Management

Running your own company is sometimes challenging – in truth most entrepreneurs would say that it’s almost always challenging. In some ways I feel like the challenges of a small business are very different than the challenges of large organizations. Som...

I had read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t  by Jim Collins years ago but I decided to re-read it because for whatever reason when I read it the last time, I didn’t have any memorable pull quotes – I didn’t have anythi...

It seems like we’re all prone to want to find amazing solutions. Whether it’s Ponce De Leon looking for the fountain of youth, searching for the lost city of Atlantis, or searching for El Dorado, we seek to find the seemingly impossible – and in at le...

These days it's relatively common to hear employees described as "human capital." However, that wasn't always the case. The term began to become popular in 1964 with the publishing of Human Capital , the work of Gary Becker. Before that, capital was...

With a title of Making It Happen  you might expect that the book is all about execution. How do you get the idea converted into action? At some level this is true, it’s about making ideas happen. However, at another level, it’s not. It’s less about e...

It started two years before The Great Depression, and the impact on what we know about management can't be understated. Management and the Worker seems to share the insights that were discovered at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works based...

It started with the liars. They’d ask, “Do you have a minute?” They’d plop themselves down in the comfy guest chair and proceed to take about 45 minutes. That’s what kicked off Cy Wakeman’s quest and led to No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Work...

No one cares what you know until they know how much you care. That truth is at the heart of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity . Your job as a manager or leader is to bring out the best in the people you’re working with, an...

While speaking with a friend recently she said that she had written in her notebook a concept similar to Snapchat  that she had never followed up on. I once knew someone who said that her father had invented the technology behind invisible fencing but n...

Lots of people speak about the Toyota Production System or lean manufacturing, but few have taken the time to look at what the originator has to say about it. Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management: Special 100th Birthday Edition is his writing about the...

In my work on knowledge management it’s become all too clear that labor costs are the costs that dominate most organizations’ budgets. Unless you’re in a particularly material cost intensive industry – such as manufacturing – most of your cost in an org...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1980, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham wrote Work Redesign , which explains how and when to redesign work. I picked the book up in no small part due to my respect for Richard Hackman and his work ...

I’ve worked out loud in my career by accident. I started with editing then writing books. I started writing articles (because they required less effort) and I’ve been speaking for years now. In many ways, my life has been what Working Out Loud: For a Be...