What if individuals and organizations are responding to the pressures of today’s business climate by dealing with the wrong issue — trying to manage and extend time, when what they need to be doing is managing peoples’ energy levels? That’s the argument of a paper in Harvard Business Review. But the well-intentioned actions offered as answers miss the fact that both overwork and the long-hours culture are deeply embedded in the systems that organizations and top executives live by.

The media have invaded the boardroom and brought with them many of the characteristics of melodrama: the continual sense of crisis, the stereotyped behaviors, the tendency to hype and overstatement, and the tricks that turn illusions into reality. It’s time we got back to reality, especially as managers and leaders. In stories, you can write the ending to the script in the way that you want it to turn out. In real life, the Seventh Cavalry may well not come over the hill in the nick of time to save you from being scalped.

The attitude people have to their work can transform an economy. If work is nothing but a ‘four-letter word’ and a way of spending time you would much rather avoid, don’t look for any increase in productivity or creativity: the only things that drive any economy forward over the longer term. What we need is the kind of stimulus that will get people more engaged in making a better, more enjoyable, more civilized life for themselves and everyone else.

Using numerical analysis as almost the sole guide to management action is tempting, especially in times when everyone is under pressure to “perform” against numerical targets. But relying on numbers is very risky, especially when business success depends more on people’s perceptions and responses than moving abstract figures around on a spreadsheet. Whatever the numbers say, people and their feelings nearly always have the final word.

There’s good evidence that much leadership behavior borders on the psychopathic, but is this simply a response to organizational cultures that are themselves suffering from a fundamental sickness?

We’ve probably all seen articles that point to the close similarities between the symptoms listed as evidence for a diagnosis of psychopathic illness and typical behaviors of many [...]

Today’s obsession with quantifiable objectives is more about office politics than performance

I was working for a well-known European government a couple of decades ago, in the days when quantifiable objectives for performance measurement were new and exciting — at least if you were excited by quantifiable measures of performance objectives. We had an office in [...]

If we can learn from it, we can establish management approaches that will do better

Photo of Hurricane Frances taken by Astronaut Mike Fincke aboard the International Space Station as he flew 230 statute miles above the storm at about 9 a.m. CDT Friday, Aug. 27, 2004. (NASA)

Our current management system is broken.
It’s based [...]

Conversation is becoming a lost art, replaced by endless one-way talk and organized “spin”

This is a revised and expanded version of a post I wrote back in 2005. If anything, the situation I describe seems to have become worse since then, so I believe that it is well worth repeating.
“To converse” means to share [...]

Current economic and financial problems have been caused by systematic failure of macho, short-term leadership

What we are encountering in the global economy isn’t just a credit crisis and looming melt-down of various financial institutions. It goes deeper than that. We are daily faced by clear proof that, in the past few years, many corporate leaders [...]

Why do some of them seem incapable of learning?

“I have called, and ye refused” says Wisdom irritably, in the King James Version of the Bible. “I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded.” It’s a common enough complaint, and one that’s found in most great religions and in the works of most great [...]