by Matt Perman
From Good to Great:
The biggest problems facing organizations today stem not from a dearth of new management ideas (we’re inundated with them), but primarily from a lack of understanding the basic fundamentals and, most problematic, a failure to consistently apply those fundamentals.
by Matt Perman
It’s not that there can never be anything relevant in these statements. But very often they are used as substitutes for hard thinking — to justify taking the easy way out, and thus prematurely killing many paths of high potential.
by Matt Perman
From Good to Great:
Most answer that budgeting exists to decide how much to apportion to each activity, or to manage costs, or both. From a good to great perspective, both of these answers are wrong. In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all.
In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the hedgehog concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.
by Matt Perman
One of my core management philosophies is that managers should define the ultimate outcomes with their people, but not the specific steps to reach those outcomes. Each employee ought to have the freedom to figure out their own path to the goal.
This solves the “manager’s dilemma” of how to serve the organization while also providing autonomy to the employee’s. The organization is served because employee efforts are directed toward the performance of the organization; at the same time, employees have autonomy because they are able to determine the best way to accomplish those results, based on their own individual preferences, judgment, and talents.
It also serves employees to know the outcomes because it is motivating to know what is expected of you and how it serves the larger picture.
One question I often get about this is: How does this work for jobs that are largely routine? For example, how would this work for a factory worker?
There’s a lot that can be said here, but Tom Morris does a good job of articulating a core part of the answer in If Aristotle Ran General Motors:
A concern for truth should continually play an important role in how we think about our jobs and in the many ways we interact with others in our work. But a concern for beauty should guide us too.
How, you might wonder, can a factory worker be an artist and experience this form of active beauty if he has to perform the same routine motions over and over, all day long? This is part of the reason Jack Stack decided to teach everyone at the Springfield Remanufacturing Company what he began to call “The Great Game of Business.”
Even the factory-floor worker engaged in repetitive acts of assembly can play the game of business, using his mind to devise more efficient processes and motions, connecting his specific job with the big picture of what’s going on in the overall company life.
He may be able to see things no one else can see and make suggestions for beautiful improvements no one else could make. He alone may be in a position to create an elegant solution to a problem that no one else can solve, or even notice.
We need to encourage the people who work around us to think of their jobs in this way, no matter what their jobs might be. Everyone can be a performance artist and an important player in the great game of business.
by Matt Perman
BNET has a brief video on how managers should set SMART goals and be explicit in connecting the dots between employee’s goals and how they serve the big picture.
Smart stands for:
by Matt Perman
This is from a Gallup Management Journal interview that I recently came across in some of my notes. It’s right on, and is applicable to all organizations of any type, not just government organizations (which is the immediate context):
GMJ: How can government begin engaging the minds of all its employees, managers included?
Mears: The answer begins with swapping control for accountability — and accountability requires ensuring that employees understand the outcomes that are expected of them. When employees understand desired outcomes and have simple metrics to track them, you have accountability.
Employees also should be empowered to think about better ways to reach those outcomes. They can experiment and make appropriate local improvements as long as outcomes are reached. This helps eliminate some of the busywork that builds up when people don’t understand the big picture. Accountability works better than control.
by Matt Perman
Now there is a study to back up what everyone knows: the Gallup Management Journal reports on how workplace socializing actually increases productivity.
by Matt Perman
A good quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
Knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5.
The quote is from Andy Crouch’s culture making blog. The post itself contains an interesting comparison between Saddleback Church’s campus and Google’s headquarters as an expression of the overarching role of culture in shaping architecture.
by Matt Perman
A great post at 37 Signals from a while back. Here’s the first paragraph:
More on why Pixar’s movies are so much better than the competition: According to “Pixar Rules — Secrets of a Blockbuster Company,” the company has created an incredible work environment that keeps employees happy and fulfilled. The result: “A tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production.”
by Matt Perman
Rick Wartzman summarizes Peter Drucker in an article on why executives who devalue values are wrong:
For Drucker, these numbers surely would have been troubling. The way he saw things, any organization needs to demonstrate achievement in three major areas if it’s to be successful: generating “direct results,” “developing people for tomorrow,” and the “building of values.” If a business is “deprived of performance in any one of these areas, it will decay and die,” Drucker warned in The Effective Executive, his 1967 classic. “All three therefore have to be built into the contribution of every executive.”