Wall Street Online (through Yahoo!) is reporting that the stock market has had a major affect on the main compensation method in many industries: incentives. Unless the market increases substantially, with the DJI running back up towards 12 000 or 13 000, the options that were granted for the last five years are not worth [...]

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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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by Michael Baranovsky (GDL 1.2)
Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where it seemed like the jackals were circling one of their own injured? I was sitting in a meeting with the department heads of an IT outsource account in Chicago. We had just finished listening to a dry run of some [...]

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Four years ago, I posted about the difference between Closed-Sector and Open-Sector careers. It’s worth looking at again, because your choice of career will affect the choices that you have.
A brief excerpt:

If your first appointment in a Closed-Sector Career matters, it may be used as a proxy for capability. I may assume that you are [...]

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Last month, Michael Spencer posted a list of what he, as a religious person, wanted in a church. His readers, from a variety of denominations, all agreed whole-heartedly with his vision. And that’s the problem. Take a look at how using vague Universal Language (as opposed to even Universal Values) can lead to agreement where there probably isn’t any, whether in churches, companies or associations.

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You’ve got a problem: your executives are all “baby boomers” and about to hit retirement. But so are the ranks just below them. How in the world can you get new executives in the pipeline who have industry experience and know your corporate culture?

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As part of the shift back to our goals here at The Manasclerk Company, I’ve been looking at what the web has to say (popularly) about “adult underachievers”. Today I found the “advocate for extremely bright children”, Stephanie S. Tolan. Her brief article, “Discovering the Gifted Ex-Child“, describes the trajectory issues that Elliott Jaques & [...]

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From “The Wrong Incentive” by Roger Martin, Baron’s, Dec 23, 2003:

How, then, should incentive compensation be structured? It should be based exclusively on features of the real market — sales, costs, investments, margins, profits. These are items over which management and employees have some control and their actions can be directly linked to such items. [...]

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Neurologist Robert Sapolsky is an interesting character. The Edge has an interesting piece by him, which seems to be fairly stream of consciousness. Sapolsky, of couse, has done some fascinating field research on baboons and lab research into the inner workings of the brain, and a little of both all the time.
In the Edge [...]

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