management

Controlling bosses cause poor work

A boss gets things done through others.  An ability to influence others to meet a goal is critical to get things accomplished.  Some call management influence, others call management coercion.  Influence or coercion, controlling bosses cause employees to strive towards goals that are opposite to the boss. Bosses are managers, bosses manage resources:  time, money, and [...]

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Fistful of beans 08/24/2011

3 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1.   Bored People Quit — Rands in Response blog People who quit say:  “I don’t believe in this company.”  Bored people quit. The author of this post is neither an HR professional nor an organization development/behavior professional, this author simply manages people.  I say [...]

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Influence of The Modern Firm

The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth by John Roberts Brief:  The most fundamental responsibility of a general manager is to craft strategy and design an organization where the strategy can succeed within the economic, political, legal, regulatory, social, and the technological environment the firm operates.  A direct challenge to the design is finding alignment within the [...]

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Getting it done versus getting it accomplished

Some people, and some organizations, can confuse very elemental operational concepts.  The confusion is tough to trace to a culture issue or a perception issue between getting it done versus getting it accomplished. Getting it done means you care more about finishing than about quality. Very different terms. Very different concepts. An alternative way to [...]

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Project management is useless without scale

Project management is a profession. Project management is a discipline. Project management is a skill. Project management is a function. Project management is a knowledge Project management is useless without scale and project management helps no one if it is not scaleable. Compare an accounting function of a Fortune 50 company to an accounting function in a 60-person organization.  The [...]

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Fistful of beans 04/13/2011

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Managing the Motivation Equation — Chief Learning Officer Leveraging motivation theory can reduce intention-action gap.  What is the intention-action gap?  Outside work the intention-action gap can be saying you will call you mother every Sunday, but rarely do.  At work the intention-action gap can be saying [...]

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Business strategy failures are project management failures

The essence of strategic change is not a new direction, but a series of directives on what to start, what to stop, and what to continue. After all, a strategic plan really acts as a roadmap or charter for change.  A plan not carried out is a project failure. The difficulty of strategy implementation is a [...]

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Fistful of beans 12/22/2010

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1.  Is the belief that mergers drive revenue growth a delusion? — McKinsey Quarterly To evaluate a merger’s success evaluate the impact on revenue.  Revenue determines the outcome of a merger, not costs; whatever the merger’s objectives, revenue is what hits the bottom line harder. [...]

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4 performance myths dispelled and no more performance reviews

September’s Talent Management magazine writer Mr.Harold D. Stolovitch provides a reality check within his Human Performance column titled Dispelling Performance Myths: High job satisfaction results in high performance When employees select their own work goals, their motivation to achieve them is greater Personality inventories used for selection purposes are strong predictors of job performance success [...]

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The key to innovation may be better employee hygiene

Today’s drive for continual innovation, as it is taught, as it is written about, as it is sought, and as it is crowd sourced has a lot to do with early pioneers in management theory.  For example why is hygiene important to innovation?  Innovation needs motivation and motivation needs hygiene to succeed. The humanistic  management school emphasizes, [...]

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The bureaucrat and bureaucracy revisited

Max Weber (1864 – 1920) was a German sociologist, political scientist, and economist and was an admirer of forms of organizations found in German government circles.  His views on bureaucracy, when revisited, provide an interesting set of implications, my comments, if any, are in brackets: Each office has fixed duties Impersonal rules and regulations apply [...]

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In review: Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect

July 2010 in review. A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect — As a manager, running a team takes more than lining people up and pointing to the finish line.  People are all not only motivated by salary.  A leader or a manager may feel sabotaged when their [...]

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It’s true, your boss is a psychopath – UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE?

From the weekly, always insightful, Boston Globe Ideas Section, I give you this week’s UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE [their capitalization, not mine].  This section usually provides a hodge-podge of nuggets from the social sciences.  This week’s lead: It’s true, your boss is a psychopath Watching the news some days, you’d think a lot of companies were run by [...]

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More workers voluntarily quit their jobs

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal presented More Workers Are Considering Quitting Their Jobs This is the boomerang effect of companies cutting payroll costs to the bone, redistributing work to the smaller remaining staff, and leaving an environment where workers feel “lucky to even have a job”.  This leaves little left for motivation and the result of [...]

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All hail the solution to the micromanager

How to handle the micromanager? Raise your hand if you love working for a micromanager? Are you a micromanager?  You can raise your hand if you are, no one else knows, actually everyone already knows. Micromanagers grind work to a halt. If there is no confidence in work getting done, the fish rots from the [...]

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The NFL draft and your company recruiting strategy

There is little doubt each National Football League (NFL) team spends an extraordinary amount of resources preparing to draft their number 1 pick. An NFL team’s number one pick is intended to be the team’s future star and this year the NFL draft has changed their format to glorify the first round draft even more. [...]

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Change management bottom up or top down

Classic change theory: leadership drives change; leadership must be committed for change to work. Seems to make sense, but in reality leadership is irrelevant. The organization’s ability to change is dictated by the operational units and employees, not leadership. The reality: culture eats strategy for lunch. Your workers dictate change and strategy. Leadership doesn’t drive [...]

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Human capital portfolio management and simple math

A venture’s viability really comes down to a bet on a team to deliver.  It is the interpersonal process where venture performance is most impacted. Modern portfolio theory allows investors to maximize return and minimize risk.  The goal is to estimate both the expected risks and returns, as measured statistically, as an accumulation of investments.  Why use [...]

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Aubrey (Bill) Tobey, President, ACT International

“Toby is a visionary with great creative talents, practical logic, a ‘can do’ positive attitude with excellent management, communications and organizational skills. “As an advisor to the Arctic Group in its efforts, under his management to attract foreign semiconductor manufacturing businesses into the eastern region of Hungary, I was impressed with his brightness, ‘heads-up’ energy, [...]

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Change management, project management, and the intervention

Change Management is the Illness Overwhelmingly, organizations rely on process analysis to identify opportunity for savings. Process analysis is most commonly identified as change management. Change Management: Analyze and diagnose business and operations processes with a focus on the greatest areas of improvement in cost, schedule, and quality. Very few enjoy having themselves and their [...]

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