Management

Here’s a question that bedevils everyone from Fortune 500 boards seeking a replacement CEO to school principals hiring a new algebra teacher, from families looking for a great electrician to baseball teams searching for a better shortstop: How do you find extraordinary, game-changing talent? George Anders is a top-shelf business journalist, a veteran of the […]

Here’s a tip for rounding out your summer reading. Pick up a copy of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, which pubs today, is one of the best business books I’ve read in many years. (Buy it at Amazon, BN, or 8CR). The authors — Harvard B-school professor Teresa […]

Lots of people believe that a single individual can’t make a difference in an organization. Lots of people, it turns out, are wrong. Take the case of Jen Shefner. She’s an assistant vice president at Columbia Credit Union in Vancouver, WA, in charge of the credit union’s online and mobile services. Last month I met […]

One of the ideas in Drive that has spread the fastest and the widest is the FedEx Day. Invented by the folks at the Australian software company Atlassian, these one-day bursts of autonomy allow people to work on anything they want (as long as it’s not part of their regular job) — provided they show […]

Back in my misspent youth, when I wasn’t watching sitcoms or walking to the library, I spent a big chunk of my time playing teams sports — baseball and basketball especially.  I had coaches, of course, but none of their exhortations, encouragements, or demands made much of a difference or left an impression on my […]

Do family-friendly policies like childcare subsidies and job sharing increase productivity and profits? Or are they luxuries that hurt the bottom line? A paper (pdf) by Nick Bloom, Tobias Kretschmer, and John van Reenen says the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In their study of more than 450 manufacturing firms in the US and […]

Josh Stumpenhorst, a teacher in the suburbs of Chicago, wrote to share his experience trying implement a FedEx Day, one of the stickiest ideas in the Motivation 3.0 repertoire, in his 6th grade classroom. He dubbed it Innovation Day 2011 and has a great description at his blog, Stump the Teacher. But I wanted to highlight some […]

In this February Inc. Magazine article, which I finally got to this weekend, The University of Virginia’s Saras Sarasvathy talks about research she’s done into the thinking styles of accomplished entrepreneurs. The whole piece is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by her flavorful distinction between entrepreneurial thinking and managerial thinking: “Sarasvathy likes to […]

Erin Albert is a multi-talented, multi-tasking pharmacy professor at Butler University (Go Bulldogs! Beat Wisconsin!) who runs a couple of businesses and is pursuing a law degree on the side. Since she obviously has lots of time on her hands, she’s also just written a book. It’s called Single.Women.Entrepreneurs. And it’s about – wait for […]

This is the time of year when the temptation to hibernate — physically and mentally — can hit hard. It’s so much easier to stick with familiar and comforting routines, to trundle along in the same old rut. I asked clinical psychologist and George Mason University scholar Todd Kashdan – author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient […]