Collaboration. Everyone talks about it, but only a few know how to do it well. Here’s Motley Fool’s chief collaboration officer on best practices for working together better.
Collaboration. Everyone talks about it, but only a few know how to do it well. Here’s Motley Fool’s chief collaboration officer on best practices for working together better.
IN THE American version of “The Office”, a TV mockumentary about the daily grind of work, Oscar Nunez, one of the show’s characters, comes out with this gem:
“It doesn’t take a genius to know that every organisation thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn’t have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?”
I was reminded of this while reading about Fishbowl, an American software firm, in theHarvard Business Review. It employs a pair of managers for each position in the company. Everyone, explain the firm’s two bosses in the (inevitably) jointly-authored piece, “thought we were crazy”. While everyone else was busy cutting out management tranches and getting rid of extraneous staff, Fishbowl was doubling up on every one of its management positions, at “not inconsequential cost”.
The best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. See what they get right.
(Source: hbr.org)
All social entrepreneurs are dedicated to their business and the cause they’re working for. But sometimes things happen that make even those important efforts seem small by comparison.
These days, every established company is at risk of having its industry—and its own business—disrupted by a startup. Cognizant of this, companies devote a lot of time to talking about how important it is to innovate. But here’s the truth: most companies can’t innovate because everyone is paid to maintain the status quo.
This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.
Are you working to make a company better from the inside? Is it working? A survey of CSR professionals found that the industry’s lack of direction is starting to wear on the people who should be most excited.
Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways.