I took a great class this fall in the Technology Management program at Columbia. The official title of the class is “Behavioral Challenges in Technology Management”, but it should really be called “How to become a Chief Information Officer (CIO)”. The class is taught by Alan Morley, and is a class he designed to take […]
Category: management
Peak, by Chip Conley
Amazon link Subtitled “How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”, this is a book applying the ideas of
Being anti-stealth
Charlie O’Donnell has been taking an anti-stealth approach to his new startup Path101, where he’s blogging everything that’s going on with the company, from meeting agendas to funding strategies. His strategy sparked a great thread on the nextNY mailing list about the advantages of being anti-stealth versus being secret. I contributed to the thread, and […]
Common Sense
Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy columnist at ESPN.com, has used the recurring trope of the Vice President of Common Sense which he describes in this column where he derides the choice of Mario Williams over Reggie Bush in the NFL draft: I’m becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire […]
Six Sigma and the Perils of Process
We had to read about Six Sigma process management last week for class. Six Sigma is a set of practices that allow companies to improve their processes towards satisfying customer needs, which is a laudable goal. The basic idea is that you have to first Define your goals, find ways to Measure your performance relative […]
Intracorporate communication
Why do organizational hierarchies exist? I was discussing this question with a friend a few weeks ago – I actually read The Origin of Wealth because she said that it had a good discussion of this question. The answer in the book, which I sort of agree with, is that hierarchies are actually an efficient […]
Change of view
When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, […]
Authority
My last post on advice for managers stirred up a great comment thread, so go read those comments first. The main subject of contention was my third point where I said “There is no such thing as authority”. What was interesting was that every commenter had a different way of interpreting the word authority. Jessie […]
Advice for managers
A friend of mine just asked if I had any advice for a person who’s just starting his first management position at a startup. Even though I have minimal management experience myself, I’ve been in all sorts of work environments, including a startup that grew from 40 people to 150 people and went bankrupt a […]
Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, by Robert D. Austin
Amazon link This book is recommended by Joel (mentioned in his post on “Econ 101 Management”) so we read it recently in our book club at work. The premise is that measuring employee performance is guaranteed to distort an organization’s desired results. This assertion contradicts management mantras everywhere, such as “You can’t improve what you […]
