“One bad apple spoils the barrel.” So says an English proverb going back to the 1300s, and literally true: As an apple spoils, it releases gases that speed the process in adjacent ones.[1] Using that as a metaphor for business ethics, three researchers wondered, to what degree do the apple (individual), barrel (organization), or the …
One of the great mysteries from my 35 years of working life is why workers who “everyone knows” is trouble not only keep their jobs, but sometimes get promoted. Their bad behavior is talked about all the time by line workers and other managers, yet they stay employed. I wrote years ago about one answer. …
Anyone who, as part of their job, tries to get individual workers or managers to cooperate, has dealt with people who feel they can accomplish more on their own. Sometimes openly, more often without admitting it, they follow their own agendas. The science in this post may or may not be useful in persuading them …
Skeptics of Agile—myself among them—are indebted to Dwight (“Ike”) Eisenhower, U.S. president from 1953–61. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military industrial complex,” he said that last year. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”1 From this was coined …
In 1999, before I danced away the millennium on New Year’s Eve to Prince while ignoring fears about the Y2K Bug, a major study began changing the way researchers viewed worker motivation. Lead author Edward Deci was the first to propose in 1971 that workers might have internal motivations that had nothing to do with …
Silly me. I thought a silver lining in the Covid Crisis would be that managers would learn most workers do not need constant oversight to do good work, and will be productive from home even with its distractions. Because they couldn’t monitor worker activity closely, some managers would be forced to empower their teams to …
I often tell the story of a project manager at Microsoft who wasn’t very good at it. Among other reasons, he didn’t use project management software to control the work, despite Microsoft Project being the industry leader. Once he and my office-mate drove separately to an offsite meeting. She got there first despite having left …
