“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”
The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!
“Everybody knows what NSFW means. [...] But what about safe for work?”
Seth Godin asks some good questions in his post SFW.
Bob MacNeal has a bone to pick with command & control management in Leaders Yes, Managers No:
“Are most innovations born in environments of control or inspiration? Easy question.”
Scott Berkun (author of The Myths of Innovation) writes:
“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.
This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”
Herding Cats Quote of the Day:
If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.
—Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca
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