It is time once again for the always pleasant task of offering a New Year’s list of recommended additions to your daily reading. While the Mayan calendar may be winding down this year, the value of these authors and their insightful writing surely won’t – I expect they will remain valuable sources of thought-provoking and [...]
Traction – an apt and reassuring title for one of an increasingly rare breed of truly satisfying and rewarding management books. Gino Wickman’s “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” aims to help the owners and managers of a small business to formulate a concrete, actionable picture of the business, and then to use that to develop equally concrete action to create more productive and profitable pictures with each forward step – generate traction to move forward into a position affording new and greater traction. Who doesn’t want to feel they have such a profound understanding of and contact with the reality that drives their business?
I once heard a company commander in the Marines criticize a then-common means of dealing with individuals who were chronic discipline problems: arrange for their reassignment to someone else’s unit. “I don’t transfer problems,” he said with a resolute determination that brooked no argument. “I fix them.” I was impressed by that, and inclined to follow his highly responsible sounding no-excuses attitude. But I later learned that he was mostly wrong . . .
With his previous book, “The No Asshole Rule,” Stanford University Management Professor Bob Sutton struck a powerful chord, resonating strongly with many of us – most of us – struggling mightily to do good, decent work in organizations of all sorts all around the land. In this one, he has picked out an important theme to carry his message effectively and meaningfully forward. It is: bosses matter. Discussed in the same context of the previous book, “Good Boss, Bad Boss” establishes the case for why bosses are so vital to the establishment of a healthy, personally satisfying, organizationally productive workplace – and why those who are dismissive of this fact for that very reason so often wind up actually being so toxic. In a very strong stage-setting chapter Sutton makes it clear why bosses matter. Quoting a researcher, he points out that “people do not quit organizations, they quit bad bosses.”
Advice for effective management has been showing up in some of the most unlikely places over the past several weeks, or in unexpected guises. Let’s take a look at some of these, leavened with some real advice from some of the best management trainers around. . .
We’ve seen how physicists have discovered the limitations on their ability to attain precise and comprehensive knowledge about the characteristics of an object at a given moment in time. How certain, in the face of this from physics, are we in our own field that we can even identify precisely the vital components of management – or, even more implausibly, of individual leadership . . .
One of the most peculiar phenomenon uncovered in physics over the past century is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This states – to the great frustration and irritation of many – that we cannot know with precision both elements of certain pairs of characteristics of an object. Most commonly, position and velocity are used, and the meaning of the principle is that the more precise is our knowledge about an object’s position, the less so is our knowledge of its speed, and vice versa. There is some debate about what this principle is saying to us at a fundamental level . . .
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