Michele Zanini (Page 3)

Friday Links, June 25

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. 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’

Management History Featured

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&

Meritocracy Featured

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

Toxic Assumptions Featured

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

Power of Community Featured

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

Featured

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 [https://twitter.com/DanielAlpert] described in a great Twitter thread today: > Good JobsDay (and Good Friday). We at @jobqualityindex [https://twitter.com/jobqualityindex?

Management Processes Featured

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

Leadership Featured

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

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 [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000768132030149X] suggesting that "digitalization" of business will lead to an expanded role of HQ and more power and

Management Data

Americans' satisfaction with big business cratered in 2021

Managers and Administrators Employment Tracker

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?

Management Economics

Top economists don't think large executive salaries reflect current contributions to firm performance

Executive compensation has less to do with current contribution to firm performance and more to do with efforts to move up the corporate ladder.

Management Data Featured

In investment in workplace training declining? Evidence from the UK

Despite the reskilling hype, large-scale survey data from UK shows training days and spend are in decline.

Management History Featured

Mary Parker Follett on Community, Creativity, and Control

Mary Parker Follett's perspective on the creative power of collaboration, how to effectively manage interdependence and diversity, and the nature of influence and authority in organizations that are more relational than hierarchical.

Mgmt Throwback Thursdays

Hackman & Oldham's Job Characteristics model

For this week's Management #ThrowbackThursday [https://twitter.com/hashtag/ThrowbackThursday?src=hashtag_click], I bring you Hackman & Oldham's Job Characteristics model. Developed in the 1970s, it challenged the prevailing attitude that jobs should be simplified to maximize efficiency: As part of their research, Hackman &

Video

Build Change Platforms, Not Change Programs

Traditional approaches to change are bureaucratic at their core--and that's why they fail. We need to a new model for organizational change, one that's bottom up & horizontal, embraced, and emergent.