Analyse Your Business

Raghoo Potini shared some key insights from the Book "Flash Foresight" By Danil Burrus, which I thought was a great framework for analyzing one's business. 

"A flash foresight is a classic eureka! moment, like Newton's discovery of gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree . Actually the Flash Foresight triggered by the application of one or more of seven simple principles covered in the book .Let me cover two big ones.

TRIGGER #1: START WITH CERTAINTY: There are two distinct kinds of change that we can use to find certainty:1. Cyclic change2. Linear change
Cyclic change: provides us with all sorts of certainty .When it is autumn, you can predict that, within six months, it will be spring. Humanity has identified more than 300 distinct cycles that allow us to predict the future accurately. 
Linear change: A simple example of linear change is your age. Your life progresses in one direction. No matter how well you take care of your health, you are not going to start aging backward. Linear change is where the real action is, precisely because it is not a repeating pattern and therefore creates entirely new circumstances and opportunities. 

Hard trends and soft trends: A hard trend is something that will happen; it is a future fact. A soft trend is something that might happen; it is a future maybe. Here's an example about Hard trend and soft trend. The 78 million Baby Boomers are now flooding health care system in the US. Again, notice where the hard trend is, and where it isn't. The increasing numbers of Boomers who will need medical care as they get older is a hard trend, because those numbers are fixed and cannot be changed. But the projected shortage of doctors and nurses to provide that care is a soft trend, because it is something we can change if we see it and decide to act on it.Action:  

Make a list of all the cyclic changes that are affecting your business. Make a list of the linear changes that will have an impact on your life. Make a list of all the hard trends that are taking place in your industry, so you know what you can be certain about. Make a list of all the soft trends that are taking place in your industry, so you can see what you can change or influence. Ask yourself, "What do I know will happen in the next few weeks, months, and years? And how can I innovate to take advantage of what I now know for certain about the future?"

To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .

Dematerialization. As technology improves, we are reducing the amount of material it takes to build the tools we use. For example, laptops are getting smaller, lighter, and more portable, even as they become more powerful.   Virtualization. This means taking things we currently do physically and shifting the medium so that we can now do them purely in a virtual world. Using software, we can now test airplanes, spaceships, and nuclear bombs without actually building them. Virtualization has transformed the world of business. Amazon is a virtual bookstore, and eBay is a virtual yard sale.   Mobility. With the advance of wireless technology, we are rapidly becoming untethered from everything. Our mainframe computers became desktops, then laptops, then palmtops, then cell phones.   Product intelligence: Imagine you're driving down the road, and a light blinks on your dashboard: One of your tires is about to go flat. Your GPS speaks up: "Service station with an air hose in three miles; take the next exit." How does your car know this? It's intelligent. It has smart tires, and it's networked.   Convergence. Filling stations and convenience stores converged in the 1980s; in the '90s, so did coffee shops and bookstores. Today, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and information technology are all converging. Products are converging, too. The modern smartphone is an e-mail device, a camera, a video camera, a music player, a GPS device, and more. Action: Ask yourself, What problems will my company be facing in the next few weeks, months, and years? What problems will our customers be facing?" Then look for creative ways to solve those problems before they happen.

TRIGGER #2: ANTICIPATE: When a competitor offers lower prices, you are forced to change how you do business. Being preactive means putting yourself into opportunity mode, looking at problems before they occur, and then preventing them from happening in the first place. It means, instead of reacting to change that happens from the outside in, creating change from the inside out.

These five technology trends all the result of three interlocking hard trends. The first digital accelerator is processing power. The second digital accelerator is the growth of bandwidth, the third digital accelerator, storage."

Coaching For Ethical Dilemmas

Recently, I came across an article from Fast Company, The Nine Faces of Leaders which dealt with the attributes FedEx uses to identify it's potential leaders. Among the nine,one was Integrity. Now Integrity to my mind, is colored with shades of both moral as well personal values, as a result of which,  Integrity based leadership-decisions are likely to be fraught with personal and professional  conflict. Having written my last blog piece on the subject of Managing Value Conflicts, I was curious to understand the  definition of this attribute, and since the Fast Company article gave only an edited version, I decided to explore a bit more for the complete version. This, I found, was how FedEx explains this leadership attribute

Integrity; A leader with integrity adheres to a code of business ethics and moral values, behaves in a manner that is consistent with the corporate climate and professional responsibility, does not abuse management privilege, gains trust/respect, and serves as a role model in support of corporate policies, professional ethics, and corporate culture. 

In my experience as a coach, I have found clients having to deal with conflicts managing their personal vs. business values everyday in the memos on their desks, in their engagement with difficult employees and in their negotiations with their clients. Finding it challenging to adhere to a code of business ethics and moral values, they look to a coach to help them work through their conflicts. I have often found coaching in these situations to be less than easy. How, exactly, should I help them clients think through their ethical issues, what questions should I be asking, and what are the factors I should consider? 

Hence my attempt to create my personal framework for coaching clients with ethical dilemmas.Hope it helps you too!

The Five-Step Ethical Coaching Framework
Manuel Velasquez is a professor of Business ethics and the author of a widely used text book.In their article Thinking Ethically: A Framework for Moral
Decisions Making he and his associates describe
five different approaches which philosophers down the ages have developed to deal with moral issues. 

More important, he and his co-authors offer a useful 5-step framework for coaches to help their clients explore ethical dilemmas and to identify ethical courses of action.

Step 1: Recognize an Ethical Issue

1. Could this decision or situation be damaging to someone or to some group? Does this decision involve a choice between a good and bad alternative, or perhaps between two "goods" or between two "bads"?
2. Is this issue about more than what is legal or what is most efficient? If so, how?

Step 2: Get the Facts

3. What are the relevant facts of the case? What facts are not known? How can I help the client  learn enough about the situation to make a decision?
4. What individuals and groups have an important stake in the outcome? Are some concerns more important? Why?
5. What are the options open to client for acting? Have all the relevant persons and groups been consulted? Have?How can I help client  identify creative options?

Step 3: Help Client Evaluate Alternative Actions

6.  Ask following questions to help client evaluate the options:

• Which option will produce the most good and do the least harm? (The Utilitarian Approach)
• Which option best respects the rights of all who have a stake? (The Rights Approach)
• Which option treats people equally or proportionately? (The Justice Approach)
• Which option best serves the community/organization 
  as a whole, not just some members/employees/stakeholders? 
  (The Common Good Approach)
• Which option can lead client to act as the sort of person he wants to be? (The Virtue Approach)

(For details on the Approaches click here)

Step 4: Make a Decision and Test It

7. Considering all these approaches, which option could best help client address the situation?
8. If the client told someone he respects-or told a television audience-which option he has chosen, what would they say?

Step 5: Help Client Act and Reflect on the Outcome

9. How can the client's decision be implemented with the greatest care and attention to the concerns of all stakeholders?
10. How did the decision turn out and how can I help client review learning from this specific situation?

Coaching for Ethical Practices

Dov Seidman is a consultant who helps corporates develop values-based cultures, he believes that in the 21st century, it is no longer what you do or what you know that counts most. It is how you do what you do that has become the greatest source of advantage. We are deep into what he calls the 'era of behavior'. 

By using The 5-Step framework coaches can help their clients to work through their moral and value conflicts, and shape behaviors for conceiving and re-conceiving how they can build for growth. 

Leaders as Role Models

One of the most important components of leadership is to be ambassadors of the values the organization stands for. In these day of a powerful media, where everything that prominent leaders do, gets either flashed on TV, or splashed in print, leaders have an especial responsibilty to symbolize the values of the organization they lead. Three prominent leaders, who, according to me,  manage to do this most effectively are; Vijay Mallya of the UB group, Rahul Bhatia of Indigo Airlines and the Dalai Lama, who needs no introduction.

Vijay Mallya, calls himself the King of Good Times and he symbolizes this image to the hilt! He owns - among other things -  a luxury yatch, a personal aircraft which boasts of a Picasso as part of it's beige and cream interiors, and a fleet of classic and antique cars. Wine, Women (his Kingfisher calendar featuring a bevy of beauties is well known) and Wealth sums Vijay Mallya's lifestyle. It also aptly reflects his moniker as the King of Good Times and pay huge dividends to his companies - liquor company UB, Kigfisher airlines (now in dire staits, financially) and FI and IPL teams, among others.

Rahul Bhatia is the founder of low cost Indigo Airlines.  While Mallya personifies a high flying lifestyle of luxury, Bhatia does the opposite  - he lives up to his companies values of a low-cost functional airline. At a recent meeting of owners of airlines and their CEO's with the Prime Minister of India, he drove down in a Santro driven with his CEO at the wheel. All the others came in expensive chauffeur driven cars. At the recent Economic Times awards for Corporate Excellence (he got the Entrepreneur of the Year Award), in a sea of suits, he was the only one dressed in a waist coat.

The Dalai Lama, the much respected Buddhist leader says his religion is 'kindness'. His ready laughter and child like quality help to reinforce the image of a benign soul. Both in his actions and utterances, he comes across as a simple person and the very epitome of kindness. He was the recipient of the1989 Nobel Peace Prize and his acceptance speech clearly reflected his values. "Although I have found my own Buddhist religion helpful in generating love and compassion, even for those we consider our enemies", he said, "I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion."

Being a Role Model to Your Organization's Employees

By the very nature of their high profile roles, leaders such as Mallya, Bhatia and the Dalai Lama have the overarching responsibility of living up to their image more to their external customers. But how about leaders whose compulsions to role model are different? What can leaders whose responsibility lies primarily with their own people and organizations do to fulfill their responsibilities? They can reflect their own and their organizations desirable values with actions such as: 

1. The goals and performance standards they establish.
2. The values they establish for the organization.
3. The business and people concepts they establish.

Successful organizations have leaders who set high standards and goals across the entire spectrum, such as strategies, market leadership, plans, meetings and presentations, productivity, quality, and reliability.

Values reflect the concern the organization has for its employees, customers, investors, vendors, and surrounding community. These values define the manner in how business will be conducted.

Concepts define what products or services the organization will offer and the methods and processes for conducting business.

These goals, values, and concepts make up the organization's personality or how the organization is observed by both outsiders and insiders. And it is this personality which defines the roles, relationships, rewards, and rites that take place, that the leader has to role model.

Useful resource: Sample chapter from the book The Leader as Role Model http://tinyurl.com/bnv2jz8

A Coachee's Improvement Log Page #1

After every coaching session, my coaching clients write a log of the awareness created, clarity, and learning during that session.They also commit to actions they will take as a result of the new knowledge, which serves as an action review template for the next session. Reproduced below, with the client's permission,  is page # 1 from a coachee's session log. His priority was to improve his Customer Service for which I employed the learning methodology of See, Plan, Do, Check and Fix model (see visual). The process was not linear and I went with the flow of the client's thought processes. 

SESSION COACHING OUTCOMES

Session #1                   Date: XX/XX/2011

My Awareness-Action Cycle

• I need to properly encourage staff members and middlemen to find out ways to improve sales and after-sales services. 
• I need to give more attention to incoming inquiries, attend them in an improved manner and do something positive to generate good business.
• There are areas which need my personal attention.
• Marketing should be given more time and attention.

Next Steps

1. What : To discuss with staff  

    Action: Ways to improve sales

    By when: This week

2. What: Reports

    Action: Improve management reports and implementation

    By When: Today

3. What: Follow-up personally

    Action: Attend sales inquiries personally

    By When: This week

4. What: TimeManagement

    Action: Find ways to save time

    By When: Immediate

On Why CEO's Procrastinate. And What They Could Do About It

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

                                                                                                   - Tillie Olsen

From my years of coaching CEOs, one of the important understanding is that the first and most prominent challenge for CEOs in the pursuit of their goal is - procrastination. In other words, getting started on the key priorities that will make their biggest ideas a reality.The reason for the procrastination? The threat of uncertainty.

Timothy M. Pychyl, who specializes in the study of procrastination has an explanation for this on his blog. According to him, people when faced with a task about which they are uncertain on how to proceed, experience negative emotions and threats to self. To cope with this experience, they end up delaying the task, escaping the negative emotions and rationalizing the choices they make. I have had CEOs come up with all kinds of excuses for not implementing the tasks they had committed to. Excuses such as "I cannot think beyond a three months planning horizon" (to delay their long-term planning exercise). Or "My customers insist on speaking only to me and not my subordinates" (to avoid delegating to them). Or even rationalizations such as the executive in the cartoon below.

 What such CEOs are doing is that instead of self-regulating their behavior to stay on task such as mustering their creativity to make a plan of action, they self-regulate their emotions. Mood for them, takes precedence. While useful in the short-term in terms of mood repair or protecting self-esteem, this short-termism can have serious long-term consequences for their companies. Consequently, they end up undermining their company's, as well as their own performance.

Strategist and author Kaihan Kippendorf, is right on target when he says that most CEOs invest their energy at any one time on four initiatives:

1. Wastes of time: hard-to-execute ideas that would have little impact on their achieving their goals. 

 
2. Tactics: easy-to-execute ideas that will not significantly impact their success. 

3. Winning moves: easy-to-execute ideas with huge impact. 

4. Crazy ideas: difficult-to-execute ideas that, if you could figure out how to make them happen, would really make a difference.

Investing Time Wisely

If they have the best interests of their companies at heart, and wish to invest their time and energy more efficiently, CEOs should practice the following.

• Dump the Wastes of Time and focus energy on more productive activity.
• Execute the Tactics or the easy-to-do stuff of the second , but bear in mind that they are not strategic priorities.
• Attend to the Winning moves NOW.
• Instead of dismissing the Crazy ideas as "go to the moon" ones, spend their time figuring out how to make them feasible.

To begin practice, they should ask themselves two questions: 

( i ) If I successfully executed this initiative, what impact would it have on my ability to achieve my goals? and 

( ii ) How easy is it execute this initiative?

An an even better way; they can get themselves a Business coach who can support them to question themselves in sifting and weighing their options and estimating chances of success. And most important - remember the commitments they made to themselves!

To know more on how I can help you, check out my website http://arurbizcoach.com/

Decoding the Desi Dynamic

With more and more Indian executives being posted abroad - especially in booming sectors such as IT, Pharma and FMCG, Indian companies have felt an increasing need for the chosen people to be trained in the culture and the ways of the country of posting. This has meant the rise of a new breed of trainers in culture and special classes for country specific culture training to help such executives fit smoothly into their new roles.

But have we ever stopped to think about the Indian manager who is about to take up a position outside his native state? Have we ever thought of the need for training such individuals to quickly settle down into their new roles they are about to take up? Why do I say this? Hear what some expat CEOs have to say. Kwon of Samsung believes serving in India is like serving in many countries. Michael Bonham, who is the Ford India CEO supports this view. When he shifted to Delhi after spending nearly three years in Chennai, he actually thought he had shifted to a "different country."  So how does one go about learning about these countries within a country and our cultural traits and attitudes?  How does one go about decoding what the Economic Times calls the desi dynamic? Learn from the experiences of expat CEOs posted on Indian shores. Why? Because they notice things which we as Indians don't and they put a light on attitudes which we take for granted.

For many of us our attitudes and beliefs about different communities are the cultural stereotypes handed down to us from our parents and friends, (the Bong is sentimental, the North Indian is aggressive etc). And these become the drivers influencing our behavior and responses to people from these communities which can come in the growth path of executives who aspire for leadership roles. For, as Jacques Challes the Managing Director of L'Oreal puts it, "India is about the future of business." Moreover Challes believes that in India "you are constantly building" unlike his own country France, where everything is static. Since the business of business is primarily about managing people, and the Indian environment is one of constant change, where do we begin? With one of Challes observations.

Challes has observed that the power distance between the field staff and the highly educated managers at headquarters, is so big, that they are not able to communicate effectively. The loss in translation is the reason why strategies created at the top are often not executed efficiently in the field.

The Indian manager has a unique set of attitudes, knowing which, can help us grow quickly in our leadership roles

So how can managers cut this loss in translation? How can s/he improve execution of his or her painstakingly planned strategies? The learning about the desi dynamic of the expat CEO trying to settle down into his leadership role in India, holds important lessons for us. 

Yves Martinez of Legrand has discovered that its not enough to set targets and issue instructions to his managers you have to take time to convince the internal teams. "...people want to understand what they are doing, they want to take time over it." 

Benoit Lecuyer, the MD of Hager Electro believes that management in India is more personal and therefore managers have to make people the centrepiece of business and life. Instead of calling large meetings with 50 people, they should call the managers for one-to-one discussions. This  helps the manager and his senior to get to know one another better.

Kiminobu Tokuyama CEO of Nissan Motors seconds this view when he observes that Indian managers are rich with ideas and views but in business meetings, they do not express any disagreement with their bosses. "My constant effort," he says. " is to create an atmosphere of mutual respect, trust, confidence and fearlessness and thereby enable free flow of honest opinion from all."

A very important insight comes from Neil Mills, CEO of Spicejet. He calls for dealing with people as individuals and not as members of a community. He believes that there is no such thing as a common Indian culture, for instance, a person with a south Indian name could be more north Indian, because he has lived in Delhi all his life. This means one has to tailor the way instructions are given to people based on their divergent backgrounds and not as a Marwari, Tamilian, Bengali etc.

So there you have it - the desi dynamic decoded. Now to set about internalizing and validating the observations in our corporate lives and leadership roles.

The Rewards of Paying Respect

A recent cartoon by Salam in the Economic Times shows a manager telling his boss, " We have arrived at a respectable compromise with the employees...they have given up their demand for a raise...in return for being treated with respect." The cartoonist neatly captures a profound workplace truth - that employees value being treated with respect more than money.

A variety of surveys show that workers want more than just monetary compensation. In their article in the  Journal of Economic Perspectives, Ellingsen and Johannesson  observe that "in particular, workers want a sort of appreciation and recognition from their employers that conveys respect" As a matter of fact, they report that, "workers sometimes respond negatively to  what they perceive as signs of disrespect, including intrusive managerial control and even, in some cases, monetary incentives." However, inspite of a substantial body of evidence to the contrary, employers insist in their belief that monetary compensation out beats any other form of reward. 

Dilip was one such client of mine who, inspite of my efforts to convince him to the contrary, insisted that monetary rewards were the best form of rewards for his employees. To find out just where the truth lay, I decided to conduct a survey of his employees which evaluated their ratings of five workplace factors; Self-fulfillment, Esteem,  Belongingness, Security, Physiological/Basic. To my no great surprise (but to Dilp's great astonishment), the majority of his employees top rated Esteem and Belongingness.

The lesson for employers - those who treat their employees with respect may find themselves in the situation depicted in Salams cartoon. But those who blend it with monetary rewards, are in store for even greater rewards- a highly motivated employee force!

Ref: Tore Ellingsen and Magnus Johannesson, Paying Respect, Journal of Economic Perspectives-Vol 21, Number 4-Fall 2007-pages 135-149

Elementary eh, my dear Holmes?

Lie to Me was a TV show on Star World that I loved to watch! It was about Cal Lightman, a genius psychologist  and founder of the Lightman group, who uses unusual techniques to arrive at the truth. One of the episodes was about a policeman who has been shot and rendered a quadriplegic - he could neither speak nor make any actions. Lightman shows him pictures of likely suspects and detects the answers by observing the cop's irises of the eye - they dilate on his recognizing his shooter's face.

I have personally found the science of Body language fascinating and of great use in my coaching practice, and the program was like a primer on micro expressions and also helped me revise my knowledge of the subject. When I coach (always face-to-face) I look out for different signs which can help me get a better understanding of the coachee's personality. The pitch and tone of voice in his speech, his facial expressions, hand-to-body gestures and body language are one set of signs I look out for. The others are around him and only need an awareness of their significance to add colour to the canvas of his personality. For instance, a cluttered table to me reflects the clutter in his mind.

What does this table suggest about the owner's personality?

This could mean two things - either he is disorganized in his ways or currently navigating through several decision making options. Also, how does he handle interruptions, how does he speak to people on the phone and why, what kind of books does he read? All these observations help me to get clues to his personality and draw up an approach to coach him.

Leaders too can gain from a knowledge of reading people - they can apply the insights gained through observing to improving their performance as leaders and to navigating the ever-present corporate politics. In our corporate lives, says Art Petty in his blogpost we spend a great deal of time struggling and striving to be heard and somewhere along the way, many of us forget how important it is to shut up, listen and importantly, to observe. How true!

He has some useful suggestions to make on how to watch and learn - the 'elementary' lesson Sherlock Holmes always needled his dear Watson on.

Are you encouraging innovation in your company?

Yesterday my friend Shiva texted me the following joke:

Teacher: What is half of 8?

Student: Depends sir, if  cut horizontally into half, then its '0' and if vertically it is '8'!

The teacher fainted.

Researchers at the Wolverhampton University looking for the world's oldest jokes have found that jokes ancient and modern shared “a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion.” Much the way the student did - no wonder the teacher fainted! 

Innovation like jokes, also requires a willingness to deal with taboos (out-of-the-box thinking) and a streak of rebellion (an ability to take risk). However, no innovation can be called an innovation unless its implemented because, as the graphic below shows, Implementation = Profits and Profits fuel Innovation. An unimplemented innovation remains a mere idea generating zero profit, instead it reduces the time spent on generating and vetting it as cost to the company.

Source: http://www.jpb.com/innovation/index.php

Recently, I happened to facilitate a team of key managers from an engineering company which was one of the oldest in its line of business, but getting battered by the competition. The MD wanted me to help them change their way of doing things. At one of the sessions the MD observed that one of the reasons the company was lagging behind was that few, if any, innovations were happening in the company. Based on this observation, we decided to form a cross-functional team that would work exclusively on innovation projects. However, a few months into the project, the MD suddenly decided that  as it was nearing the end of the sales year, all innovation projects were to be shelved and everyone was to focus only on completing the target. The Innovation projects went out of the window, and the last I knew, they have not been revived either.

The MD may have had his reasons for doing what he did, but imagine the consequences of his decision on his team. If  innovation was be a priority for the company, then the leader should have been communicating this message to his team in all possible ways. In this case, by taking a so called break on the innovation projects, he had sent a message to his team that the projects weren't important enough, generating sales was.

Change management requires several tasks to be done simultaneously. It is therefore very important that leaders drill into their managers that all change management tasks need to be done in addition to their day-to-day tasks. Not in exclusion, or one instead of another.

As the graphic above shows, successful implementation of innovation projects need to be powered by management. By taking his eyes off the "innovation ball", the MD had sent a silent message to his team about where his priorities lay.

PS If you are interested in creativity and innovation, you will find Jeffrey Baumgartner's website http://www.jpb.com//index.php very useful:

The checklist for change

Every evening for going to the gym, I fill my gym bag with two towels, a change of clothes, shoes, socks, and a bottle of drinking water. Every so often, I forget one or the other and have to either do a sweaty  workout (forgotten towel), or miss out on the steam and bath (forgotten bath towel). Now, to save me from the miseries,  I have put up a sticky note on the cupboard door with a checklist of all the things to be carried in the gym bag.

I am not particularly fond of checklists and tend to rely excessively on my memory - unreliable though it is. But reading Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto, has been the trigger for change. The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes. Checklists help foster communication, which in turn lead to teamwork. In a world of complex surgeries, there are so many details to focus on, it’s easy for errors to happen. Often  surgeons have to focus on their own responsibilities and trust that their colleagues are taking care of theirs. The checklist brings them all back to the same page; if nobody can proceed until it’s confirmed that a particular task has been performed, they’re forced to check in with each other. A BBC programme the other day had a doctor from a hospital in the UK recounting his experience of using the checklist. There were times, he said, when a surgeon forgot a swab inside a patient and risking his life considerably. Now, taking a count of the number of surgical swabs prior to, and post the operation, such mishaps have been completely eliminated. In the process, saving many a life - if not a malpractice suit! Even a simple thing like each person on the surgical team introducing himself/herself  to the others, has saved precious moments of time when a patient's life hung by a slender thread!

Personally, I have found the checklist a great tool in my change management projects. Such projects tend to be complex because you are not sure where and how exactly to begin the process. The checklist brings in the much required structure and rigor, providing clarity and saving me much time in laying out the road map for the project.

I have found the resources at ProSci BPR Online Learning Centre  particularly useful. Registering on the site makes you eligible for free tutorials and there are also several change management checklist you can download and use. Steve Banhegyi also has a very useful set of Leadership Checklists you can make use of.

How good are you at reading the pulse of your employees?

In his book, author Alfie Kohn, relates an interesting tale of an elderly man who had endured the insults of a crowd of 10-year-olds every day as they passed his house on the way home from school.One afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan. He met the children on his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the following day and shouted rude comments about him would receive a dollar. Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth.

Do we really need managers?

Umpteen books have been published on management, a whole bunch of management gurus and management consultants have held forth on it, and management schools have built courses around it. But the question remains in peoples' minds - what do managers really do, and a more important question, do we really need them?

Well here is the answer in defense of middle  management . Also check out the link in the article which will lead you to a very interesting new World Bank-Stanford study.

After you have downloaded it, don't forget to check out the Appendix. Apart from Table 2 (page 44) which provides a list of 38 management practices it also has other resources you may find useful.