‘Free’: The New Currency

February 29, 2008

In his recent Wired article, ‘Free,’ Chris Anderson talks about the economics of free.  Anderson’s new book, due out in early 2009, will also be called Free, so we will hear all about this in due time.  His core idea is important.  How do businesses, so used to proprietary products and services, information control, and the [...]

Business Needs Fewer of These People…

February 28, 2008

Position

Manager
Job Description

Don’t bother to learn anything about what your employees do or how it’s done, even at a superficial level. But, tell them what to do and when to do it. Ceaselessly and needlessly cross-examine them about minutia you don’t understand in order to see if they slip up when they tell you why [...]

What’s an A Player?

February 28, 2008

I’m thinking about team-building again…
Conventional wisdom says that:

A players hire A players
B players hire C players
C players hire losers

You see the problem… If you don’t hire exclusively A players then your entire company will quickly fill with losers, dragging you and your company to the grave.
It’s a good thing there’s an easy solution, right? [...]

Family Inc.

February 28, 2008

Some 80+% of businesses world wide can be defined as family businesses. Yet, in Management 101 textbooks, rarely are family firms mentioned at all. In most management texts, family firms are mentioned in the chapter on entrepreneurship, and even then they tend to get 2- 4 pages worth of attention. When you factor in the [...]

Austin Inc.

February 26, 2008

It’s not the economy, stupid… it’s culture.  Why? Because economies are cultures inscribed—their values, goals, and priorities.  We’ve been making much fun of generic American business practices here for several months, in part because it is so damn easy.  This is as much a stinging critique of larger structures in American culture as it is anything.  [...]

Telecommuting as a Motivator

February 25, 2008

When my girlfriend was applying to vet schools, we knew our relationship was going to have to be one of long distance for a pretty long stretch of time.
All of the schools she was applying to were rather far from New York (where we’re from), but the one school she was accepted to and ended [...]

Jump Like a Frog

February 23, 2008

In a recent issue of Business Week’s IN, ‘Inside Innovation’, there are several mentions of frog design. Frog design, one of the world’s leading industrial design firms, with offices in the Germany, Italy, and the US, has a star studded reputation in the world of designers. Frog design also matters to those of in management [...]

Welcome to Not a B-School

February 22, 2008

Conventional B-School curricula are broken and irrelevant for the most part.
We didn’t make this up. It has been pointed out by some of the insiders of the B-School world—Henry Mintzberg, Warren Bennis, James O’Toole. For independents, entrepreneurs and small shops of designers and developers, subjects like Human Resource Management, Supply Chain Management, [...]

Management 2.0: Management as Design

February 21, 2008

Some 50 years since the Ford Foundation’s influential report on the state of management education in the US, all is not well in the world according to “MBA.” To be sure, the economic and cultural capital of B-Schools, and their MBAs, has never traded higher. B-schools around the world are well endowed, well attended, and [...]

The Saturday Night Special

February 17, 2008

There was a fine exchange about management and leadership on the Optimal Experience blog in the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning—Saturday night being hot time for professionals to squeeze in one last deep thought.
In a previous incarnation of Not An MBA, I wrote three posts about management, leadership, [...]