John's Management Blog March 2006 Archive

Have you ever wanted to tell someone to "shut up and listen"? Has anyone ever said that to you? All of us talk too much from time to time, but ... Read More

The former top corporate officers from Enron are still on trial, but one of the clear lessons we learned from the collapse of that company was the danger of "yes-men". ... Read More

We all have a little voice inside us that tells us when something isn't right. Sometimes we can ignore it, but it's always there. Managers are well advised to listen ... Read More

Laurence Peters proposed in his 1969 book "The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong" that employees in hierarchical organizations are promoted to their level of incompetence. When employees (or ... Read More

Companies that promote people to their level of incompetence and leave them there go out of business. Demotions encounter ego problems. Look instead at Performance Management as a tool for ... Read More

Effective use of self-directed teams to flatten the pyramid can increase the flexibility you have to manage and can limit the effect on your business of highly-placed incompetents. Smart companies ... Read More

From a management perspective, restricted stock is much better than stock options for motivating employees to think and act like owners. If you are considering stock options to reward your ... Read More

Most of the "numbers" you need to manage your business come from within your organization, but some important ones come from outside the company. In the US, a lot of ... Read More

An HR Manager recently told me that her job didn't require math skills. As I pointed out why she was wrong, I started thinking about how important math skills are ... Read More

Here is the flip side to why passion for your work is important. Larry Doesn't Work Here Anymore tells the changes it can make in the life of just one ... Read More

Today I read an interesting article in Fortune magazine about twelve famous, successful people and the tricks they use to accomplish what they do every day. The tricks they use ... Read More

I have written before on the importance, and the value, of working at a job you care about. Your passion for that job not only makes the day fly by, ... Read More

Most of us work for companies that are trying to make a profit. Within that organizational structure, many of us have profit and loss (P&L) responsibility for departments or other ... Read More

In addition to cost benefit analysis, you may want to use standard calculators to measure the health of your business. AT&T offers a set of small business calculators from bankrate.com. If ... Read More