Sublime

“First, make sure responsibilities are clearly defined—well known by the person who is responsible, but also by others. Second, make sure it is also clear who the person is accountable to—the person who is responsible for holding the person responsible. And, third, accountability is about understanding why something didn’t work and what needs to

we often ask someone to act as a “balcony person” in a meeting or workshop. This person’s role is to sit in the back of the room and take notes on what happens, recapitulating participants’ various comments and behaviors. It

The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by. He has no intention of just getting by. He very quickly figures out – through experiments and

The quest for occupational satisfaction is an understandable, individual attempt to solve the problems of alienation, boredom, and rage in hierarchical work settings. But because the problem is framed as an individual problem, any solution is necessarily partial, contingent, and temporary.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their

An organization can promote creativity by facilitating different ways of seeing things. Jean-Rene Fourtou, while he was CEO of the chemical firm Rhone-Poulenc, was once asked, “Why is