Evangelos Markopoulos

Space for Company Democracy

Space is a vital element in a system for the development of anything, as it defines the freedom needed to evolve, mature, and contribute. Lack of space is lack of freedom, which means lack of progress and development. Organizations are systems that are obliged to give space to new management and leadership initiatives. The Company Democracy Model, presented in this paper, is based on the space given to people to act in a democratic environment where ideas lead to meritocracy, valid knowledge, innovation, competitiveness, extroversion, and other benefits and ideals. Democracy, on the other hand, can be annoying to those resisting and reducing the space, freedom, and opportunity that people deserve to be judged upon. The paper presents numerous reasons why organizations fail to learn from their mistakes, and provides a democratic co-evolutionary and co-opetitive framework that can significantly contribute to organizational development, as long as a minimum of space is given to freedom of speech and communication.

Delphic Maxims Based Applied Philosophy for Business and Governance Management

Knowledge analysis and representation is significant in defining situations before they are implemented through action. Knowledge engineering precedes knowledge management and knowledge utilization needs knowledge creation. In the race for capturing and mastering knowledge, emphasis is given to the development of intelligent methods and tools to understand the human mind, but not the human being itself. To tackle this complexity, it is necessary to seek knowledge in non-trivial sources via root cause analysis models of philosophical wisdom, which usually provides the answers. As problems become more complex over time, synergies of knowledge disciplines are critical and necessary. This paper presents a triadic categorization approach, based on classes, taxonomies, and ontologies of the Delphic Maxims, and their analysis by cognitive models in an attempt to reveal their contribution to modern business and governance management through the essence of the Hellenic contribution to the global economy, civilization and humanity.

Degree of Agility with an Ontology Based Application

Agility is a concept and practice with significant importance in managing projects and organizations, although it can also be very risky due to its degree of fuzziness if not properly defined. This research re-defines agility, emphasizes the need for ontologies for its management, and creates an application to measure the degree of agility inside an organization. In this research, various definitions of agility were gathered for the creation of ontology through a mind map revealing the characteristics of agility. As part of the Co-Evolute theory and methodology, the first agility ontology was developed as well as an application that evaluates the degree of agility in an organization. The application includes statements on which the respondents give opinions concerning the current and future desired states of agility and its importance in an evaluative way. The application has proven to operate well and extensive validation and verification of the tests runs will follow.

Safety Culture and Collective Commitment in Organizational Context

In nuclear power plants and process industry safety is the number one priority over profitability and productivity. In such high-risk environments where individuals work independently their decisions can lead to dangerous situations to coworkers, organizations or even to society. In many cases, a loose commitment to occupational role causes individual to perceive safety culture as something too much detailed which makes them to lose focus on what is important regarding the safety culture. In our view, this is a problem for collective safety culture to raise to a higher level. To understand organizations collective safety culture and safety consciousness it is important to analyze employees individually to see what are their internal feelings, understanding and aims. This paper presents a joint analysis of organization’s safety culture and commitment towards their organization by utilizing also Company Democracy Model (CDM).