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 [...]

I am coping with some health issues for the present and my writing schedule is likely to be disrupted as a result. To fill in some of the gaps, I will be re-publishing some articles from the past, and some that I wrote as guest posts elsewhere. I hope to be able to return to [...]

Understanding the natural currents of information in today’s macho organizations shows how communications become blocked

What’s most often blamed for organizational problems of every kind? Poor communication.
What probably claims most attention from consultants, writers, gurus, and trainers? Same answer; yet it never appears to improve significantly.
Since modern organizations began to emerge, people have been [...]

Being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean you have to act like an asshole too

On March 7th, “Men with Pens” ran this article suggesting that entrepreneurs are basically control freaks with a bad case of ego hyper-inflation. It describes entrepreneurs as “the most difficult and frustrating people to deal with,” accusing them of talking over people, steamrolling [...]

Setting “challenging” performance targets may be behind many of today’s ethical problems

It’s become conventional management wisdom to use performance targets as the primary means of managing, often combined with “empowerment.”
The reasoning goes that people need to know what they are expected to achieve (and by when), while individual creativity and initiative are best tapped [...]

Murphy’s Law (that whatever can go wrong, will) is the natural result of organizations and their leaders rushing headlong into situations of negligible visibility

When Napoleon still ruled most of Europe, a Prussian general called Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book entitled “On War” — one of the all-time, classic books on warfare and strategy, still [...]

Most of the present economic and financial problems have been caused primarily by a single flaw: an almost total failure of leadership

The most obvious lesson of the so-called “credit crunch,” and all the financial and economic problems that flow from it, is going to be the hardest one of all for organizations to swallow. Their [...]