Unhelpful Statements One of Peter Drucker’s maxims was “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I have lots of sympathy for the statement. If you aren’t measuring performance, you can’t see if it is getting better or worse; if you don’t know if it is getting better or worse, you aren’t managing it. I like a robust […]
The Art of Managing Complexity
Fire Fighting In the late noughties, Michelle Barton and Kathleen Sutcliffe carried out a study of wildfires in the US. They were interested in understanding how the firefighters went about managing complexity in their job. The researchers wanted to understand why some fires were well controlled and brought to a swift and happy conclusion, whilst […]
The Management Conundrum
Trust or control? Imagine a scenario where your employees keep on changing things. All in the name of improvement and innovation. Everybody is spending time making your organisation run that little bit better. It sounds great, a management nirvana, until you realise that they are tinkering with processes, messing with procedures and running roughshod over […]
Standards Make Good Servants but Poor Masters
Standard work I found an interesting post about standardisation in public services. The post argues that standardisation doesn’t work in the service industry. Each customer or citizen is different and because each citizen is different they want different things. So if you standardise everything and then force your staff to follow the standard process […]
The Most Profitable Activity in the World
Collaboration The iPhone is — arguably — the most profitable product in the world. Since it was launched in 2007 it has sold over 700 million units. In my household alone we have 4 of the damned things. I hasten to add my daughter’s phones are hand-me downs, but all the same. The iPhone 11 […]
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