Michele Zanini

Bachelor in Bureaucratic Bloat

The relentless rise of management and administration in U.S. universities has become a real drag on faculty and students alike, as Yale's experience suggests.

Empowerment

The great pharmacist rebellion against crappy work

You know things are bad if even pharmacists are revolting against poor working conditions.

Meritocracy

De-biasing the performance review, once and for all.

Ideally, judgments about human capability would be comprehensive and impersonal—the product of standardized, data-driven performance systems. In practice is seldom achieved, as new study (and several others) suggest.

Can we manage without managers?

The management column (Bartebly) in this week's The Economist makes the case that managerial hierarchies are valuable & inevitable, and flat organizations represent a "false utopia:" Why companies need middle managersOrganisations embrace flat hierarchies at their perilThe EconomistThe EconomistThe article is paywalled, but the basic logic is as follows: Flatter

Warren Buffet on why the institution matters more than individuals

Among all of Warren Buffet's legendary shareholder letters, the 1989 edition is among my favorites. In it, he makes a powerful argument that, when it comes to firm performance, institutional design is far more important that the talents of individual executives. Here's the key passage, drawn from the section where

Friday Links, June 25

If you pay people more, they will be more productive. Wow, who knew? Glad to see corporate executives rediscover the power of efficiency wages (i.e., paying above-market wages with the aim of improving employee motivation and productivity), something that Henry Ford recognized back in 1914. Commentary: Here’s why

Management History

Chronicles of Management ADD (Ambition Deficit Disorder), vol. 1

In its 1976 annual report Procter and Gamble described itself as a company built on "freedom and individual initiative." The report devotes seven whole pages to unpacking these principles and the various practices that reflect and reinforce them--such as employee involvement, promotion from within, and profit sharing. Here's the excerpt,

Meritocracy

The problem with corporate leadership successions

Leadership successions in large companies are similar to those in autocracies. That's nuts.

Friday Links, May 14

1. Does WFM hurt productivity and collaboration? A large-scale study of work patterns at an IT services company during the Work-from-Home (WFH) period shows that: ⬆️ hours * same output = ⬇️ productivity. The culprit: a substantial rise in communication and coordination costs due to WFH. And it's not just near-term productivity that suffered.

Toxic Assumptions

How to "Deep-Six" Innovation

Six Sigma worship nearly killed 3M's innovation engine

Links

Friday links, April 30

A "key to our success was that we isolated our scientists from financial concerns and freed them from excessive bureaucracy," says Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, reflecting on how the company developed its COVID-19 vaccine in record time. The CEO of Pfizer on Developing a Vaccine in Record TimeIt started with

Power of Community

Harnessing the power community: lessons from Formula 1

In a F1 team there are no silos, no middle managers and no BS staff jobs. Instead, there’s empowerment by the bucket load.

Links

Friday links, April 9

Next time execs at your company say "innovation is a top priority," show them this tweet: Want to know why it is so hard for big companies to innovate? Read the classic paper "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B” on the power of bad incentives:

If you're serious about purpose at work, you must flatten the hierarchy

Unless we change our organizational DNA, purpose-filled work will be remain largely confined to the managerial elite.

Links

Friday Links, April 2

US employment is recovering, but we're still a long way off pre-pandemic levels for most occupations. Good U.S. employment numbers today, as @DanielAlpert described in a great Twitter thread today: Good JobsDay (and Good Friday). We at @jobqualityindex expect that the restoration of private sector low-wage/low-hours jobs, wiped

Management Processes

How to Fix the Performance Review-Once and For All

A few notable exceptions aside, the performance management process in most organizations is broken. It's time to end this.

Links

Friday links, March 26

Note: during the course of my research--and, tbh, time-wasting on Twitter--I come across a variety of sources that are interesting to me. This post is an experiment to see whether you might also find them useful as well. If so, I'll make this a regular feature. Please drop me a

Leadership

The remarkable elitism of corporate learning curriculum

Some remarkable examples of how we don't even try to equip most people to fully contribute to their organization.

Skills and Training

You can't reinvent workplace learning unless you rethink your organization

If you want to update workplace learning for the 21st century, you need to update your organization as well. Without that, you'll be stuck in the AFTP- Another "Fine" Training Program-mode. As usual.

Entrepreneurship

A few unicorns will not create a dynamic and innovative economy

The world’s unicorns, VC-backed startups worth more than $1 billion, have been getting a lot of press over the last five years. All this excitement about the unicorns is understandable — they underscore the promise of new technologies and the power of the entrepreneurial spirit. Unicorns also represent a threat

Digital transformations will likely increase centralization and executive power

A quartet of management academics (Phillip C.Nell, Nicolai J. Foss, Peter G.Klein, and Jan Schmitt) just published an interesting paper suggesting that "digitalization" of business will lead to an expanded role of HQ and more power and involvement by execs, rather than encouraging more decentralized forms of management.

Management Data

Americans' satisfaction with big business cratered in 2021

Gallup just published the results of its annual poll gauging satisfaction with various aspects of American life, including its institutions. Not surprisingly, the numbers are generally lower relative to the January 2020 batch. What's striking, however, is the collapse of satisfaction with the size and influence of major corporations. Respondents

Managers and Administrators Employment Tracker

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Management Data

2020 was a very good year for the managerial and administrative class

The latest occupational data suggests that bureaucracy's footprint in the US economy has never been greater.

Changing how we change

The promise of digital tools for organizational "hacktivism"

Employees can now aggregate their influence, skills and passion to form powerful horizontal coalition for proactive change. How can we encourage this happens at scale?