“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
"Taylor always said that scientific management would usher in a "mental revolution," and it has. Modern life is Taylorized life, the Taylor biographer Robert Kanigel observed, a dozen years back. Above your desk, the clock is ticking; on the shop floor, the camera is rolling. Manage your time, waste no motion, multitask: your iPhone comes with a calendar, your car with a memo pad. "Who is Schmidt?" journalists wanted to know, a century ago. Vell, ve are." [
The history of management consulting]
posted by vidur
on Aug 7, 2011 -
30 comments
A series of studies conducted at GE's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois in the 1920s remain some of the most important in social science, with a lasting impact on the working lives of almost everybody. Before the
Hawthorne Experiments, the approach to work was to
treat humans like machines, optimizing their movements and time. But the researchers in Cicero discovered that any change in the workplace, even dimming the lights, increased productivity, because the plant workers reacted to being studied. The "
Hawthorne Effect" launched
a management revolution, suggesting that worker's feelings and attitudes might actually be important. Except,
according a new paper by the author of Freakonomics, the results of the Hawthorne studies
"proved to be entirely fictional."
posted by blahblahblah
on Jan 5, 2010 -
26 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
Where Is Bob? We have a manager — Bob. Bob is incompetent, overweight, unattractive, uncouth, socially awkward, and generally, not a very nice person at all. For a while, we were convinced that Bob had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. But then, something happened — Bob stopped showing up for work on a regular basis. Sometimes he wouldn’t even bother explaining his absence, acting as if spontaneous five-day weekends were simply the norm. And that is how everyone came to wonder —
where is Bob?
posted by nakedcodemonkey
on Aug 15, 2008 -
117 comments
Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective Microsoft Employee writes: "The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek." Let the
metavalanche begin.
posted by psmealey
on Jun 27, 2007 -
66 comments
Stupid Management Tricks at Circuit City. Is your retail electronics company losing money? Want to cut costs? Then how about firing some of your people? I know! How about singling out those store workers who are making too much -- 3,400 of them, and get them to reapply for the same job at a lower wage?
posted by storybored
on Mar 28, 2007 -
66 comments
W. Edwards Deming: Noted
consultant, and proponent of total quality
management.
The prevailing forces of destruction start early in life-grades in school from toddler on up through the university, gold stars for school athletics, merit system or annual appraisal on the job, incentive pay, work standards, MBO (rather, MBIR: Management by Imposition of Results), MBR (Management by Results). These forces of destruction must be replaced by leadership.... The transformation will restore the individual; will abolish grades in school on up through the university; will abolish the annual appraisal of people on the job, MBO, quotas for production, specified requirements that people work 57 minutes out of every hour, incentive pay, monthly or quarterly reports on business targets, competition between people, competition between divisions, and other forms of suboptimisation. Leadership will replace these bad practices, and will restore the individual.
posted by Brian B.
on Jan 27, 2007 -
51 comments
Peter Drucker; the Prince of Management, dead at 95. He was a
visionary leader to many. I tried to look up some opposing views and could not readily find any. Peace out.
posted by Mr T
on Nov 12, 2005 -
22 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
Do we need management consultancies? A new
book written by "David Craig" - a nom-de-plume for an insider with 20 years of consultancy experience.
"What distressed me and many other consultants was how the greed of directors and partners put me into situations where we cheated,lied to and defrauded clients while our bosses became enormously rich through various tax avoidance schemes."Of course
John Birt (BBC) and
other consultants tend to disagree.
The UK goverment spend on consultants is now
£1.9 Billion per annum (about $10 Million/day.)
posted by Lanark
on Jun 19, 2005 -
17 comments
NPR's "All Things Considered" had a great piece on the anger management industry today and it's increasingly ubiquitous presence in many
strata of American society.
This is the most well known anger management company in the biz, while programs like
this promote less orthodox techniques of trumping stressors.
Had any network rage lately?
posted by moonbird
on Oct 28, 2003 -
6 comments
Terrorism Status: Orange - High Condition Homeland Security has announced that the Terrorism Advisory Status is moving up to Orange.
According to the HSO, Orange alerts mean that we should be "preparing to work at an alternate site or with a dispersed workforce, restricting access to essential personnel only."
What is your company's policy for the Orange alert? Will you be working from home tomorrow? Better compose that email to HR now...
posted by DragonBoy
on Sep 10, 2002 -
45 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
Time for a change of business strategy focus? Nokia and VolksWagen are the examples given,
'the heart of productivity growth is what happens inside the firm, and firms are first and foremost organisations of human beings'
positive role models to lead us from downturn alley?
posted by asok
on Apr 29, 2002 -
2 comments
The Red Cross has a decade-long pattern of using local crises to raise funds, and then to spend those funds on other things. The donors had thought their money would go to help specific victims, and sometimes up to 80% would be diverted to other causes. I think this is wrong.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Nov 19, 2001 -
39 comments
Laid-Off Workers Are Striking Back What's interesting is the retailators are not doing so *because* they were laid off, but because of the *way* they were laid off. When will business learn humans need to be treated like-- well-- humans?
posted by christina
on Aug 2, 2001 -
16 comments
