Brain Bytes

Management deals with human nature brought together within an organisation for a common purpose. To be effective, management needs to deal with what is real, not what is hoped for. A lesson from Behavioural Economics is that incentives drive behaviour. Are individual personnel or organisational incentives driving desired or perverse behaviours? If the manifest behaviours are not those desired or desirable, what is driving those behaviours? What are you going to do? Adapted from Peter Drucker,...

It is almost by definition that knowledge workers are the most knowledgeable in their field within their organisation. It almost goes without saying, but if they aren’t then why are they there? Being experts in their field, it is more effective to manage knowledge workers by clearly specifying desired outcomes and letting them loose to achieve those outcomes. Micro-managing any employee let alone knowledge workers is a time-consuming and frustrating exercise for everyone. But worse,...

As part of management’s role to manage its resources for maximum benefit is its duty to preserve its assets and ensure they remain maximally effective. In any organisation, a large proportion of the assets (resources for production) lies within its employees' brains. This fact is more so for knowledge workers, where it has previously been pointed out that knowledge workers have and are the means of production. That being the case, it is imperative that the organisation attracts, retains, and...

Peter Drucker wrote, “[t]here is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” To that pearl of wisdom, we could add “or should not be done any more.” A critical part of management’s role in managing resources for maximum benefit is to focus resources where they will most effective. The operative term here is to focus, which also means to concentrate. And the necessity of concentrating resources demands that we remove resources from where...

Management is concerned with the productive use of resources, of getting the most value (outputs), from the inputs under its influence and control. With management having such a pivotal role in the maximising of benefits, it behoves us to ensure our best people are appointed to management positions. You wouldn’t let an incompetent person be the coxswain of a canoe full of people, so why would you let a similarly qualified person manage? What are you doing to ensure that the right people are in...

The programmes and or successes of yesterday can become a burden for today if an organisation’s activities are not continuously evaluated for effectiveness. We must all remember that the purpose of an organisation is not only or simply self-perpetuation; it is to achieve results. If an organisation’s results are not in line with its goals, then it needs to change. But stopping doing something is probably harder than starting it in the first place. Once started, all sorts of human fallibilities...

Business prophets tend to remember their prophecies that came true, but they don’t advertise what they didn’t prophecise, and they (conveniently) tend to overlook their failures to predict correctly and or accurately. Not only is selective memory a challenge to business prophecising integrity, but there are also a couple of other challenges to consider. One is that the future has already happened, but you weren’t paying attention to the innovations, trends, and needs. As they say,...

Although the concept may be a little obscured by technology, social media, and our near chaotic environments (amongst other factors), at the core of all human relationships, and therefore business relationships, is the concept of integrity. Nobody can consistently fake possessing integrity for long. We can forgive incompetence, ignorance, bad manners, and even being plain wrong from time to time. But a person with dubious integrity, and therefore a poor reputation, is despised and to be...