Category: Best Practice

The other day I received two emails from my engineers. Both of them had summarized a meeting they had attended representing their respective business units. If I had not known their emails were describing the same meeting I could not have told: They both gave me a totally different summary. Clearly we were in need…

In the twenty odd years I have helped organizations to improve their level of professionalism I have discovered a phenomenon that I named ‘Perverted Peter Principle’. Its mine. It has my copyright on it. Patent pending… Where was I? Peter Principle I guess you know the classical Peter principle (see here). It is a theory…

Do you know this situation? When you as a manager comment on a team producing garbage people in that team will give you reasons. One of the most common reasons they give me is: “we got garbage at our input too!”. Behold! That’s a case of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Garbage in, garbage out? On…

Karate is not an ancient art. What we know today as Japanese Karate is only about 100 years old. Indeed it stems from on an older Okinawan tradition called ‘Tode’. But ‘Tode’ changed dramatically to become ‘Karate’. Why? Because Karate had a different purpose than Tode. Tode was an art of self-defense often taught in…

I doubt that human potential can be expressed by any single figure. On the other hand I find myself considering only 5% of my employees for 95% of my tasks. It’s always the usual suspects. So it seems I do have an intuitive concept of potential. When it comes to hiring that makes my goal…

When you take up Karate lessons you have to make one choice: whether to accept the person in front of you as your sensei – your master – or not. If you do, you are expected to put yourself into her hands entirely and follow her lead without complaint. If you don’t you are expected…

In the world of software a copy comes at almost no cost (yes, I know this is an oversimplification). Still engineers (and managers) go to great lengths to reinvent/recreate things that already exist instead of copying them. In fact this behaviour is so common that there is a name for it: “not invented here!” And…

You send questions from time to time that I would like to answer. That’s why I decided to publish this Management FAQ. I will extend this with more questions coming in. 1. As a manager, should I manipulate somebody into doing something? My answer: yes, definitely! I’ll explain: Most of us managers do little work…

“When you discover that you are riding dead horses, the best strategy is to dismount.” Most of you know this saying of the Native Indians (if not, read this hilarious blog post to catch up). Still, many dead horses are ridden in companies daily. There must be reasons. Here are my favorite ones: It is…

Principal agent problems: how to make work assignments work Clean handover of work packages is key to make a business work – and yet I regularly see work assignments fail. How is that possible? The process of handing over a task seems simple enough. The principal agent theory describes the underlying dilemma: It states that…