GE’s practice of firing the bottom 10% would have seen as evil leadership by the Romans, who practiced “decimation” only on cowardly or mutinous troops, and even then rarely.

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For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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In January, I scored a copy of the Bros. Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die as I was working with an Australian start-up. I commend their book in its entirety — very useful, and it explains in clear language (that I wish I had come up with) why I write [...]

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A little teaser for the forthcoming Part 2 of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian organizational expert and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioner’s Guide. In this 30-second excerpt, Hoebeke talks about the most important thing Koldo Saratxaga did to help IRIZAR create a high-performance, team-focused work culture.
If you’re not Spanish [...]

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While reading the excellent and highly recommended book by Heath & Heath, Made to Stick, I came upon this passage about Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs:

Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to employees:

Think of what that $1,000 [...]

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It’s the problem that management wants HR to solve: how do we get these people motivated to do what we want them to do. Even then I knew the answer: the only way to make someone do something that they don’t want to do is to coerce them. You make the reason for them doing it outside them.

There are other ways, of course, but they mean reframing the problem to be sensical to the person. And you have to give them a voice in their own life. Otherwise, you end up with non-motivated workers.

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A second kind of evidence to suggest that the evolving success of the system has a powerful developmental effect on the leadership comes from the way members of high-performing systems talk about the early formative period of the system. There are consistent statements such as, “We had no idea things would turn out like this”; [...]

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Here’s a hard learned lesson:
You are not going to change your personality very easily.
Some of you may believe that I am wrong. I would like to see some evidence before you go spouting off. The only way to radically change your personality is to undergo what psychologists call the Conversion Experience. It’s not limited to [...]

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I wrote the following for another site. It will be pretty heavily edited and changed prior, but I’m pretty pleased with it as is. So I’m posting it here for y’all’s enjoyment.
I will upload the image files later. They aren’t necessary but you get a good idea of the structural changes that this company [...]

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How you set limits to others and to yourself (along with your personal interpretation of the limit setting) determines whether your motivation comes from within and works or comes from without and destroys enthusiasm.

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