Move Your Mike
In February 2013, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, sent a memo to her employees saying that working from home was not acceptable anymore,...
Empowerment, That Horrible Word
What scientists call distributed control is usually called empowerment by management consultants. However, some experts don’t like the ...
Delegation Requires Boundaries
The origin of the word management is from Italian, meaning “taking care of horses”. All I know about horses is what I picked up from ...
Don’t Let Scrum Make You Fragile
My spouse has a personal trainer who makes him perform all kinds of healthy practices. One week it’s the lateral lift, another week it�...
The Merits System
It is clear that the annual bonus system doesn't work. A tremendous amount of research says that it demotivates people, destroys coll...
The Flat System
Some people argue that organizations should get rid of their bonus systems. They say most of an organization’s performance is in the sy...
The Bonus System
A practice that has infiltrated the western business world like a pestilence in a shanty town is the annual bonus system. The idea of thi...
The Problem of Vogon Mission Statements
A few months ago I was in a bar in Melbourne. I had been there for a number of hours, enjoying a relaxed atmosphere, friendly service, ni...
The Problem of Top-Down Goals
There’s a problem I have with suggestions for goals and purpose in standard management literature. Most writers and consultants assume ...
The Problem of Stakeholder Focus
As soon as an organization, a team, or a person, defines their purpose as a focus on one thing above other things, there will be sub-opti...
Business Guilds
Have you ever seen the façades on the Grand-Place in Brussels? They look absolutely amazing. In the past they were literally the image o...
The Kudo Box
There are many wrong ways to reward employees. A simple but effective approach is to install a “kudo box”, which enables people to gi...
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