Posts Tagged ‘management’

How to be the best manager in the world

Simply delightful parody at Slacker Manager, listing the Seven Habits Of Highly Ineffective Managers. I checked through the list feeling smug (I am, of course, flawless), until I got to this one…

Give someone on your team a project. Don’t tell them how important it is. Keep throwing more little balls at them until they drop the big one. Complain about how they have no idea what’s really important to you. Continue until they cry or quit, whichever comes first.Do the same thing with projects you get. Focus on the urgent, forget the important, and keep fighting those fires!

7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Managers » Slacker Manager

Business widsom without the jabber

I hate business books. Most fill 250 pages with soft-edged puff, remaining sufficiently vague to ensure that the author cannot be held to account. Either that, or they become religiously specific.Imagine the delight, then, in stumbling across this [PDF]. You can read the 16 pages in your tea break, and much of the wisdom is, er, wise. Try this for heft:

a Must Read Manifesto: “Winning companies recognize it is better to distribute leadership and to employ a bottom-up strategic planning process that drives the business forward than it is for functional senior managers to collaborate on decision making and push new strategies, processes, and plans out to the organization.”

Via Brand Autopsy.

How to win using smaller steps

Thoughtful piece by Guardian Unlimited supremo Neil McIntosh, prompted by the lack of outcome from The Economist’s Project Red Stripe. McIntosh uses the success of the iPod as the basis for an argument that success can come via seemingly small steps that, taken in the right sequence, can form a much larger whole.

The lessons for news organisations? We needn’t make innovation hard by insisting the end product is always huge and/or high-profile. We shouldn’t think that innovation is something that can be outsourced, either to a small team or to a software vendor (the latter being a surprisingly popular choice for many newspaper publishers). And we needn’t necessarily worry that we’re not having enough ideas. If you ask around, you’ll probably find it’s not ideas we’re lacking. What’s tricky (I know - this is my job) is capturing the best ideas, mapping them to strategic goals, and delivering them in a way that makes them successful.

Complete Tosh, by Neil McIntosh: It’s hard to see the future from there