I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

We’re bad at most things by default. The only way to overcome the deficit is with the right kind of practice....But have you tried to manage for hours? How do you even practice management?... professional managers don’t start as managers... Observation is no substitute for doing... Many managers over-involve themselves.... get in the way. It’s a…

Just one topic in this edition, sparked by Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review)... reported “time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more”

time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more...How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies ... 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own... In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collabor…

ad-hoc collaboration alienates top contributors, gobbles up time, and makes organizations less effective... an exhaustive study from the Harvard Business Review just revealed that, far from a panacea, collaboration is actually productivity poison. Here are some of the frightening highlights:... 3. Collaboration tends to foists work from the incomp…

what's usually meant by "collaboration" is 1) plenty of ad-hoc meetings and 2) open-plan offices that increase the likelihood that such meetings take place... open-plan offices... are productivity sinkholes... collaboration tends to penalize the competent who end up doing most of the work. A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now co…

there are a number of companies looking at ways to apply AI, machine learning and related concepts to recruiting... we see glaring limitations to applying machine learning and AI to screen candidates based on their CVs and social media profiles alone... CVs alone fail to capture individual performance and contribution, raw talent, actual competenc…

Score 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following:... You know what costs a lot of time? When good people quit.... Defined levels and career paths take work to develop. But they’re a straightforward way to give people mastery goals and direction. Ever look at some company getting it right and think, “How did they hire …

How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door... Smart young things joining the workforce soon discover that, although they have been selected for their intelligence, they are not expected to use it. ... After a few years of experience, they will find that the people who g…

it is very clear that ‘Digital Transformation’ is a difficult, ambiguous, misleading and even potentially dangerous term and we have to get better at explaining it... It’s not about digital or technology ... it does have everything to do with business models, people, culture, leadership and change... We should be aiming for nothing less than Hum…

In Ronald Coase's The Nature of the Firm ... the function of a firm was to reduce transaction costs, especially information costs, and that firms would grow until the increase in organizational costs canceled out efficiency gains... Today, however, we live in an information economy. Competitiveness is no longer determined by how efficiently we…

nothing about Federman’s job responsibilities at Fortune are traditional for a Time Inc. employee. He works closely with colleagues in editorial, public relations and marketing. He mines analytics for data about the best times to post stories and what’s connecting with readers. He identifies trending stories and occasionally writes one ... helps d…

Gallup discovered 82% of hiring processes didn't pick the person with the right talent ... Add the wrong person into your employee mix ... and you could be looking at the cause of 80% of your turnovers. - 4 questions managers ask to better compare equally qualified candidates

"nobody tells you anything when it comes to bubbling-up abuse from the trenches. It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone five levels deep in the bowels of the organization to reach out to the fifth-richest man in the world and trouble him ... It doesn’t matter how many invitations to open doors... you extend, it’s just not going to happen. …

“The only way you can keep great employees in the company is by treating them like great employees.... Here are five truly idiotic HR policies that will keep your best employees racing for the exits the minute they get the chance — and keep you re-filling the same positions over and over:" Five Stupid Rules That Drive Great Employees Away, F…

there’s no denying that had he been alive today, Orwell – the great opponent and satirist of totalitarianism – would have deplored the bureaucratic repression of HR. He would have hated their blind loyalty to power, their unquestioning faithfulness to process, their abhorrence of anything or anyone deviating from the mean.In particular, Orwell wou…

"If organizations want to enable workers to bring not only their hands but also their heads to work, then jobs need to be redesigned to give people ownership of (1) how they perform tasks, (2) their identity, and (3) their time.... managers complain that their employees don’t think for themselves. Yet ... punish their subordinates for failing …

"In the next five years, millennials will make up half the workforce and 75% of it by 2025... We want to contribute to building something great... with meaning. We’re also talented, driven, and have really high expectations for the companies we join and the type of work we engage in... companies need to ask us what we think and how we feel. Unf…

"The excuse that tech companies make for their lack of gender diversity is that the pipeline of women studying engineering is shrinking. Sadly, this is a self-perpetuating cycle. Because there are few women in engineering, girls don’t perceive computing to be a friendly profession, so fewer are entering the field... This issue is important beca…

"companies are hungry to build employee engagement. At the same time, managers struggle to figure out what works and are reluctant to hand over any autonomy...talent management processes often enforce conformity, legitimize mediocrity and penalize failed attempts at innovative thinking. four Deloitte LLP offices in India... initiated a contest. E…

"Stacy sits down with Google Ventures to share her perspectives on startup hiring, leadership, and more." Also a good example of video journalism, but a comparison between total Reads (as measured usign Medium's womderful metrics) vs number of views of the embedded videos - i.e., do people watch them, or just read the textual summaries? - Manage…

"There has been a strong increase in the proportion of workers that are disengaged in the past five years, perhaps doubling ... the costs of this disengagement can be very high... remote workers - those that work somewhere other than where their boss works - are more engaged.... when workers are remote, the leader's behaviors change, and that .…

" the 3D Workforce: Distributed, Decentralized, and Discontinuous... is really a 4D workforce, however, because these is a fourth factor: Disengagement." Good overview of some recent research, with some conclusions such as: "...as companies become more fast and loose with the transition to social business models of operations, employee engag…

"Companies on Fortune’s “100 best companies to work for” list returned 14%/year on their stock compared to 6% for the average company... The Workplace Fund ... investing only in companies that have outstanding workplaces. It’s had a 9.63% return since its inception in April 2005, compared with the S&P 5.58% over the same period... Gallup resea…

A great riposte to Joe Keohane’s "In Praise of Meaningless Work", which descried "meaning-mongering as the new greenwashing". "The problem isn’t that corporate leaders are talking about meaning too much. It’s that they aren’t taking it seriously enough.... It should come as no surprise that the corporate machines that are populated by such inter…

"In How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg... focus on hiring, developing and empowering "smart creatives"-professionals with the technical skills to solve problems as well as the imagination to dream up new ideas. ... while senior executives strategize and plan, those plans always fall short. "Since the plan is wrong, the peopl…

Over on Medium, a terrific piece taking apart how bad most hiring processes are, and exploring one experiment with fixing it: hiring hackathons. The actual results were mixed - it was a pilot, after all - but the idea definitely deserves traction for a company like Intrasoft."

"the basics of human resources management goals and practices have remained little changed, philosophically and practically.... The main metaphor today’s HR professionals live in is still a machine with its designed-and-fitted parts and cogs, as opposed to the ‘living’ system of social networks in which people participate and interact... Let’s …

My most important two questions were 'what are you going to do when you get selected?' and then I always followed up with 'and what will you do if you aren't selected?'.

"Instead of trying to make them happy, ask them to do something hard... @the opportunity to use skills and abilities” has displaced “job security” as the top driver of satisfaction, and it consistently ranks among the top two... Employees don’t just want their skills used; they want them stretched.... Respondents ... started to feel stale after o…