Management Articles

• Using Quality to Develop an Internet Resource by John Hunter
  The article provides guidance to help those responsible for managing the application of internet technology to improve the performance of organizations.

• A Call for Continued Open Standards and Net Neutrality
  by Tim Berners-Lee. "The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality—from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large."

• Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big by Jeff Bezos
  "I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need. ... the key is that the company has to experiment, and what you want to try and do is reduce the cost of experimentation so you can do as many experiments per unit time as possible ... and they're not experiments if you know they're going to work."

• 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,'"

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.