with the different managers to set up the roles.
- Everyone is not equal in an organization because there have decisions have to be made. If we're doing it well we're pushing down that decision making. And we're also empowering people more to work at a level that they really are comfortable with.

- Charlote: I'm currently an independent consultant in the Toronto area. Before stepping out on my own, I was a human resource professional in a variety of industries. The Requisite organization approach aims to build trust in an organization to reduce paranoia. Charlotte: I had some concerns in terms of actually implementing it.

- Warren Kinston was invited by Elliot to join him at the Brunell Institute of Organization and Social Studies in 1978 or 1979. He believes General Theory of Bureaucracy is the best book Elliot ever wrote. Other mentors included Rafe Robotom and Jimmy Algie.

- If I were designing a curriculum for either civilians or for the military, it would have to reflect what I think an individual needs to learn at each specific point in time. What I would want is someone who is able to understand organizations as systems. Once you set that context, the context itself should help evoke leader behavior.

- Harry Levinson was a giant in the field of leadership. He created what is generally accepted modern knowledge about enlightened leadership. His relationship with Elliot Jacks gradually became more and more strained. I regret that the direction that the institute has taken has not been as exciting for him.
- At the core of what we do, in my book, Accountability, Leadership, at the core, it is 90% Elliot Jacks. He managed to offend just about every legitimate management academician other than Jerry Harvey. The reality is they just don't know what he stands for.

- The third area I call engineering is an art rendered in a science. Engineering is a system of templates and methods that are grounded in science. Almost our entire field is craft. Understanding that the templates need to be justified by the science allows me to be a lot more flexible.

- Jack's level of development certainly seemed to me to be a sensible idea and a good guideline for certain companies. Oil companies have to pay attention to the long term demand for hydrocarbons. Energy companies need to take the long view that they need to plan a long way ahead. It is not a one size fits all philosophy.

- Rick Oppenheimer is a chair for Vistage International. The organization is the largest CEO organization in the world. There are about 15,000 members all over the world, 80% of them in the United States. We have education, advisory board, relationship, and mentoring.

- When you look at the healthcare challenge of America today, it's taking on the healthcare system. You're going to have to do it with some combination of public health and a number of different things. Some proposals seem to be at too low level in terms of our capability to address the system.

As the technology of communication advances more and more of activities once confined to elites are now available to increasing numbers.

- I think the basic rule applies as the same as level of work. You can't see it until you see it, and once you sees it, you can't not see it. But until you seeing it, it's unbelievably difficult.

- The setting up of the Glacier Institute of Management was a direct result of continued inquiries from businessmen. His books are not published within the United Kingdom any longer. Most of the books published make no reference to his work whatsoever. But the ideas that he formulated were, in some senses, ahead of way ahead of their time.

- Richard Brown is the eldest son of Wilfred Brown. Has been involved in personnel and HR for some 35 years. Not currently in a full HR role, but doing interim work. His father's work influences every part of the work that he's doing.
- Elliot always maintained a professional distance between himself and my father. He was employed in Glacier by the Works Council, not by the company itself. This enabled him to have some independence of his. Own. But there was also intense, personal clashes, but differences of opinion.
- When he became Managing Director of Joint Manager of Glacier in the late 30s, he was only 27 years old. In that same year he established the works council within Glacier. He was a committed socialist, a member of the Labour Party. His diary gives insight into the pressures he was under by his subordinates.

- I think one of the things that would be of great benefit is to have that sense of coherence amongst people that are using the ideas to have the ability to share. If we want the work to continue and to grow then to be sustainable in the long term we have to have continuous development.

- Otoranski: Elliot was a great inventor in terms of making use of research on cognitive development in organizations. He came to see what Elliot called capability in a broader perspective, namely something that links cognitive and what I call socially emotional. Otoranski would like more research about how these two lines of development link in executives.

- Alma Reese considers herself chief greeter and ambassador for novice. If a company is going to be successful, its workers must be comfortable. Reese found that working at Novus people are extremely helpful.

- I was involved in a project which they put a project to deem in a sort of developmental phase. It brought home to me that if you are going to employ people on project teams, employ people. You've got to be very clear about what their relationship is, who's their manager.

- My expectation is that we have a pretty good strategy. What we need to do is execute. Coaching, mentoring, training, executive development, talent development are kind of where I'm focused. Bringing that next generation along is really important for our future success.

- There was a realm of psychosocial reality. It's a realm which can be investigated, and it is distinct from the physical realm. The paradigm here was a person's level of capability and then the corresponding level of work in an organization. It was very powerful and just it took many, many long time for that to settle in.

- The capacity for self reflection is important within any stratum. But the kind of self reflection a level five does is very different than the self reflection of a level one or two. Our understanding of self in a variety of ways is always within the limits of the strata in which we live.

- In the medical profession, you have direct output at virtually level two through level five. The complexity of a department really was dramatically different. It was growing the next generation of hospital commanders. Now in the military, the doctors do command the hospitals.

- Maria Burt is a human resources manager at Novus. The company has six levels in its management system. Burt helps managers match employee capability to the role complexity. She says the most important thing for her was how open the process is.

- The impact of references on my career, as I had the opportunity to work with Elliot, Jakes and Dr. Steve Clement. Using Requisite, I will find a solution so quickly. And I can see things that no one else can see, and I can diagnose a problem and fix a problem.

A few points on treating RO not as a cult but as a system of science-based solutions to organizational problems

- Getting to that point is actually quite difficult and also one undermines dramatically. Even simple ideas are extraordinarily complex to put in place. The idea of let's get authority and accountability aligned at first sight goes against human nature quite dramatically.
- Samuel: All chief executives are impelled for their own ego reasons to change stuff. Most chief executives also want human relationships as I was talking about before. 99.99% of the world is not using requisite organization. So it's quite understandable if they come up with a different model.

- HR is not progressing as it should. My feeling is that they're still too service oriented. There's very little strategy that they do. VPs of HR should spend some time in the Flask. Advice to young HR people would be to learn as much as you can.

- Barry: It is very difficult to work, once you've worked in a requisite organization, to move to one that isn't requisite. He says it is important to look at where are the opportunities to implement Requisite. org. Barry: It takes time to learn the Requisite organization approach and even more time to implement it.

- Scott Hine is Executive Director, Strategic Initiatives at Novus International. His role includes a large corporate infrastructure project. He also manages non financial internal audits. How is this different from where he worked before with respect to exercising his full capability?

- Rick Brown is principal of an independent consulting company. He's had a 30 year career in financial services in two major banks in Canada. The last ten years has been with CIBC. He moved from a stratum three role to a true stratum four strategic head of HR role.
- I was the director of Human Resources in a division at CIBC. I spent the next five years as the business HR resource implementing Requisite. org. During that period I was more a target of the change than really an agent. The learnings came later on when we took the learnings more internally.
- Most of my work as head of HR was highly tactical and operational in nature. I started operating as a true stratum three and start bridging the world between operational execution and strategy development. I didn't have a lot of difficulty adapting or resisting the change.

- Right now in the development of organizations it is overwhelmed by the antirequisite quality of organizations. The personality offers a great potential for exploration and growth and improvement. But right now things that are attributed falsely to personality deficits are really organizational deficits.

- How do you assess somebody's performance and then how do you pay them? What Elliot said was, here's a simple way to assess somebody. It all comes down to personal judgment as to the performance of the person.

- Kevin Maori is director of customer supply chain at Novus International. He found the Novus management system to be well suited to a fast paced company. He says it does an excellent job in identifying and matching people with their roles and capabilities.

- It is wrong to imagine that if we have a series of one year objectives that that in itself adds up to a long term strategy. The best companies that I've worked for are orientated to the long term. Even the best run companies constantly revisit their longer term assumptions.
- The industries that I am most familiar with are mining, natural resources, and power generation. In all of them, you could actually look quite a long way ahead. One can look a longway ahead in economic problems.

- I first came into, or first heard of Elliot's work and the work of the BIOS community when I was a mature student. My involvement with BIOS has evolved since 1982. Finding ways of introducing that thinking into work.

- If there was to be more research done, it would be what's the relationship to making more money and requisite organization. At the end of the day, the chief executive has to make a big leap that more utilization of capacity and less coercion results in more profit.

- I think that one of the most powerful things with requisite organization is that it's just not for big business, it's for small business. It's for all of these attributes of society education, social work, government. There is a need for people of higher stratums in board levels to challenge a new level of thought.
- Over the next 50 to 100 years, the big test of democracy will be is now that we've created huge governmental institutions. Can we get the strata leadership necessary to lead those institutions? That'll be as big a test as was the labor movement, and the Civil War.

- It was an extraordinary partnership because they were complementary. Elliot, the rather introverted psycho analytic background psychiatry before then. Wilfred Brown, an industrial manager and owner of Great Idealism. Such conditions and such a partnership of two men rarely arises.

- Rich Morgan was vice President of Human resources at Canadian Tire Financial Services. His first experience with Requisite organization was a first career path appreciation. The assessment also included his wife. The whole experience changed his life.
- After six wonderful years at canadian Tire, I needed another change. I started my own consulting business. Learned very quickly in consulting that on one's own, you don't very often get the type of challenging assignments that you would like. In retrospect, requisite organization has changed my life in a very positive way.

- For the last ten years, I've been doing requisite organization consulting. We've done work in some of the largest companies in Canada. 95, 99% of our work is about implementing requisite practices and systems. Our approach in consulting is to really work with HR professionals.

- I would love to have been exposed to this in college courses or graduate school courses when I was 25. By the time I was 30, it was really good at it. This is a system for all seasons, for prosperous seasons. If you can learn it, the quicker the better.

- I was working with Colonel Neil Cosby at the Army Research Institute. Elliot, myself, and Steve and Owen Jacobs all were pulled together to look at the technology of Elliot and see how it could be applied to the army. What we learned was it'd be pretty tough for the operational army to think about designing this stuff. So we moved it into the overhead army.

- The main work initially at Brunel and I was in virtually practically at the beginning was in the hospital service. We came to see that hospital organization is just not like industrial organization. We got some interesting new material on multidisciplinary team work. This is one of the richest areas in the social welfare field.

- My consulting practice has changed somewhat over the last eleven years that I've been consulting. I tend to work with smaller presidents, companies under 100 million in size. What I like to do is to find ways for a company to grow by 25% within one year.
- One concern for Canada is that our governments have allowed our large global companies to disappear. Most of the head offices have been bought out by either American or European pulp and paper companies. What that means for consulting is that you have to focus in on smaller companies and help them grow.

- Jerry: I do a lot of work in a thing called anaclytic depression. It's a form of depression that occurs when an idea that gives you emotional support is taken away from you. One reaction to that could be depression. On the other hand, you talked about being stimulated by Elliot.

- Psychosocial entities exist independently of their actualization. I would like my own work to be developed within a wiki fashion because it's basically common sense. We've got to appreciate and tolerate and welcome diversity.

- If you've ever worked in a requisite organization, you will never want to work in a non requisite organization again. My business now is about aligning strategy, people and performance. The organization framework is that underpinning to allow an organization to link strategy, its people and its performance.
- For me, the most essential requirement for success is absolute clarity and absolute buy in at every level in the organization. ideally the sponsor is the business leader. If everybody is singing from the same song sheet, everyone is committed and everyone understands what the prize is. A more effective and more focused organization will deliver significantly better results.

- I think one of the big learnings is that you really can't just work on one part of the organization. If a client wants work done on structure or work on peoples or people or any of the other systems, what we try and do is to encourage them to look at the other areas.

- The two main actors, the investment institutions and the corporate managements, are each under great, almost irresistible pressure to perform in the shorter term. Only exceptional firms can resist it.

- The business world and financial world are riddled with many major conflicts of interest. People are on both sides of every problem. In the United States, investors have no rights at all. Investment banks are on every side of every major transaction. What can one do about it?
- The evidence that now exists that well governed firms perform very much better is now incontrovertible. How do we solve the problem? Well, in a way that ought to appeal to free enterprise. By creating a market demand for good governance.

- Short CEO tenure puts a huge strain on CEOs. RTZ is developing a whole program around corporate governance and thinking about the role of the board. We can help organizations identify the gaps and provide a blueprint for how they can get there in the future.

- I was almost completing a PhD which I was doing at the Land School of Economics. I found Wolfie Brown and Elliot Jax's work absolutely fascinating. What appealed to me as well was his mixture of theory and practice.
- In the early days Brunel was and possibly still is a bit of a concrete jungle. I had become incredibly interested in the nature of organizations. The whole concept of social welfare, social services, social policy was very close to my interests. It was an incredibly exciting period in British social policy.

- Elliot regarded organizations as generic across all the sectors. The concept of sector that there could be different sectors. There was not one that he ever really tackled. And that's the way I moved so for many years.

- In the 80s, CRA had completely restructured using Stratified systems theory as their basis across all of their companies. It gave me the opportunity for the first time to work from the top to the shop floor. There were major projects over a long period of time which was improving the quality of leadership.
- CRA started from what were the major systems that needed to be aligned and coherent with the culture. Change programs probably, and depending on the size of the organization, went on for five or six years. It's really thinking about very seriously the design of those systems and then thinking about what behaviors will that drive.

- We've had to become more efficient and effective at getting the work done. We've created new role that are focused on getting better and more timely information to the business units so that they can make better decisions. It takes time to make these kind of fundamental changes in the way people think about how we get workdone.

- A recent trip to Australia sort of solidified my appreciation for the theory. What we saw was both in the headquarters of Iron Ore in Perth and then out in the mine, at the railhead and at the port in Dampir. We saw an organization that could apply other practices like Lean Six Sigma to change.

- If you have a manager and with a specialist, should he take it? What's the position of it? It's up to the line manager whether he accepts it or not. They're starting to prosecute senior managers in the organisation personal culpability.

- "I immediately saw the drastic change we had to make and I can't say that it scared me. But it also gave me enormous relief because I felt now there was a clear solution to the mess that had been there, " she says. The integration of credit and finance cut down probably one third of the whole management structure.

- Tata Industries in India has adopted work levels and has kindly recognized that they were my ideas. I've trained people in Unilever over many years who are now acting as consultants. I do have on my agenda, once this project is completed, a book which draws together the experiences of the three companies.

- Ian McDonald first met Elliot when he was an undergraduate at Brunell in 1968. Joined Institute of Organization Social Studies in 73, late 73. Developed interest in mental hospitals, in particular people with severe learning difficulties. Went on to design Chart of Initiative and Independence.
- Got invited over to Australia to CRA. First thing I did was help design the training programs for the general managers. It was quite a challenge to move from sort of the health services in the UK through to Australian mining companies.

- The three levels of requisite organization comprises three levels. The conceptual framework is the system of concepts that we use to understand the phenomena that we study. What the conceptual framework does for us is it helps us make sense of the data that we collect.

- In 2005, 2006, I am really seriously looking at issues that I need to deal with within my business. The interrelationships between people is becoming much more complex. We decided to implement requisite organization. It takes a theory, it takes a process and it takes time to put in place.

- Let me touch a bit on kind of the steps we went through in our requisite transition. The staffing side was a process that was not without its challenges. But the end result is we got the right people with the right capability doing work at the right levels.
- What did your world look like in a post requisite. org environment? There was still the accountability for operational delivery, albeit that was delegated to my team. Where I was focusing my time was on developing the talent within the organization.
- How do you link Requisite. org into David Ulrich's talk on strategic HR? There is a very clear linkage between the two. Thought leaders make greater contribution at that strategic level. Requisite Organization provides the wherewithal to execute that strategy.

- April Poor: I am big on structure. I don't do well without structure. The Novus management system offers that structure that sort of guides people. Here at Novus there is a structured learning system. When it's used properly, it really does work.