(This is a guest article by Jonathan Littman, Co-Author of I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job)

When historians finally get their hands around the lost decade that wiped out our 401k’s, looted our nation’s treasury and battered our economy, they will likely arrive at a simple conclusion: Playing nice was bad for business.

The last administration sold itself as the “let’s be nice to business” school of thought. It was a philosophy that spread throughout entire industries and our greater economy.

Nice was a forced smile, a phony front for those who wanted to put one over on everyone else. Most of the seemingly nice results generated by all this nice turned out to be frauds. Those generous mortgages peddled to new home-buyers blew up into balloon payments that rendered thousands bankrupt and homeless. Wall Street was nice to investors for most of the decade, delivering fabulous returns on investments nobody understood—until the bill for the bad mortgages came due.

Bad investments had been stacked upon bad investments in this nice new financial instrument called the derivative that nobody understood until it helped to wreck our economy. The nice, regular returns offered by ‘Mr. Nice’ himself, Bernie Madoff, was a gigantic Ponzi scheme that cost investors $60 billion.

“Don’t trust the smile of the crocodile . . .”

During the orgy of niceness, those entrusted with policing the purveyors of phony nice were way too nice. The SEC and FBI were incredibly nice to thousands of scam artists who went on a financial crime spree. Accounting firms were nice to lots of companies that didn’t really earn money, or ship as many products as they said, which ended up costing lots of jobs.

It was a genuinely nice age to steal billions from everyday Americans and corporate employees.

At the pinnacle of our nationwide nice delusion, two advertising agents wrote a sugary 119-page treatise called: “The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness” It was what everyone wanted to hear. Donald Trump (a client) loved it. The book became a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller. It was in short, a very nice time for business.

How quickly the herd changes direction

Nice is now a four-letter word. Companies have been falling over themselves in trying to prove that that they are no longer suckers and anything but nice.

Top corporations that have had strong fiscal quarters, or even increases in earnings, have coolly laid off thousands of workers. Smaller firms have even boasted of record earnings—while announcing massive layoffs. Those banks handed the free lunch of our billions of tax dollars have not been very nice to individuals and businesses desperately in need of loans. Congress is on the verge of making it nearly impossible for anyone under 21—young workers and college students struggling under debt—to get a credit card.

The New Nice is Mean.

Today, thousands of corporations are marching in lockstep to prove how nice they are to their company bank account, which has the trickle down effect of being mean to the people who do the work. Firms are paying employees for four days a week but demanding that they work five. They’re slashing benefits and perks. They’re laying off men and women by the thousands.

They’re being nice about it.

Consider Microsoft, which recently put out an official e-mail from CEO Steve Balmer, announcing the firm was “Eliminating additional positions across several areas of the company. While job eliminations are always difficult, we are taking these necessary actions in response to the global economic downturn.”
See how nicely they did it! They’re only eliminating positions. No talk about firing people.

Mean is the New Nice, and just as the age of Phony Nice ruled America for nearly a decade, we are now headed for some Serious Mean.

Don’t worry. They’ll be nice about it.

Jonathan Littman is co-author, with Marc Hershon, of I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job and the business blog, IHatePeople.biz. A contributing editor at Playboy, he co-authored The Ten Faces of Innovation and The Art of Innovation. For more information please visit www.IHatePeople.biz

Technorati Tags: corporate attitudes, macho management, making money, mean bosses

Before blaming ‘communications’, look at the these five alternative possibilities.
 

Are organizational communications really as bad as they are made out to be? Do we need all the books, courses, articles and blogs on the subject? At one level, the answer has to be ‘yes’. Organizations are full of managers who confuse, lie to and manipulate their subordinates, executives who never listen to anyone and employees who hoard information and use every means possible to cover up their mistakes. There are also lots of honest, well-meaning people get caught up in misunderstandings, muddled intentions, incorrect assumptions and mixed messages.

Are ‘poor communications’ all that is behind these problems? I don’t think so. I think that ‘communications’ has become a buzzword that allows senior management to divert the blame and avoid dealing with the real issues.

Here are five serious issues that should always be checked out before jumping to the conclusion that ‘communication’ is what needs to be improved.

• Is the problem communication—or what is being communicated? The homespun saying that became famous during the last US presidential campaign sums it up: you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Executives, like politicians, are devotees of ‘spin’, but however you communicate an unacceptable message, the message remains unacceptable. Blaming poor communications for a poor response is diverting attention from what really matters: the message itself.
• Are the expectations behind the message impossible? Executives often blame poor communications—and “middle level managers who cannot motivate”—for the organization’s failure to deliver on what they promised, even if what they promised was never realistic in the first place. It’s the old chestnut called, “mistakes were made, but not by me.” To avoid admitting their own failure and incompetence, these executives try to shift the blame onto vague concepts like communications and, of course, onto lower-level managers.
• Was the failure due to poor systems? By jumping to the conclusion that communications lie at the root of every problem, you can postpone indefinitely any consideration of the systems within which people have to work. Blaming communications is cheap and attributes the problem to someone else. Accepting that systems are inadequate is likely to be expensive and, if you’re the person in overall charge, lays the blame squarely at your door.
• Was the thinking behind the communication too rushed? In many cases, what is diagnosed as a communications problem comes down to nothing more than a muddled and inadequately explained message. Before you blame the communicator or the process, ask yourself whether the message was prepared to adequately, laid out clearly and contained everything necessary to be understood. Managers are often in such a rush to do things they send out messages no one can understand.
• In the case of communications about goals or targets, was it clear to the recipient of the message what his or her role or task should be? It’s all too common for senior managers to throw out a slew of messages about what has to be achieved, and by when, without taking time to consider who needs to do what. You cannot blame poor communications for an inadequate strategy.
• Did the recipient listen? In upward communications, the most likely cause of any problem is simple: the person above has failed to listen. As executives rush from meeting to meeting, terrified that they might miss something—or that others are plotting behind their backs—they don’t give themselves time to listen to what is said to them. Later, when it becomes clear what they missed was important, they blame the other person for ‘poor communication’. In addition, many executives are so puffed up with their own sense of importance that they feel no need to listen to anyone. They aren’t kept in the dark by others; they do it to themselves.

Can communications be a problem within an organization? Indeed they can. Is it a topic that we should pay attention to? Of course. Is it as widespread a cause of problems as conventional management holds? I don’t think so, but no one will know for certain until managers and executives stop using it as an excuse and start inquiring into the true cause of the problems they face.

Technorati Tags: communications, workplace communications, management, leadership, motivation

Stefan Stern has an interesting article on the Financial Times website (“Bully-boy school of management”). He too thinks something went wrong with the corporate culture in certain organizations in the recent past. Maybe the macho management, achievement-at-any-price culture, with its attendant tolerance of bullying, even had something to do bringing on recession.

Bullies may think they are merely “driving the organization hard,” but the reality is different. They can so terrify their subordinates that no one is willing to bring them anything but good news. After all, turning on the messenger in anger at some piece of bad news is common enough for almost everyone to have suffered from it sometime.

Can you blame a subordinate who doesn’t want to be the one who faces a furious boss—especially one with a reputation for dealing roughly with people who get on his bad side? Yet, without proper communication upwards, the leader will be in the dark about most things, especially anything that might be a threat to his expectations and his ego—like risks about to go wrong.

It seems even Jack Welch—not a man with a reputation for kindness and tolerance of subordinates—has had a change of heart over the wisdom of leadership based on “squeezing, squeezing and squeezing.” Maybe he should have thought of that when he was still in the corner office. According to the article, “James O’Toole from the University of Denver remembers one former GE executive confessing to him that one of his boss’s attacks ‘caused me to soil my pants’.”

As Stefan Stern concludes:

“Organizations are made up mainly of ordinary people and most will contain their share of racists, sociopaths and bullies. That’s life. There may not be much we can do about that. But, if the CEO’s corner office is inhabited by a bully who cannot or will not be faced down, that business has a serious problem, culturally and operationally. And when it all ends in tears, it won’t just be those being shed by the bullied victims.”

Bullying used to be the sign of weaklings, trying too hard to prop up their miserable lack of self-esteem. Then, somehow, it started to be seen as a sign of commitment and intensity in pursuing corporate profit goals. But, either way, it has done great harm, both to the bullies and those who employ them. You cannot pursue even good ends by bad means and expect there to be no consequences.

Technorati Tags: corporate bullying, macho management, leadership mistakes, lack of communication,

Is there still time to reverse a global pandemic—more contagious than swine flu, more deadly than Ebola—that has brought economies to their knees?
 

The hysteria surrounding H1N1 swine flu has concealed the growth of a much more deadly pandemic; one that has been circling the world for a number of years and shows, as yet, no sign of decreasing in intensity. I refer, of course, to Mad Manager Disease (MMD)—a virulent infection of the brain that warps reasoning, undermines balance, destroys judgment and reduces those suffering from it to helpless dependency on mind-altering drugs like bonuses and stock options.

It is amazing that the World Health Organization has yet to offer formal warnings on this subject or recommend the temporary closure of business schools—the principal sources of infection. Known carriers of the disease, such as CEOs (an acronym for Chief Excuses Officers), other top executives and any number of management gurus, need to be placed in the long-term quarantine.

The symptoms of the disease

How can you tell whether someone you have to deal with has caught the virus? The principal symptoms of the disease are strikingly similar to other viral infections like influenza:

• High temperature. Sufferers are constantly stressed, overheated and excitable. Everything has to be done at high speed, preferably by yesterday. Their ability to cope with normal levels of uncertainty in life becomes impaired, so they engage in a frantic search for predictability, typically based on large amounts of wishful thinking.
       As the disease reaches its terminal stages, many sufferers’ overheated brains produce hallucinations (typically of personal triumphs), coupled with delusions of grandeur and invincibility. Arrogance and bullying are widespread from first infection, but tend to grow steadily worse. In terminal cases, there is a complete loss of any sense of reality shortly before the onset of final brain-death.
       Becoming overheated and constantly rushed leads to irrational phobias. People suffering from rabies are said to become fearful of water. Sufferers from MMD become terrified by change. The disease acts to enlarge the command-and-control centers of the brain, resulting in obsessive micromanagement, an irrational desire to impose pointless rules and procedures, and a progressive collapse of trust in subordinates. MMD also resembles rabies in causing infected creatures to launch unprovoked attacks on anyone within range.
• Dizziness and loss of balance. Two of the commonest signs of infection are ‘management myopia’ and ‘measurement-itis’. Management myopia produces an inability to see beyond the end of your nose and a total focus on short-term results. Measurement-itis has been explained as a serious inflammation of the statistical nodes of the brain, leading to the obsessive collection of meaningless data. Since the statistical nodes are poorly developed in many managers anyway, sufferers are unable to make sense of the information they have collected and resort instead to simplistic rules of thumb.
       MMD produces a loss of balance when dealing with expectations, work schedules and budgets. Indeed, the attempt to impose unrealistic, unbalanced versions of any of these should be seen as an immediate indicator of an infection. Balance is also lost in considering priorities, especially between employee needs and financial requirements. Infected individuals typically display an obsessive craving for spreadsheets and financial ratios, further undermining their sanity.
• Nausea. Most infections produce nausea in the sufferer. MMD is unique in that it produces nausea in everyone who comes into contact with the person suffering from it. The behavioral symptoms of the disease—macho posturing, obsessive greed, blatant self-interest and a complete indifference to the welfare of others—are more than enough to make any normal person feel sick.
       From time to time, those suffering from the disease do produce a particularly foul form of vomit, made up of management jargon, half-digested buzzwords, meaningless ratios and PowerPoint presentations. When this happens, bystanders are strongly advised to take cover. To be drenched in this stuff can be life-threatening.
• Weakness. The judgment of those suffering from Mad Manager Disease becomes weaker by the day. In time, they are unable to make any decisions of a rational nature. Instead, they resort to management myths, constant repetition of the past and an excessive reliance on conventional methodologies.
       Secondary infections are also common. Sufferers frequently succumb to every prevailing fashion, and their brains are easily taken over by parasitic ideas spawned by popular management gurus. Serious invasions by fungus spores such as benchmarking and belief in industry best practice are sadly common.
       MMD quickly destroys the imaginative elements of the brain. This leaves sufferers paralyzed with indecision in the face of changes in circumstances. This stage of the disease made a major contribution to the current economic melt-down. Despite all the evidence that existing management methods were no longer working, sufferers were unable to imagine any alternatives.

Fortunately, MMD is both curable and preventable. Widespread reading and the cultivation of an open mind provide effective vaccination, as does a healthy dose of skepticism on a regular basis. The most effective treatment is a rigorous exercise program based on freethinking and questioning of all conventional ‘wisdom’, coupled with a regular diet of active non-conformity. In critical cases, however, the only cure may be escaping from corporate life altogether.

With careful mental hygiene and isolation from sources of infection, anyone can avoid this pandemic. If you remember to wash your mind free from all macho assumptions and management myths on a regular basis, you should be fine.

Technorati Tags: management, leadership, judgment, macho management

When it comes to how to think about anything, the answer is simple: do it for yourself!
 

One of the problems of macho organizations is the way they overrate any opinions expressed forcibly—especially if they use an ‘it’s all or nothing’ approach, or begin with the phrase, “It’s quite clear the only thing that matters is . . .”

When everyone ‘discusses’ an issue via displays of machismo, it’s not surprising the loudest mouth wins. In an atmosphere like that, thinking for yourself—and, worse, straying from the approved pathways of corporate dogma—is likely to be dangerous for your career. The result is monumental narrow-mindedness.

As we seek to dig ourselves out of our problems and get ready for whatever lies ahead, it’s worth considering this: the most extreme views (and the most extreme presentations of almost any views) may seem compelling, but they contain almost all the risks as well. Almost any idea or opinion will be toxic if it’s the only one you have.

People who are more cautious and ambivalent are more likely to be right, but they won’t have the same impact in a room full of egotists, all eager to ‘win’ by making sure that their idea is the one that is implemented. Amongst macho managers, not only is ‘might’ the same as ‘right’, but volume and vehemence count for more that sound reasoning or careful reflection.

Why do we believe even self-appointed experts?

What started me thinking about this was Nicholas Kristof’s fascinating piece “Learning How to Think” in the New York Times. I won’t quote from it at length (you should read it for yourselves) but it describes the way that we all over-rate so-called expert opinions, especially loud ones or ones from famous people or high-profile pundits.

He has sound research evidence to back up what he says. For me, the most telling (and most amusing) included the finding that the predictions of experts were roughly the equivalent of random guesses; that the clinical diagnoses made by psychologists were no better than those made by their secretaries; and that a laboratory rat did better than a group of Yale students in figuring out the best way to find food dropped in a maze!

So why do we still tend to believe what these experts tell us?

A good part of it comes from the way most of us were brought up to defer to our ‘elders and betters’. Even as adults, we still follow that ingrained behavior. Many people also doubt their competence and ability. We are painfully aware of personal inadequacies and doubts, whereas the experts appear totally confident and absolutely certain of what they say.

Do they have doubts? Absolutely. Are they always as certain of their facts and interpretations as they appear? Of course not. They’re just good at acting the part. The more closed-minded, rigid and opinionated they are, they more they bolster their opinions with the trappings of authority and expert status.

On being mentally lazy

It’s much easier to swallow ready-made opinions and beliefs that to do the work needed to discover and test your own. That’s simple laziness.

People with only a hammer-shaped idea in their heads see every problem as a nail. People with no ideas at all grab for whatever appears fashionable or appeals to those around them. If having only one idea makes it toxic, have none at all—and relying on others’ thoughts to fill the gap—is to be pretty much brain dead.

There’s a story that a group of angry parents once confronted the president of Harvard after he had announced an increase in tuition fees. His response was blunt: “If you think education is too expensive,” he told them, “try ignorance.”

I have no idea how the world will go in the next few years: up or down, out of recession or into a worse one. What I am fairly sure about, however, is that mental laziness, narrow-mindedness and glorification of ignorance, wrapped up as gut-feel, got us into this mess. That being so, only thinking for ourselves again stands any chance of getting us out.

Technorati Tags: thinking for yourself, moving on, creativity, open-mindedness, facing the future

What makes a corporate and workplace culture ‘civilized’?

United States Supreme Court (Photo: dbking)

In recent years, much of corporate America—much of the Western corporate world, if it comes to that—has taken a large step backwards in providing truly civilized working conditions. Can it be right, here at the start of the 21st century, that people face career uncertainties, job instability and working pressures greater than any since the oppressed mill-workers of the Industrial Revolution?

Many workplaces present people with a continual, manic experience, full of rush, hurry, pressure, distractions and escalating anxiety. Professional and managerial-level staff skip meals and breaks, dash from one meeting to another and work hours even the unskilled laborers of the past would have felt were oppressive. Throughout today’s typical workplace culture, the environment has gotten steadily tougher. Organizations demand their staff work longer hours, often at a faster pace, to beat off competition from other businesses doing the same thing. It’s a vicious cycle—a no-holds-barred game where the stakes are constantly raised. No one seems to consider the alternative of stepping aside and allowing the lemmings to race each other off the cliff.

Taking a hard look at what we are doing to ourselves

This isn’t a civilized way to live. People have less time to spend relaxing or attending to family and friends. Fathers (and many mothers too) see less of their children, have less energy to devote to bringing them up as they would wish, and are too tired when they are at home to give their family quality time and attention.

The workplace has become more than central to many people’s lives. It’s become the place where they spend more time than anywhere else. The place that grabs at their attention, even when they’re supposedly having time off away from work. So they skip vacations, phone in to the office from those holiday beaches, carry cell phones everywhere in case someone—anyone—from work needs to call them at any time. Work has taken over their whole existence.

What should a civilized workplace look like?

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself. To me, a civilized workplace needs to meet these criteria as a minimum. Anything less than this cannot, I believe, lay claim to being a civilized place to work:

1. It must operate in ways that ensure everyone is treated with the dignity benefiting a fellow human being. Macho management is not compatible with a civilized society.
2. It must recognize work as part of life, but not the whole of it. People who choose to set family and non-work commitments on a par with their work must not be penalized or devalued for doing so.
3. It must be free from discrimination, bullying, unfair pressures and exploitation. Bullies, whether they ‘get results’ or not, have no place in a civilized corporate culture; nor do discriminatory policies, unequal pay for equal work or victimization of those who blow the whistle on management wrong-doing
4. It must be a place where ethics are adhered to in deeds as well as words, and honest dealings are the norm. We’re seeing today what happens when no one trusts anyone else, either to lend them money or accept their sureties. That way lies a total breakdown of economic activity.
5. It must recognize and honor values that go beyond the obvious financial and economic ones. Money isn’t everything. You can manage what you cannot measure. Management by accounting and numbers has failed and failed badly. It’s time to look at quality as well as quantity.
6. It must be a place where people make choices on the basis of what is right—intellectually, ethically and socially—not what is currently expedient. Short-term thinking and devil-take-the-hindmost attitudes have brought us to the brink of ruin.

We can make better progress towards making our offices, laboratories and manufacturing plants into places to be proud of. We can encourage every leader, no matter how few are in his or her team, to accept civilized standards and implement them as best they can. Grass-roots movements are usually unstoppable, once they attain enough momentum. This one can be too. Yes, we can!

As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Technorati Tags: corporate culture, civilized working conditions, civilizing the workplace, corporate ethics, setting standards, work/life balance

Why doing what everybody else does is asking for trouble
 

Leaders, we’re often told, are paid large salaries because their jobs require the exercising of personal judgment in the face of considerable risks. The risks are certainly there, as is the need for judgment, but a good many leaders—maybe the majority—typically exercise nothing more demanding that the willingness to imitate others and go along with the prevailing fashion. Their fear of being left out is far greater than their concern to understand what they are doing.

Imitation is the virus that cripples all too many of today’s organizations. It’s also a large part of what got the world into its current, horrendous mess. Like other viruses, it rarely kills quickly, preferring to spread itself through the weakened body of its host, waiting to infect whatever other potential hosts it comes into contact with.

As a result, you find whole industries where the principle form of leadership is watching to see what everyone else does and doing that. No one has an advantage, because no one stands out from the rest. It’s stable and comfortable, so long as nobody rocks the boat. It also feels safe and risk-free. In reality, it’s running a continual risk that everyone is going to go down together. What destroys one, destroys all.

Darwinian, Schmarinian!

Our prevailing orthodoxy assumes that businesses are subject to a strict ‘survival of the fittest’ pattern: that any organization doing something harmful to its future will soon collapse and be swept away by ‘fitter’ rivals (Obviously, those who hold to this idea have some kind of blanket exception for US automobile makers).

The reality is that you only need to work in some companies for a few days to see that the people in charge are immune to any concerns about destroying the business. Their sole strategy is to take good care to enrich themselves and boost their own egos. If you look at the financial world’s so-called ‘Masters of the Universe’, together with the leaders of most banks, insurance companies and hedge funds, you’ll be able to pull out scores of examples of such destructive leadership patterns, matched with the personal survival instincts of a sewer rat.

Left to itself—as those same people demanded—the financial world has embarked on an orgy of self-destructive behavior that would amaze any lemming. Far from acting on the principle of survival of the fittest, it has made imitative suicide into an art form.

What is at work here?

I think I found the answer in an article written by Freek Vermeulen of the London Business School.

He points out that deadly viruses survive, despite killing their host organisms (and thus themselves), because they spread quicker than they kill. They manage to reproduce themselves and infect another host faster than they kill the one they’re already inhabiting.

It’s this speed of transmission that allows pandemics both to spread fast and kill millions. So long as the virus or bacteria keeps on infecting new hosts before it kills the current ones, it can survive AND destroy simultaneously.

That seems to me to be exactly what happened in the run up to the present economic meltdown: bad ideas and crazy risks were imitated so quickly they spread to almost every corner of the financial world before they started to kill their initial hosts. By the time everyone caught up with just how deadly they are, it was too late.

Is there an antidote?

Indeed there is: the same one that can save any of us, in our own small lives, from going down the identical path that leads from fashionable imitation to ultimate misery and regret. It’s called thinking for yourself.

Our so-called leaders have proved themselves to be incompetent at best and plain stupid in many other cases. Far from exercising independent judgment, which was what they were paid to do, they simply followed fashion. When things went well, they claimed the credit (though most of it was dumb luck). Now they are up to their nostrils in the brown stuff—and us with them—they still can’t see that doing what everyone else did isn’t any kind of excuse.

Thinking for yourself won’t insulate you from every mistake, but at least the ones you make will be your own. And because you will know why you did what you did, you’ll have some chance of learning from your mistakes and doing better next time. Work out what’s best for you and don’t simply follow the herd.

The heads of banks and finance houses clearly had no idea why they allowed their businesses to ‘invest’ in toxic loans and incomprehensible ‘financial instruments’. They neither understood what they were putting our money into, nor seemed to think it mattered. Everyone else at their exclusive golf club was doing it. Who dared to be left out?

When the history of these times is written, people will once again marvel at human stupidity and the power of the herd instinct. They’ll ask the same question they always do: “How could anyone be so dumb?”

The answer will also be the same: “Those who don’t think and allow fashion to rule their lives climb to the top in good times and take us all into the abyss a few years later.”

Whether they are financiers or politicians, the world never seems to learn that allowing the ‘good old boys’ and the charming glad-handers to run things is putting the inmates in charge of the mad house. Electors take note!

Technorati Tags: fashion, imitation, self-destructive behaviors, stupid financiers, viral ideas, economic chaos.reasons for financial meltdown

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What every leader and organization should be learning from Wall Street’s misery

“Shipwreck” J.M.W. Turner

People tend to over-value their assets and ignore embarrassing problems. Part of the problem with Wall Street is that corporations still can’t bring themselves to admit that most of the fancy derivatives and other so-called assets they are holding are worth virtually nothing. They hang on, claiming their businesses are strong and denying the truth, until it’s too late and the crisis threatens to overwhelm them, one by one.

It’s the same with personal strengths and capabilities: people tend to over-value their abilities and underplay their weaknesses. As a result, they become complacent about what skills and experience they have and what they can achieve with them.

Too many bosses convince themselves that their people like them more than they do; that they’re better, cleverer leaders than they are; that they are excellent communicators, when the reality is much less hopeful; and that they can run their part of the business better than is actually the case. Read the full story

It’s time to recognize that conventional management ideas are broken — and start thinking of something better.

Admiral David Farragut

In the American Civil War, Admiral Farragut achieved immortality with an order usually simplified as, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” During the Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864, Farragut ordered his ships to charge into the bay, despite a minefield (mines were called ‘torpedoes’ then), to attack and defeat the Confederate force waiting there. His action pretty much sums up the attitude to management in recent years. Over more than a decade of short-term thinking, leaders have rushed, full-tilt, into action, ignoring the risks in a headlong charge for glory — and the huge personal rewards it could bring.

From hedge-funds to motor manufacturers, there has been only a single goal: to make as much profit as quickly as possible, more or less regardless of any other considerations. Such justification as any bothered to seek came from people like Milton Friedman, who preached notions of laissez-faire economics and the duty of ‘maximizing stockholder return’ without regard for anything else. In time, this was transformed into undiluted self-interest on the part of executives. It could hardly be otherwise, since the stockholders were increasingly impassive and disinterested in anything but profit themselves. When most of the shares in a corporation are owned by huge money funds who buy and sell on the basis of numerical analysis — or index funds who will own whatever is needed to match the chosen index, regardless of any other considerations — stockholders plainly have little or no direct interest in the business itself. Read the full story

Today’s fetish for competition is dangerous nonsense

If you are in business, how do you think of your competitors? Are they friendly rivals and people to measure yourself against; or are they enemies to be exterminated: the company driven out of business and the workforce thrown onto the streets? If you work in a large organization, how do you see your colleagues? Are they the people you need to work with to get things done, who may also be your friends; or are they bitter rivals for promotion and threats to the security of your own position? Would you do something underhand to make sure that it was them and not you who got the push?

Most people, most of the time, prefer cooperation to competition. They prefer teamwork to conflict, and they generally try to be fair in their dealings with others. If this were not so, the human race would have died out a very long time ago. But organizations these days try to inculcate an almost pathological competitiveness among their staff and similar attitudes against other organizations. All of which benefits nobody in the end, besides ruining people’s health, happiness and careers. Read the full story