How to Fix the Workplace—for Real—with Jeffrey Pfeffer

Jeff Pfeffer is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and author of several provocative books, including "Dying for a Paycheck," "Leadership B.S.," and the newly-published "7 Rules of Power." In this episode of the New Human Movement, we talk to Jeff about why human-centric management practices remain rare (despite the mounting evidence of their positive impact on worker well being and organizational performance), and what can be done to change this. According to Jeff, two levers are most critical: (1) measuring the toxic effects of current management practices, and (2) holding executives accountable for creating human-centric workplaces.

Episode Links

Jeff Pfeffer's website

7 Rules of Power

Dying for a Paycheck

Leadership BS

Jeff's excellent summary of why human-centric work practices create value but nonetheless often fail to get adopted, appearing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives

Producing Sustainable Competitive Advantage Through the Effective Management of People, Academy of Management Perspectives, 1995

Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Tom Malone

Mastering the Art of Strategy with Richard Rumelt

Building a Business With a Higher Calling with Paul Polman

Paul is the former CEO of Unilever (2009-2019), the co-author of Net Positive, and the co-Chair of Imagine. In this episode, we discuss how to build a business that services all of its constituents—and merits their trust.

Why Good Jobs Matter with Zeynep Ton

Zeynep is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The Good Jobs Solution.

Entrepreneurs everywhere with Eric Ries

Eric is the bestselling author of the "Lean Startup” and the founder of the Long Term Stock Exchange. In this episode, we discuss the challenge of turning established companies intro entrepreneurial hotbeds.

Replay of LinkedIn Live: busting bureaucracy and humanizing work

Busting Bureaucracy: Gary Talks with Roche CEO Bill Anderson

For the past 4 years, Bill Anderson, CEO of Roche Pharmaceutical has been leading a crusade to “smash” bureaucracy. In this blunt and provocative conversation, Bill talks with Gary about what it takes to vanquish bureaucracy.

Searching for Significance

Why is management research so poorly funded? Would anyone notice if b-school researchers took a 10-year holiday? These are the questions Gary Hamel addresses in his wide-ranging and provocative take on the state of management research.

Why Your Organization isn’t as Innovative as it is Efficient

Every organization on the planet has been engineered for efficiency, but few have been engineered for innovation.

Why Your Organization is an Emotional Deadzone

Management was invented by engineers and accountants, and it shows. Too many organizations view human beings as mere “resources”. Until this changes our organizations will be less energetic, less creative and less resilient than the people within them.

Why You Don't Need to Worry Robots Will Steal Your Job

Why You Don’t Need to Worry That Robots Will Steal Your Job

For a hundred years bureaucrats have tried to turn human beings into semi-programmable robots. Now that we have real robots, we need to let human beings do what they do best: dream, imagine and create.

Why We Need a Revolution of the Mind in Management

At its core, virtually every large organization is a bureaucracy. That’s a problem, because bureaucracies are poorly suited to a world of head-snapping change, unconventional competitors and omnipotent customers. Few of us, though, can imagine an alternative to bureaucracy, but we must try.

Why Success is a Self-Correcting Phenomena

Success has never been more fleeting, and denial, arrogance and nostalgia, never more dangerous. Here’s how excellence expires and how to guard against it.

Why Silicon Valley Doesn’t Matter

Whilst Silicon Valley is great for the US economy, its impact on productivity and growth is modest. What’s needed is not an entrepreneurial enclave, but an economy filled with organizations that have unleashed the entrepreneurial energy of all those at work.

Why Resources Don’t Matter Anymore

In the creative economy, ingenuity counts for more than size, and agility trumps scale. Instead of bulking up, big companies need to learn how to do more with less.

Why Freedom and Control Aren’t The Trade-Offs We Think They Are

In our personal lives, we are masters of paradox, but at work we are often not trusted to balance competing objectives. This must change. We need organizations where freedom and control coexist and where employees have the information and skills to dynamically manage competing priorities.

Why Experimentation Beats Prediction

In a world of head-snapping change, planning is near impossible. To stay relevant, organizations must learn a lesson from biological evolution: experiment relentlessly and let the best ideas win.

Why Deep Change is Usually Crisis Driven

By the time a problem is big enough to capture the CEO’s scarce attention, an organization is already on the back foot. We need organizations where change is everyone’s job, not just the responsibility of those at the top, whose emotional equity is often invested in the past.

Why Change Management is an Oxymoron

Most change programs are belated, convulsive and ineffective. The solution: change programs that are built from the bottom up, give everyone a voice, and are emergent rather than engineered.

Why An Investor is Smarter Than Your CEO

Over the last 50 years, the New York Stock Exchange has outperformed all of its constituent companies. To beat this performance, companies will have to build internal markets for resource allocation.

Why Your Organization Isn’t Really Serious About Innovation

We all understand that innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance, the only way to outperform a mature industry, the only protection you have from commoditization and the only way to ensure long-term customer loyalty.

MIX Mashup: Loving Your Way to Success

A MIX Mashup special guest shares the surprising story of what happenend when the people in a Midwestern health sytem started bringing their hearts to work.

Have We Reached a Turning Point? Drucker Forum Keynote

Drucker Forum Keynote on Hacking Management

If an organization is going to thrive in the Digital Age, its management model must be rebuilt from the ground up around the principles of the social Web. Here's a blueprint for accelerating this vital and long over-due transformation.

Natural Leadership at W.L Gore & Associates

A conversation with Terri Kelly, president and CEO of W.L. Gore on the celebrated company's long-running experiment in natural leadership and managing without managers.

Transformation of Leadership, Step-by-Step

New workplace realities are changing the structures, compensation, and decision making of organizations. What can we do in our organizations to enlarge the leadership franchise?

Are You Really Serious About Innovation?

How can you make innovation an everyday, everywhere capability? Here are three critical questions you can use to test the depth of your organization’s innovation competence.

What Matters Now

Introducing my latest book, What Matters Now – How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation.

Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment

In this fast-paced, idea-packed, 15-minute video essay, get a vivid picture of what it means to build organizations that are fundamentally fit for the future—and genuinely fit for human beings. It's time to radically rethink how we mobilize people and organize resources to productive ends.