Talking About Organizations Podcast

Coming soon! Our next episode features a 1999 book by Charles Perrow titled Normal Accidents that addresses the risks associated with complex, tightly coupled high-risk technological systems. With the Three Mile Island disaster and a host of other catastrophes, Perrow built a framework that helps forecast which kinds of technologies are most at risk. However, he suggests there are constraints regarding what one can do to preclude accidents.

In Part 2 of our episode on five works of Henry Mintzberg, we move toward the contemporary environment and ask ourselves how much has changed since the Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning was published. After all, some of the very systems that Mintzberg criticized heavily are still very much in use, and still appear to exhibit some of the same failings. So what should be done?

This month we return to the works of Henry Mintzberg, whose book Simply Managing we covered way back in Episode 14. This time, we decided to cover a number of works covering broad themes of strategy development and organizational planning, along with critiques of extant design school works. We divided five works among us to discuss in which he argues about why strategies and plans so often seem to fail, why planners seem so out of touch with the rest of the organization, and why even the processes of strategy development and planning may be inherently flawed.

Coming soon! We will cover a body of work by Henry Mintzberg. His career as a consultant and management researcher spans decades and has resulted in numerous works that provide critical perspectives on dominant schools of thought in organizational design, strategic, and planning. So instead of a single reading, we chose five and the cast members divided the works as they all converged on several common themes.

We now release a recording of a professional development workshop (PDW) called Queer Eye For Academics: Skills For Navigating Academic Life, held at the 2025 Academy of Management annual meeting. Inspired by the popular Queer Eye television series, this PDW offered a fresh approach to skill-sharing within academia, and featured six presenters – most early-career scholars from the LGBTQ+ community -- covering a variety of practical skills such as teaching, crafting research programs, and presenting, and interpersonal development skills such as engaging, fostering caring relations, and recognizing colleagues.