Management Articles

• Knowledge workers are the new capitalists by Peter Drucker
  "knowledge workers are highly mobile within their specialism. They think nothing of moving from one university, one company or one country to another, as long as they stay within the same field of knowledge. There is a lot of talk about trying to restore knowledge workers' loyalty to their employing organisation, but such efforts will get nowhere. Knowledge workers may have an attachment to an organisation and feel comfortable with it, but their primary allegiance is likely to be to their specialised branch of knowledge."

• Profit = Market Price - Actual Cost or Price = Cost + Desired Profit by John Hunter
  "Apple would probably sell very few iPhones for $2,000 more than they cost today. How many they would sell at $100 more or $100 less may change significantly but they would still be huge sellers at either of those prices. So that "market sets the price" idea is not 100% accurate (I don't think anyway). ... Pricing decisions also have big long term versus short term considerations. Apple has started pricing many things in a way which makes it hard for competitors to undercut them. Apple, almost for sure could charge more for the laptops they sell and the iPad and iPhone. But if they did they make it easier for a competitor to compete on price. This pricing decision is an Apple decision not a market decision."

• In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating
  "Convinced that capitalism's adversarial nature would disrupt employee teamwork, the 20th-century architects of modern management adapted the military's chain-of-command model for the corporate leadership chart. Frederick Taylor, the intellectual father of industrial management, contended that the inevitable conflicts between peers required the authority of a superior to arbitrate. ... Tech start-ups ignored the old-style model. Instead, employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter work in semiautonomous teams, usually made up of experts from each department: design, programming, marketing, etc. ... 'The difference in thinking between Silicon Valley and others places is that you compete one moment and you cooperate the next moment,'"

• Executive Superstars, Peer Groups and Over-Compensation – Cause, Effect and Solution
  "theories of optimal market-based contracting are misguided in that they are predicated upon the chimerical notion of vigorous and competitive markets for transferable executive talent... independent and shareholder-conscious compensation committees must develop internally created standards of pay based on the individual nature of the organization concerned, its particular competitive environment and its internal dynamics."

• Putting Performance Reviews On Probation by Samuel Culbert
  Article and NPR radio show (30 minutes). "It's time to finally put the performance review out of its misery. This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus."

• The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study
  "Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence."

• Disruptive Innovation by Clayton Christensen
  Excellent long article (a book chapter) on the topic by the expert. "Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers. Once the disruptive product gains a foothold in new or low-end markets, the improvement cycle begins. And because the pace of technological progress outstrips customers’ abilities to use it, the previously not-good-enough technology eventually improves enough to intersect with the needs of more demanding customers."

• Teachers Cheating and Incentives by Dan Ariely
  "they began to do anything that would improve their performance on that measure even by a tiny bit—even if they messed up other employees in the process. Ultimately they were consumed with maximizing what they knew they would be measured on, regardless of the fact that this was only part of their overall responsibility."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Steven Spear by Steven Spear
  Five-time winner of the Shingo Prize for research excellence and a senior lecturer at MIT and former assistant professor at Harvard. A senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, he is the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and trade publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.