Advertising Age has ten lessons to learn from NBC’s failing strategy of moving Jay Leno’s show to prime time. The most significant one for all organizations, no matter what your industry, is this:
Cutting back on quality, even in a recession, can be brand suicide.
I cover this reality in more detail in my series on managing in a downturn.
Here are the six levels of initiative, as summarized by Stephen Covey in Principle Centered Leadership:
I’ve been enjoying the book What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer. Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at the Standord Graduate School of Business and former columnist for Business 2.0.
Pfeffer argues that most poor business choices arise when leaders do one of three things:
(As an aside — the resemblance here to the cause of bad decisions in economics and politics is quite interesting, although I don’t know yet if Pfeffer makes the connection.)
To test your application of these concepts, here are a few questions from the “pop quiz” on the back cover:
Are you concerned that your employees are spending too much time surfing the web? You shouldn’t be. By monitoring their downtime, you’re destroying their trust — and ultimately hurting your business.
Your bottom line looks like trouble. Where can you save money? Don’t touch your employees’ benefits. Short-term financial trouble is no excuse for cuts. You’ll pay the human cost in the long-run.
Your employees work long hours. Does all that time really pay? Hours-in does not equal good work-out. The absence of time with family and friends is one of the reasons U.S. health care costs are soaring, including employer health costs.
A good word from Cut to the Chase: and 99 Other Rules to Liberate Yourself and Gain Back the Gift of Time:
The higher up in an organization you go, the more likely you will see appointments being scheduled in ten-minute slots. Below the top level, half an hour seems to be the shortest meeting achievable. Whenever possible, go for ten.
A. G. Lafley, the CEO of Proctor & Gamble, has a good article in Harvard Business Review called What Only the CEO Can Do. This article may be helpful for those working in business or in the non-profit world.
You can also read a quick summary of the idea in brief and the idea in practice.
Should you hold back high performers from promotions until they have “paid their dues”? Jack Welch answers no. “That uncompetitive practice is a throwback to the days when an employee’s time served could, and often did, trump his value added.”
Jim Collins:
In other words, management matters immensely for the health of society. Free society is not ultimately sustainable without effective organizations and, therefore, effective management.
My wife told me that when I do these posts on recommended books, I should mention that I read 50-100 books a year. So, I’m not recommending things off the cuff here. These are the best books I know of on the subjects.
When it comes to management, here are the top seven books I recommend:
1. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
I’ll be continuing off and on for the next few weeks our discussion of rules, and why they should be minimized. Let me give an example from personal experience.
This is the story of the time a cashier would not sell me Gatorade, even though I was in dire need, because of a rule.
A paper delivered at the 2009 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society
I want to give you today a theology of management. This will consist of six parts.
First, I want to convince you that good management matters. Specifically, I want to convince you that it should matter to you as Christians—whether you are a pastor, in the leadership of a ministry, or a lay person in the workplace.
Second, I want to show you what great management is so that you can become better at it insofar as you may be in a management role and so that you can support its practice in your organizations and churches even if you are not.
Third, I want to use the field of management as an example to demonstrate how we as Christians can think more effectively about how our faith relates to all of life—to typically “secular” areas that nonetheless are very central to our lives. This means asking the fundamental question of whether it is even possible to think theologically about management without depreciating theology and ruining management.
Fourth, I want to show the very neat ways in which a Christian ethic informs this very important discipline. This is some incredible stuff.
Fifth, I want to apply this by looking at what effective management looks like in various organizations – including, briefly, churches. Many of us are scared off from seeing a role for management in the church because of the off-biblical trajectory of the pastor as CEO model. I want to show that that the problem is wrongly applying management. Management can matter to us in the church without being made ultimate, and I want to show how.
To this end, this paper has six sections: