Posts Tagged: leadership

Main — Comments Off
15
Mar 10

Time Poverty and the Cult of Busy

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.”

Main — Comments Off
12
Feb 10

Decisiveness

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

Main — Comments Off
4
Jan 10

We Trust You

Matt from SvN on control via trust:

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden. [...]

Imagine an employee handbook that just said: “We trust you. Be mischievous.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If the company trusts you with corporate secrets, company property, and access to production servers … maybe the policies on appropriate use of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are misplaced.

Main — Comments Off
28
Oct 09

Fight as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong

Bob Sutton believes you should “Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.”

This seems to me to be good advise, and one that I’m going to work on. Apparently he has a whole book written about this type of thing.

Main — Comments Off
26
Oct 09

The economy is causing unhappiness at work

The Economist on unhappiness at work:

“A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy, found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%.”

The article puts the primary blame on the poor economy, but also suggests that micro-measuring employees (how many times did you smile at a customer today?) and mixed messages about company loyalty play a significant role.

Bob Sutton discusses the data further. Particularly, he is interested in how companies will fare when the economy returns.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →