The Management Innovation Exchange or MIX is truly a great place for learning about innovative management practices and ideas for reinventing management. I highly recommend it if you have a passion for re-defining the ‘way things work’. In fact, I too contributed a “hack” to make people managers more accountable for their employees by building attrition costs into the managers’ P&L.

I am putting together a small list of hacks and stories which I found most interesting on the forum:

• Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School writes a thought-provoking piece on “What is Your Management Model?” We have all talked about business models, but not much about the management model. How are we going to make choices about people, effort coordination, objectives etc.? How will we balance a traditional vs. a new-age management practice? Ultimately, what’s more important – the business model or the management model? Must Read.

• Jordan Cohen of Pfizer tells a great story about how to make people more efficient by taking out the routine work out of their work. Fascinating example of outsourcing low value-adding tasks.

• Matt Sholsberg asks us to reinvent the wheel. ...

Yesterday I attended Lectures: Dead and Alive, The 2010 Tucker Talk, delivered by Dr. Bruce Robertson, Professor of Classics, who asked, “In an age of instant online videos, why do people still travel thousands of miles to hear a public presentation? Why are lectures so improbably still ‘alive’?”

Bruce is an energetic speaker and he gave an excellent presentation, without slides, that kept the audience’s attention, in spite of the extreme heat and humidity in the auditorium. Bruce said that the lecture is a grand and living thing and noted how the rapt attention of others focused on a single presenter can induce a higher degree of focus. We’ve all heard of or perhaps witnessed people who can electrify a room. Bruce explained how lectures can help us to experience the sublime, enabling the contemplation of otherwise hidden natural order, and this is what teaching should offer. He admitted that the lecture as mere knowledge dissemination, in this age of wikipedia, is dead. Good lectures excite and inspire. His lecture reminded me of the article Love on Campus.

One of the comments after the talk was that the university continues to value the lecture.

This morning I attended ...

The WSJ Heard on the Street section printed an article today, “Older US Workforce Has an Ugly Wrinkle” sparked a few thoughts for my post this morning.  

• First, was a statistic. 40% of the US population over 55 is working or looking to work, the highest ratio since JFK was president. Demographically I found this interesting mainly because the ratio of 55+ Americans to the population has increased since the 1960s. The open question to me is, does the 40% go up from here, as baby boomers reinvent what retirement means? Or does it go down as the pain of the recession begins to wane and nest eggs are more confidently restored?
• Next, “on the positive side, the declining share of manufacturing in the economic mix… Should make it easier for many to continue working”.  Let’s stop right here and google the age of the author writing this piece. Innovation will come to manufacturing too. BMW proved it in this HBR article a few months ago. where the workforce mix of the future was artificially created in one of the most heavily labor intensive lines, and the team innovated around the effects of an older workforce. (a 7% productivity gain to boot thank you very ...

Here's an eye-opening and provocative post by Brad Smart, reprinted with his permission from his Topgrading blog:

A Player executives have very common reading habits, and what they read varies dramatically from what C Players and lower level managers read. For anyone aspiring to be a successful CEO, or a C-level executive, emulating the reading habits of the best and the brightest might give you an edge.

Sorting through my hard copy files of 6,500+ senior executives I focused on C-level executives (CEOs and those reporting to CEOs) who are North American, and only those whom I rated "A Player." There are about 500 in the sample.

First I'll report the results, and then explain why those executives believe their reading habits give them a competitive advantage in their career.

The Results of the Study: What Periodicals A Player Executives Read:

1. Wall Street Journal - Almost all read the front page and in the Opinion section, the Review and Outlook column (this column, in my sample, is the single most powerful source of political thought for senior executives).

For all the remaining periodicals, most executives skim them and only read a few ...

This is a guest post by Sean Conrad of Halogen Software.

There are a lot of articles around today arguing both sides of the employee performance appraisal debate. Do they provide value to the employer and the employee? Are they an outdated HR/management practice? Do they do more harm than good? What can we do to make them more effective? Should we abandon them all-together?

I think, as with most things, that the value and impact of employee performance appraisals depend on our reasons for conducting them, and the way in which we conduct them. While our corporate culture will certainly influence both of these, we also have a level of choice and responsibility – both as managers and employees. If we want to, we can use them as an effective coaching tool.

But let’s step back for a minute and look at why we even conduct employee performance appraisals.

Why do we do we conduct performance appraisals?

As with most management questions, there are lots of possible answers:

• To help guide employee performance
• To ensure that employees know what is expected of them
• To give employees feedback on their performance so they can continue to develop and improve
• To ...

Here's an eye-opening and provocative post by Brad Smart, reprinted with his permission from his Topgrading blog:

A Player executives have very common reading habits, and what they read varies dramatically from what C Players and lower level managers read. For anyone aspiring to be a successful CEO, or a C-level executive, emulating the reading habits of the best and the brightest might give you an edge.

Sorting through my hard copy files of 6,500+ senior executives I focused on C-level executives (CEOs and those reporting to CEOs) who are North American, and only those whom I rated "A Player." There are about 500 in the sample.

First I'll report the results, and then explain why those executives believe their reading habits give them a competitive advantage in their career.

The Results of the Study: What Periodicals A Player Executives Read:

1. Wall Street Journal - Almost all read the front page and in the Opinion section, the Review and Outlook column (this column, in my sample, is the single most powerful source of political thought for senior executives).

For all the remaining periodicals, most executives skim them and only read a few ...

This is a guest post by Sean Conrad of Halogen Software.

There are a lot of articles around today arguing both sides of the employee performance appraisal debate. Do they provide value to the employer and the employee? Are they an outdated HR/management practice? Do they do more harm than good? What can we do to make them more effective? Should we abandon them all-together?

I think, as with most things, that the value and impact of employee performance appraisals depend on our reasons for conducting them, and the way in which we conduct them. While our corporate culture will certainly influence both of these, we also have a level of choice and responsibility – both as managers and employees. If we want to, we can use them as an effective coaching tool.

But let’s step back for a minute and look at why we even conduct employee performance appraisals.

Why do we do we conduct performance appraisals?

As with most management questions, there are lots of possible answers:

• To help guide employee performance
• To ensure that employees know what is expected of them
• To give employees feedback on their performance so they can continue to develop and improve
• To ...