How to Unf*** Management

Many companies under-invest in customer care to save a few cents per customer interaction. This happens because the costs of customer support are visible on the P&L, while the costs of exasperated customers are not (at least in the short-run). That’s why the customer support function should report to the CMO, not to operations or finance.

Executive myopia--leaders who are unwilling or unable to jettison outdated beliefs--is the #1 threat to organizational resilience. My advice: regard every belief you have about your business as a mere hypothesis, forever open to disconfirmation.

Credentials are important (you want your doc to be highly skilled), but credentialism can be dangerous. The fact that a job doesn’t require a degree says little about the abilities of someone in that job. No job is inherently low-skilled—but millions of jobs are low-opportunity.

Q: How many employees in your org have a voice in setting strategy? A: Not enough. The most valuable strategic insights come from those with no stake in the status quo--from young employees, new hires and those far from head office. That's why "open strategy" is a necessity.

When did we start calling managers "leaders?" Talk about grade inflation! A leader is someone people choose to follow. So ask yourself, if my "subordinates" had a choice, would they choose to follow me? Never forget: you're a leader only if your team says you are. 

Many believe that a company can't be big AND entrepreneurial. It would be more accurate to say a company can’t be monolithic AND entrepreneurial. Haier, the global appliance leader, broke a 50,000 person organization into 4,000 independent operating units, each with its own P&L. Every “microenterprise” has the freedom to set its strategy, hire and fire, and distribute rewards.

Bureaucracies are innovation­ phobic and congenitally risk averse. They offer few incen­tives to those inclined to challenge the status quo. As you may have discovered, in a bureaucracy, being a maverick is a high­-risk occupation.

In the Age of Upheaval, every organization needs an “evolutionary advantage”—the capacity to change as fast as change itself. That means guarding against denial, challenging legacy beliefs, generating hundreds of new strategic options each year, shifting resources from legacy businesses to promising opportunities, radically trimming bureaucracy, and proactively redefining customer expectations.

No organization needs more than three management levels. If your consultants haven’t told you this, it’s because they’re afraid to. But here’s the thing, when you flatten the pyramid, everyone’s job gets better. Nobody likes micromanaging others. (OK, almost nobody.)

To beat bureaucracy, stop acting like a bureaucrat. Empower others defy stupid rules, shun flattery, be generous, safeguard the future, and never suck up. In short, don’t sacrifice your humanity for bureaucratic wins.

Bureaucracy is just too hard. Too many layers, managers, staffers, processes, policies, reports, targets, metrics, committees, and meetings!! You need all this when you try to run a business from the top by remote control—when you don’t give those on the front line the skills, information, autonomy and skills they need to be self-managing

As you may have noticed, people with power are reluctant to give it up, and often have the means to defend their prerogatives. That’s a problem, since you can’t build a human­-centric organization without flattening the pyramid.