Sunday, December 29, 2013

Two Great Management Articles in Jan-Feb 2014 HBR

There are two great articles in the January-February 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review. The first is IDEO's Culture of Helping by Teresa Amabile, Colin M. Fisher and Julianna Pillemer. It describes the benefits of employees helping each other and the prerequisites necessary for helping to occur.  I thought the most interesting prerequisite was slack in employees schedules.  If there is no spare time in your day, you won't have time to help others.  There are many other benefits to schedules that appear to be less than efficient, and I recommend you read the book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco on this topic.

The second article was How Netflix Reinvented HR by Patty McCord. The big idea is to minimize policies and rely on the judgment of your people.  My favorite quote is "Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults".

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