The Trouble with Hierarchy
In one of the (many!) amazing "Big Idea" posts that have been going around, Scott Briscoe on Acronym talks about hierarchy. Scott says we shouldn't hate hierarchy--we should hate the lack of leadership fro ...
Category: Managing People
Starting with Trust
I have yet to come across anyone who argues that trust is a bad thing. There are certainly times where we don't trust people, and we wouldn't just blindly trust them because we think trust is generically a good ...
Behavior During Recession Can Bite You in the Boom
I like this blog post on SmartBlog Insights that gives an HR perspective on how to manage things differently during the recession. Sometimes we get so stressed out about declining revenue and shortage of staff, th ...
Big Picture and Little Picture
Both the big picture and the little picture are important. Forest and trees. Got it. But why do we insist that the big picture is the responsibility of the "leaders" in an organization, and the details ...
Understanding What Drives Your Behavior
Thanks to Jeff De Cagna for pointing out this interesting article by venture capitalist Paul Graham about "managers schedule" versus "makers schedule." By "maker" he is referring to people l ...
Recognizing Respect
I noticed in my Google Analytics the other day that one of the most popular keywords for finding my blog is the phrase "what does respect look like." I did a brief post on that in October 2007, pointing out tha ...
Set Your People Free
In Gary Hamel's book, he suggests three areas on which to focus when creating a more human organization, and one of them is "too much management, too little freedom." As I said in my previous post, most peo ...
Authenticity a Buzzword? Try Truth
I heard someone say recently that they were already sick of the word authenticity. It's obviously being discussed a LOT in social media spheres. I've talked about it here as well. I think it's a great word, b ...
Authority, Leadership, and Truth
I like to push back when people define leadership primarily in terms of the people at the top of the organizational chart. That's authority, not leadership. I define leadership in terms of a system capacity, and I ex ...
The People Side of Business
Kevin Holland pointed to an interview in the New York Times with Eduardo Castro-Wright, who is Vice Chairman of Wal-Mart. Castro-wright was somewhat critical of the status quo in the business world, including taking shot ...