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  • Archive for the Management Category


    Quote of the day: The chance to do it

    Published January 3rd, 2010

    “The really good people want autonomy — you let me do it, and I’ll do it. . . . That’s all they want. They want a chance to do it.”

    – Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental in today’s NY Times

    Harvard Business Review on what really motivates workers

    Published December 31st, 2009

    Harvard professor Teresa Amabile, whose transformative work I describe in Drive, has a fascinating piece in the (newly revamped) Harvard Business Review, which is just hitting newsstands.
    Amabile tracked the day-to-day activities and motivations of several hundred workers over a few years and found that their greatest motivation isn’t external incentives, but something different: Making progress [...]

    Free, exclusive New Year’s Day teleseminar

    Published December 22nd, 2009

    To celebrate the arrival of 2010 and to thank the astonishing number of you who are pre-ordering Drive (the number of early orders already beats the monthly sales of AWNM’s debut!), I am offering a free, exclusive New Year’s Day teleseminar.

    To participate, simply email the receipt for your Drive order to pinkseminar@me.com. You’ll be registered [...]

    What should Miles do?

    Published December 19th, 2009

    A software developer in California (I’ll call him Miles) wrote to me recently with a question about motivation. Instead of answering right away, I asked if I could pose his problem to all of you. Perhaps by combining our minds, we could be a free open source McKinsey & Company for motivation.
    So here’s Miles’s question for [...]

    What matters now?

    Published December 14th, 2009

    The inimitable Seth Godin has assembled a crew of five dozen thinkers and doers from around the world to tackle that question. In a remarkable collection of one-page essays, released today, each member of Godin’s dream team selects a single word — then uses it to offer guidance for the coming year.

    I especially [...]

    Kill a bonus, save a company?

    Published December 2nd, 2009

    Management scholar Henry Mintzberg has a provocative solution to the problem of executive bonuses: Don’t trim or tweak them. Get rid of them altogether.
    In a persuasive and clear-eyed essay in a special section of the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Mintzberg says that no matter how you configure bonuses, they create twisted incentives that [...]

    Quote of the Day: Right and wrong

    Published November 17th, 2009

    Management theorist Russell Ackoff passed away late last month, leaving behind a lifetime of memorable insights. Here’s one of my favorite, reprised in a good WSJ story about Ackoff’s life and legacy.
    “All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It [...]

    Games, not grades!

    Published October 18th, 2009

    If you’re interested in education, motivation, or doing right by our kids, you owe it to yourself to watch this Edutopia interview with James Paul Gee.In eleven minutes, he offers an array of compelling insights, including:

    How games, unlike schools, avoid the mistake of separating learning and assessment,
    Why we should use textbooks the same way we use [...]

    Business card of the day

    Published June 9th, 2009

    (via Adam Richardson)

    Factoid of the day: Does Madoff have an MBA?

    Published March 15th, 2009

    “A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly— more than in any other discipline.”(Source: NY Times, 3/15/09)

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