“Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good,” Mark Zuckerberg said recently. “They are 100 times better.”
Bull hockey, says Bill Taylor in the Harvard Business Review: great people are overrated. See also
Great People are Overrated, II and Malcolm Gladwell's 2002 take on the same theme,
The Talent Myth.
posted by escabeche
on Nov 21, 2011 -
107 comments
"The most important of the all-too-human functions of consultants is to sanctify and communicate opinion. Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file. The chief message to be communicated is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you ever imagined."
If you've ever known a management consultant, this explains why they always seem to have that "outrageously unjustified level of self-confidence." A fascinating insider's look into the anthropology of business consulting --
Masters of Illusion: The Great Management Consultancy Swindle
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese
on Sep 16, 2009 -
76 comments
How Powerful Is Productivity? TCS interviews Former Carter Staffer (and Democrat) William Lewis, who makes some interesting remarks about worker productivity:
There were many disparaging comments made in the US and maybe even stronger abroad, (and especially in Japan) about how the US labor force was getting what it deserved because it was lazy, uneducated and maybe even dumb. And of course, the Japanese then showed -- the really capable, competent Japanese manufacturing companies -- showed that was wrong by coming here, building their own factories, managing American labor and taking a lot of other local inputs and coming within five percent of reproducing their home country productivity.
posted by Kwantsar
on Jun 20, 2005 -
11 comments
J.K. Galbraith shocked at scale of corporate failures. "I can only say I hadn't expected to see this problem on anything like the magnitude of the last few months – the separation of ownership from management, the monopolisation of control by irresponsible personal money-makers." Myself and
chrispy came to the same conclusion on the drive home from the resolutely un- (rather than anti-) corporate
Glastonbury Festival today. Profit is valued and rewarded by the vast majority of corporations above all else. As a consquence, people with the same values dominate executive positions, to the exclusion of those with more 'humanitarian' or longer-term outlooks. Where is the balance? Should we make hippie non-exec directors compulsory? Or should I just go back to bed and let the drugs wear off???
posted by barnsoir
on Jul 1, 2002 -
9 comments
