Parting words from a successful Hedge Fund manager
 

In case you missed this article (“Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F—- You”) on portfolio.com on October 17th, here are the parting words from Andrew Lahde, the manager of a small hedge fund, who grabbed the spotlight last year after his one-year-old fund returned 866 percent betting against the subprime collapse. Ladhe has decided to take his money and retire.

He doesn‘t sound like a very admirable person, but much of what he says does have the ring of truth to it. I especially enjoyed this part:

“. . . I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

Technorati Tags: financial crisis, stress, management, getting out of the rat race

How misunderstandings of risk, measurement and success put us where we are today
 

We live in world of pressure to conform: to believe what others tell us is true, to toe the line, to accept the values of those in positions of power and to follow conventional, approved paths. That’s the way to get on in life and business, we are told. You need to ‘fit in’, ‘play the game’, and ‘avoid rocking any boats’.

That may produce a quiet life, but it won’t help anyone speak out when it becomes clear that things are going badly wrong. Heresy—questioning beliefs that are approved today—seems to me to be essential to human progress. Nearly every advance in human thought is loudly denounced as a heresy at the start—only later does it become the new orthodoxy. That is true of politics, religion, and matters of social justice. It is doubly true of the world of work. Corporations often claim they want creative, smart and independent people; but those they actually favor (and promote) are usually obedient to the approved corporate line.

We’ve never needed heresy more in the lifetime of anyone here today. Our orthodoxies—most of them in place since the 1930s—have failed on a massive scale. We didn’t see it coming either, mostly because to do so (and speak about it) was seen to be a heresy. As a result, we have brought down the roof on our own heads by misreading risk, putting more faith in numbers than reality, and equating the wealth of a few with success for all.

Misunderstanding risk

Mitigating—or, better still, avoiding—risk was the mantra of most financial corporations in the last few years. They thought they knew how to do it, using a combination of fancy number-crunching and the much-vaunted ‘business sense’ of the guys at the top. The orthodoxy demanded that key decisions be restricted to a few people at senior levels. Middle managers—the group most likely to know what is really going on—were shut out of important decisions. It was inconceivable to allow middle or junior ranks to use their judgment to question executive strategy.

Now we know how mistaken the orthodoxy was. The top guys were too remote from the real world to grasp what was brewing; the pointy-headed types too wrapped up in their theoretical models. Meanwhile, those in contact with reality were incentivized to ignore it and concentrate on churning out loans to obviously doubtful risks. A system originally built on relationships was turned into a system built on abstractions. To suggest anything might be wrong with that was heresy.

Leadership by numbers

The temptation to reduce the functioning of a massive corporation to one or two headline figures is too much of an attraction for some—but that doesn’t make it right or sensible; especially when it comes with a orthodoxy that concentrates attention on spurious, short-term goals at the expense of the long-term health and viability of the business.

We now know that the ‘achievements’ so avidly reported were rarely based on sensible uses of corporate time, attention, or money. Instead, the messy, complex, demanding, and fascinating process of running a successful business was ‘simplified’ to meeting a few simple, numerical goals—as if they accurately represented the business as a whole. Such “indicators” and “key ratios” are no more than numbers dreamed up by accountants and financial markets, often for some entirely different purpose. The figures are not the business. They are, at best, inaccurate and blurred pictures of the business as it was at one fixed time, and given a number of (often dubious) assumptions.

Wealth is not always a sign of success

Why didn’t we all question the most basic tenet of business thinking: that a good life means earning a great deal of money? It seems so plain now that executives had their judgment twisted out of joint by obvious conflicts between self-interest (and huge personal rewards), the insatiable demands of greedy Wall Street types, and the real interests of their businesses and the country at large. Why didn’t we see it?

Orthodoxy held that economic prosperity is based on persuading a majority of people to consume more and more of whatever corporations want to produce. That demands the consumer has access to money, and lots of it. The result was a lifestyle composed of equal parts of getting and spending, with nothing else considered. When the real sources of money ran out, they were simply replaced by credit—and more and more of that too. Credit couldn’t be made hard to obtain, since that would slow down ‘economic activity’ and limit profits.

So, for several decades, anything that produced wealth was approved, regardless of much else. The economy was ‘high’ on the addictive drug of executive stock options, double-digit growth in paper profits and deregulation. Now the ‘high’ has ended and we have to face the ‘cold turkey’.

Conventional thinking won’t show us the way out of the mess it has caused. Such progress as we can make will only come from embracing heresy on a grand scale. It is time to make a start.

Three men were trying to claim precedence for their own profession. The surgeon said his was the most important job, since God had been a surgeon at the start of human life: he had extracted one of Adam’s ribs to make Eve. The architect objected on the grounds that first God had drawn up the blueprints for constructing the universe and supervised its building. “Before that,” he said, “there was only chaos.” The economist smiled and simply said: “Who do you think produced the chaos?”

Technorati Tags: leadership, economic success, handling risk, economic crisis, causes of the economic crisis, orthodoxy, heresy, unconventional thinking

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Has Our Obsession with Quantification Caused Our Downfall?
 

At the height of the credit boom, one of the pieces of mythologogy doing the rounds was that you could quantify and measure risk so precisely that it pretty much ceased to be . . . well, risky. Banks and hedge funds employed all kinds of pointy-headed types, from mathematicians to theoretical physicists, to produce ‘risk-management’ algorithms that they claimed made it possible to make money all of the time.

Like every other kind of ‘sure thing’, from infallible gambling systems to simple ways to make millions with nothing more than a home computer and a whole lot of faith, this one too proved to be little more than the latest version of snake oil.

The interesting point, however, is not so much that another infallible system failed, as why people seem to be so prone to believing in the myth of quantification as a substitute for common sense?

Misunderstanding numbers

Part of the problem, I believe, comes from a basic misunderstanding of numbers. Numbers represent a precise language in which it is perfectly possible to express the most total nonsense.

Words sometimes have quite imprecise meanings, but a number is a number. Two never means three, or ‘nearly two’ or ‘somewhere between one and five’. You can add numbers together a zillion times and always get the same answer. They are so reassuringly precise on the surface that they lull us into believing that whatever comes in numbers is as precise as they are.

That, of course, is not true. While I can set the odds on something to the fifth—or fiftieth—decimal place, and verify my computation as many times as I like, all that super-precise number is telling me is the outcome of a process that might well be full of unsupported assumptions, logical holes and guesswork.

The numerical precision of the outcome—often enhanced by the fact that it was produced by an ‘infallible’ computer (which is not infallible either and whose precision is merely mechanical)—seems to allow people to forget that what it represents is no more that a statement of someone’s thinking: a human product as likely to be full of holes and mistakes as any other.

Human nature, numbers and risk

Human beings are both uncomfortable and incompetent when it comes to dealing with risks—even more so when that risk is mixed up with the impenetrable jargon of possibilities. Yet risk is what leadership is all about. If what to do is clear and there is little or no uncertainty about the outcome, who needs a leader?

Strategy, by definition, deals with trying to estimate what to do for the best in situations of extreme uncertainty and ambiguity. Numbers don’t work well to express ambiguity. Their calculation is too unreliable when there are multiple sources of ambiguity and no way of deciding between them. Put simply, in ambiguous and unquantifiable (precisely!) situations, numbers are both misleading and often plain impossible to produce with any accuracy.

Still, the big bosses want numbers, so the little workers dutifully churn them out, even if they know they’re nonsense from the start. By they time they reach the executive suite, they’ve been sanctified by so many committees and middle managers that no one will question them.

Leadership should be based on judgment, not computation

It is exactly in such ambiguous situations that too many executives put their greatest trust in numbers—even though that’s when numbers are at their least accurate or useful.

I suspect that it’s the precision of numbers that causes the problem. They seem so reassuring when everything else is vague and impossible to get a hold of. The same long-term, uncertain aspects of strategic decisions that make us so insecure increase the surface attractiveness of quantified data. Indeed, the more complex they appear to be—and the less we understand them—the more ‘scientific’ we’re tempted to assume they are.

People who feel afraid that they may not be doing the right thing, or making the correct choices, want to see some numbers to lull themselves into the belief that they have a solid basis on which to decide. That’s make-believe, of course; any half-competent statistician can make those numbers say whatever he or she wants them to say. But it’s such wonderfully reassuring make-believe.

Omens, auguries and statistics

The ancient Romans used to sacrifice animals and scan their livers for signs to help them decide on the right course of action for future. We laugh at such ‘unscientific’ ideas, but are we so very different?

They had some very precise guidelines for what did or did not count as an omen. Those who made these auguries did so according to careful observations and a clear set of ideas about what each spot or blemish meant. The emperor and his courtiers weren’t expected to understand such esoteric ideas. That’s what they employed augurs to do for them. The emperor’s job was to listen to what the augurs said, then decide, basing his decision on whatever they told him.

How is that so different from the CEO who listens to some manager droning through a PowerPoint presentation that lists the precise risks and benefits of a plan. That CEO is just as unlikely to have anything save the sketchiest notion of what on earth lies behind all those calculations; let alone be able to decide whether they are based on anything but the craziest estimates of future conditions.

I began my working life as a very junior person producing statistical projections for my betters. Did I always know what I was doing? Hell, no. Much of what I did was based on assumptions those same people gave me to work with. In essence, I was turning their guesswork and gut-feel into numbers. At the end of the process, what came out was no better than what went in (sometimes worse, if I miscalculated). However, since it was now safely expressed in ‘scientific’, quantified ways, it commanded a level of respect it never would have had before.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. The future cannot be computed. Risks cannot be fully quantified. It’s the job of leaders to stick to reality and acknowledge they cannot know in advance what will happen—then use their best judgment anyway. Guesses and assumptions masquerading as scientific calculations are still guesses. They’ve only changed their clothing.

A risk is always a risk. A big one is riskier than a small one. Acknowledge that and you’re at least forewarned that your strategy may well go wrong. Pretend you’ve found a way to make it a near certainty and you’ll probably bet the farm on it—then have to run to the tax-payer to bail you out.

Technorati Tags: strategy, strategic thinking, quantifying risks, executive decisions, leadership thinking, managing risk, planning the future

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Can organizations ever give up their attachment to money?
 

“Financier leaving your little room/where the money is made but not spent,” wrote the poet W.H. Auden, “the game is up for you and for the others.” Auden’s warning to a sick society, written just after the 1929 Wall St crash, was very nearly fulfilled. Only the massive rearmament and mobilization of the late 1930s and the Second World War saved the financial system of the day from destruction.

And now, here we are again. The western economy may have collapsed completely by the time you read this (in which case you may not be reading it all); but, even if things don’t get quite that bad, it’s obvious that the game is up, not just for much of the finance industry, but for an entire philosophy of management and leadership—borrowed ultimately from that industry—which tries to motivate people through greed.

Incentives to be stupid

I wrote in an earlier post about the dangers of “monetizing” organizations: trying to motivate people by giving them financial incentives to do things. There’s a lot of agreement now that this approach can hurt organizations. Until the last few weeks, though, I don’t think anyone had appreciated quite how quickly it could completely destroy them.

The disappearance of the largest banks in the United States turns out, on examination, to be related to quite small and technical changes in the rules governing how much money they were allowed to borrow. Give somebody an incentive to be stupid and they will be stupid. Give somebody a large incentive to be stupid—like allowing them to borrow thirty times the capital of their bank to gamble with—and they will be extra-stupid. What are we going to do about this?

Obviously, different types of organizations will always have different relationships with money: a merchant bank and a school will never look at financial incentives in quite the same way. But it’s clear that the time has come to think again about a basic question: what effect does offering financial incentives to the workforce have on how an organization works? It used to be argued that organizations would benefit because people were motivated by more money to work harder. In fact, it turns out that people simply do more of what brings them extra money, at the expense of what doesn’t, even if the latter is actually more important.

Why is money supposed to motivate people?

It can’t be because people value money as money—like a miser, dripping gold coins through his fingers in a darkened cellar. That would be pathological. Presumably it’s because of what money is supposed to bring: status, freedom, and, most of all possessions. These things are supposed to make us happy. And the purpose of earning money is ultimately to be happy . . . Isn’t it?

At this point, we should remember that Buddhists have always argued that it’s precisely this hunger for the things that money is able to buy—“attachment” as it’s called—which is at the root of unhappiness. [Navajo myth refers to evil and witchcraft as "the way to make money."—Editor] True happiness comes from letting these attachments go. Some people interpret this as giving up all your possessions and going to live in a wooden hut in the forest. That can work in certain cases, but it’s not money or what money can buy which is the problem, but rather our relationship with these things. Too often, we don’t own these possessions: they own us.

Rethinking our relationship with money

The cure for this problem is to rethink our relationship with money—not just as individuals, but as leaders and members of organizations. For some years now, organizations have tried to motivate people by extrinsic rewards—money, status and so forth—rather than the intrinsic rewards of the job itself. As a result, people have come to measure their worth by their salary, the size of their office or the type of car they have been given. Yet, as Buddhists have long pointed out, unlike job satisfaction, extrinsic rewards can never be big enough to make us satisfied forever. There’s always more money, a bigger office, a better car. No wonder so many people in organizations today are rich and still unhappy.

Workers in organizations take their cues from the top. A good start would be a rigorous programme to ban every single financial incentive. Then, when the attachment to money and status has been flushed out of the system, you can start building a new system in which money is just a way of translating work into the means of living; and status comes not from the size of your salary, you office or your car, but the respect of your peers.

Organisations which hope to survive will have to move in this direction anyway. The sooner they start doing it the better. As Auden wrote in the same poem: “it is later than you think”.

Technorati Tags: motivation, rewards, monetary rewards, incentives, relationship with money, status, unexpected consequences

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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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Why management fads don’t deliver
 

Last few decades of management fads and fashions have been notable fo the number of panaceas and theories that first become ‘indispensable’ then fall out of favor. I mean fads like Management by Objectives, TQM, Six Sigma, Zero-based Budgeting, Matrix Management and the like.

There’s little or no hard evidence that they add anything to company performance (Check out this article by Freek Vermeulen, an Associate Professor of Strategic & International Management at the London Business School, referencing a study by Barry Staw and Lisa Epstein of University of California, Berkeley.) It’s not really surprising that they found the major benefit of jumping on the latest management bandwagon was in improving the markets’ short-term perceptions of the company (plus the compensation package of CEO). None of these techniques seemed to have produced any positive benefit for corporate results, despite containing what sometimes looked like little more than basic common sense.

What goes wrong?

One possibility is that most of these techniques are swallowed whole and applied mechanistically—not fitted to the individual circumstances of the user. Another is that name and broad outline of a techniques is used, but managers then cherry pick the bits they like (or which fit with present preconceptions of the culture) and ignore the rest. It also seems likely that all such fashionable techniques are marketed as universal panaceas by consultants hoping to make big profits, but that, in truth, only work in a few, quite specific circumstances.

It’s certain too that many demand specific skills not usually available. They’re like getting a recipe from a gourmet chef that tastes wonderful in the restaurant, but demands skills, ingredients and cooking apparatus simply not available when you try it at home. Cooked from the recipe in a home kitchen and it’ll turn out like your normal cooking, not what you tasted in the restaurant.

Today’s endless lusting for the quick-fix

What all fashionable management fads and techniques seem to have in common is that they promise a quick fix based on a simple recipe.

Taking on a fad is typically a substitute for thought. Instead of spending the time to work out the true nature of the problems you face, you pick a solution and apply it, hoping it will work. The evidence is that typically it doesn’t.

I suspect the only reason that most don’t do active harm because they are rarely given much more than tepid, surface support. Most employees have been through the cycle before—sometimes quite often. No one expects the enthusiasm for the technique to last once the consultants have left—and it doesn’t. As a result, employees pay lip-service to whatever is the fad du jour while keeping the bulk of their actions unchanged.

What’s the alternative?

Let’s be clear. You won’t solve any problems without thinking deeply about them, taking into account their context and history as well as the current manifestation and coming up with a solution that fits the specific circumstances and available resources.

Theories and grand panaceas are always general; actual problems are always specific. It’s a fundamental mistake to try to fit your needs into some grand and general scheme, when you really need to consider is what’s unique about them—not what’s similar to something being used by everyone else.

Many leaders also make the mistake of thinking that categorizing something solves it. Managers are very prone to wanting to fit everything into their existing patterns of thought. In reality, it’s more likely that something is important precisely because it doesn’t fit. It’s warning you that the present categories and the thoughts based on them aren’t sufficient any more.

Of course, there’s nearly always something useful within each of these high profile management techniques. The best use to make of them is mostly as a ‘quarry’ for ideas that you can adapt to your own specific needs.

Reality is much more complex than any management fad. Don’t treat every problem as a nail, simply because you’ve been swept up in the enthusiasm for a new type of hammer.

Technorati Tags: management fads, management fashions, panaceas, management techniques, management consultants, simplistic answers

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

Why do people believe that they can tell what secretly motivates or drives others?

Of all the topics that come up in the leadership and management media, one of the commonest is motivation: how do you motivate people? In my simple-minded way, the answer to the question of discovering what motivates someone else seems simple: you ask them. So why is so much ink spent on theories of motivation, motivation surveys and endless speculation about the topic, some of it rather ill-considered?

On the whole, I think I blame Freud. His notion of unconscious motivation may or may not be well-grounded in psychological understanding — I am not a psychologist, so I won’t get into that morass — but it certainly opened the door to a situation the Viennese doctor may not have intended: you don’t ask people what motivates them, because they don’t know — at least consciously.

This created an even more dangerous belief: that you, the observer, may know better than the person does him or herself why she does what she does, based on using pseudo-psychology to ‘explain’ the links between what may be observed and the supposed underlying or unconscious motivations.

The mischief this has caused! Armed with nothing more than prejudice and pop-psychology, hoards of people believe that they know why others do things, without the need to check. Indeed, if they do ask — or are told — that often discount the explanation given as an example of ‘avoidance’ or because (thanks to Freud) they assume what the person says consciously isn’t true. It’s the unconscious motivation that counts. 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

Holding too many meetings destroys people’s faith in their manager and their colleagues

In the list of activities that waste time and cause worthless frustration at work, meetings rank very near the top. 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 too many 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.

Some people spend most of their working days in meetings of one kind or another. The only time available to do their own work is either very early in the morning, before the first meeting is scheduled, or late in the evening when they should be relaxing at home. There are briefing meetings, liaison meetings, working parties, project groups and a host of other meeting types; and while all offer endless opportunities to drone on about something of little importance to anyone else, the worst aspect of so many useless gatherings is their tendency to create situations where your work can be vetoed or undermined — whether that’s by the boss (who has enough opportunities to do this already) or various colleagues. Read the full story