Whack-a-mole management is the common game of ‘whacking’ business problems as fast as they pop their heads up, using a ‘mallet’ made up of whatever suggests itself as the simplest, easiest and shortest-term action. Yet because it’s more concerned with looking good than with being good, and ignores systemic factors, whack-a-mole management always ends by making things worse. You do not have to manage that way.

Holding an excessive number of meetings destroys people’s faith in their leaders and their colleagues. Not only do many meetings fail to result in any clear decision, leaving you wondering why people came together in the first place, others have no discernible purpose at all. Worst of all, holding all these meetings passes a strong message: the boss doesn’t trust the team to function without his or her constant interference; and colleagues don’t trust one another not to undermine them in some way. It’s time to stop.

At last, some of the largest technology corporations in the world are recognizing that they have created a set of monsters that are already destroying billions of dollars worth of productivity every year — cellphones, e-mail, and instant messaging. Haven’t we been saying that all along?

When someone’s committed, it shows in the way they care and how deeply they are engaged — even at work. Explore the elements of healthy, conscious commitment and reflect on why some people show a limited ability to commit to anything — leaving them unhappy, frustrated and denied a sense of meaning in their lives. Then ask yourself the key questions that will help you establish a deeper sense of commitment to, and engagement in, what you do at work, at home and at play.

How do you become truly more productive in times when you simply have too much to do? The answer lies in switching from managing how you spend your time time to managing where you direct your attention. If you have too much to do, do less — but make sure what you do is what counts for most. It’s that simple.

According to researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, white-collar psychopaths are the biggest villains in the average worker’s work and home life. Nowadays, office technology helps these white-collar psychopaths take credit for others’ good work, unfairly apportion blame and play games with employees loyalties — all from the safety of a computer keyboard. Read how some people were successful in dealing with their toxic boss.

Cutting costs has gone from being a natural practice in any profit-based organization to a global obsession. And like all obsessions, somewhere along the way it has both lost touch with reality and spawned a level of irrationality that renders it inhuman and oppressive. How many of hidden, non-monetary costs have you been lessening? How many have you been increasing, even as you drive down those that count in ‘the numbers’? Far from adding to the sum of human happiness and prosperity, the last few decades have seen us marching resolutely backwards towards a ruthlessly Taylorist view of efficiency. No wonder outrages like ‘Guanteddymo Bay’ can occur.

Authentic communication is rare today in the business world, which is why there is so little trust between people who work there. Without authenticity in communication, trust is impossible to build or maintain. The ’spin doctor’, the manipulator, the egotist and the ‘yes-man’ are examples of people whose communication is designed to carry a different message from the one contained in the words themselves. What they say may be factually correct, but it’s still designed to mislead those who hear it. If you want to be trusted, people need to know far more than what you are saying. They need to know who you are and where you are coming from.

Few people are as busy as those seeking to distract themselves from what really needs to be done. In 1759, Dr. Johnson wrote: “There is no kind of idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business. . .” Little has changed, save that we have far more toys available to seduce us; toys like e-mails, surfing the Internet and social web sites like Twitter, Facebook and a host of others. Many people complain that they cannot get their work done during normal office hours because of all the distractions they face. How many of those are truly unavoidable — and how many are caused either by poor habits or deliberate choice?

In the modern, financially driven organization, people are reduced to being extensions of the systems in use. Management is authoritarian, hierarchical and monopolistic. Using a comparison between Windows and Mac operating systems, John Fletcher charts the reasons why this approach to management seems bound to fail in the end.