I curate other people’s articles every week to share. Many articles don’t meet my idea of what people want from work, so I don’t share them. If the article expresses a view that is different then I may share it. If I strongly disagree then I’d be doing a disservice to publicise it! There was an article that was so nearly included!
Continue readingCategory Archives: Leadership
How Do You Reward Your People?
Is your Appraisal system used to provoke more performance? Is the old GE method of “rank and yank” used to remove the 10% lowest performing people? Does your organisation use a plethora of systems to coerce and bribe employees to be more effective? An article I shared recently alleged that Amazon managers were hiring more people than they needed, because they were incentivised to fire the least well performing. The perverse effects of incentives are well documented – don’t do it!
Continue readingSteam technology, Institutional Orthodoxy and UK Productivity
Sometimes history has a resonance with events today. Historians say you can’t understand today without knowing about yesterday. I’ve always been more interested in tomorrow, perhaps I missed a trick. But I was struck by England’s amazing success in becoming the major economic power in the world, and the contrast now with decades, or a century, of our productivity nightmare. Poor productivity costs everyone, employee, employer and Government, a massive amount of money. We need to fix it to be able to afford the Welfare State to which we think we are entitled. Enjoy the video.
Continue readingThe Very Boring Subject Of Margins
Do you know your margins? The very important Gross Profit Margin = (Net Sales – Cost of Goods Sold)/ Net Sales Cash is the lifeblood of a business. It needs to be worried about. You should know your margins and a good set of management accounts will yield all the ratios you need to manage the business.
Continue readingTribal Loyalty
Do many of your employees worry about how they will get their next drink or square meal? In the developed world we take our physical sustenance for granted. “An army marches on its stomach” is usually attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. The need to keep the troops fed and watered to maintain a fighting spirit is a long-known fact. Lord Nelson ate after his sailors. The US Marines feed their Officers after the men. It’s a symbol of servant leadership.
Continue readingWhat’s your Business Culture?
How do you operate? Slow and steady, taking a well planned step at a time? Or do you dive into the unknown and hope/expect/believe you can deal with whatever you catch? There are implication for both cultures.
Continue readingCompetition, Co-operation and Co-ordination
Congratulations! Your organisation is growing and as it grows moves along the usual orgainsational development path. You have teams, then departments, then functions. The organisation constantly evolves to meet the environment. Have you noticed competition between the function heads, department heads and team leaders? Enjoy the video!
Continue readingWorld Class?
What if World Class performance was as simple as taking the brakes off, to release the pent-up competitive energy of your organisation? Imagine you are in a saloon car race, winner takes all. You are on the starting line with your competition, engines revving, watching the lights go from red to green and the flag comes down to signal the start of the race. Your heart thumps as the tyres screech and slide on the tarmac as you move forward in a pack. You slowly overhaul car after car with your 1% advantage.
Continue readingGreed is Good!
Money – pay, bonuses, rewards – is a complicated subject. For something that has been around for thousands of years, human beings have a very poor understanding of what it does. Human lives are so very different now from those far off times, at least for the wealthy who do not have to worry about their safety, starving or their future. You can see that the relationship with money – it provides security – changes as lives change. What does that mean for the leaders of organisations today? Enjoy the video.
Continue readingManaging remote employees
One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted, is how many managers need to see their people working to believe they are not being lazy. McGregor’s Theory X and Y, asks if you think people are inherently lazy or if people want to do a good job. Our straw polls at our Workshops average out at about 70% Y, people want to do a good job. How does the manager cope when he or she can’t watch their team working! Enjoy the video!
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