Calligraphy by Committee | Organizations and Markets

Calligraphy by Committee

11 November 2006 at 6:36 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

The King James Bible, considered the greatest work of English prose, was composed a committee of 50 men.

Group projects, as any middle-school social-studies teacher can tell you, rarely produce inspiring results. But if you think writing by committee is hard, try drawing by one. That’s what Donald Jackson, the former official scribe for Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, signed up for when he agreed to create the first handwritten English Bible in 500 years.

Read the rest at OpinionJournal, and also visit the project’s home page.

I wonder how the 50 authors of the King James Bible got along? How did they control free riding? Were team members subject to peer review? How about 360-degree assessments? Did they work together on several projects or was this a one-shot game? (Sorry, a weekend of executive MBA teaching has left me unable to think like a regular human.)

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Management Theory.

Machlup on Equilibrium Here’s To You, Mrs. Robinson

Leave a comment

Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed

Recent Posts

Categories

Feeds

Our Recent Books

Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Peter G. Klein and Micheal E. Sykuta, eds., The Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics (Edward Elgar, 2010).

Peter G. Klein, The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur: Essays on Organizations and Markets (Mises Institute, 2010).

Richard N. Langlois, The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy (Routledge, 2007).

Nicolai J. Foss, Strategy, Economic Organization, and the Knowledge Economy: The Coordination of Firms and Resources (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Raghu Garud, Arun Kumaraswamy, and Richard N. Langlois, eds., Managing in the Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizations (Blackwell, 2003).

Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein, eds., Entrepreneurship and the Firm: Austrian Perspectives on Economic Organization (Elgar, 2002).

Nicolai J. Foss and Volker Mahnke, eds., Competence, Governance, and Entrepreneurship: Advances in Economic Strategy Research (Oxford, 2000).

Nicolai J. Foss and Paul L. Robertson, eds., Resources, Technology, and Strategy: Explorations in the Resource-based Perspective (Routledge, 2000).