MetaFilter posts tagged with business and management

The Gervais Principle

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:47:36 -0800

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”. Warning: link may evoke baleful despair!

Masters of Illusion: The Great Management Consultancy Swindle

Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:15:34 -0800

"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

The head of a small company may still choose to be a tyrant; a large organization is compelled by its structure to be one

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:25:52 -0800

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally. Or: You weren't meant to have a boss. On the other hand, maybe you are.

An Interview With William Lewis

Kwantsar — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:18:10 -0800

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.

Management methods, models, theories

Voyageman — Sat, 25 Dec 2004 10:16:09 -0800

Management methods, models, thoeries Kick off 2005 sounding and/or being smarter than everyone else. Minds will spin given the amount of info available here.

barnsoir — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 15:20:25 -0800

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???

fpatrick — Tue, 29 May 2001 14:22:33 -0800

Someone's written my book! Slack by Tom Demarco (look for the pdf download at this link) is one of the most straightforward, easy -to-read, common sense books on management since Goldratt's Critical Chain. It's the antithesis to the recent headline I saw about Lucent and Alcatel -- Rebuilding With an Ax and a Cattle Prod. How do you build anything with an ax?