Bottom 10 Habits of Productive Employees

2005-10-01 14 min read Essays Marco

If you haven’t managed people before, management looks like a mystery to you. You don’t quite understand why your manager – or managers in general – choose to do and say the things that emanate from them. Management as a whole may look arbitrary, capricious, incompetent to you, as if there is a secret plot to take the hard work you do and turn it to dust. In particular, you may wonder how rewards are meted out, be it bonuses, salary increases, promotions. Sometimes it just seems that management has favorites, and that it’s always the favorites that get rewarded, while your contribution is ignored just because your manager doesn’t like you.

Well, I’ve got news for you: while there certainly are managers that are arbitrary and capricious, the vast majority of them has real logical reasons for doing as they do – you are just utterly unaware of them. Read on if you want to read one manager’s experience…

The Good Executive Officer

2005-01-17 8 min read Essays Marco

Winning by Failure

It is the year of the Lord 2002, and corporate executives are being accused of fraudolent behavior left and right. And if it is not outright greed that pushes men and women over the edge, it seems that there is a whole world of incompetence that has pushed to the top and has been wreaking havoc over the past years.

Every day, it seems, another multi-billion conglomerate implodes in a conflagration that will leave entire cities without jobs, causing pain and suffering to large populations, but seemingly not harming those who caused the problem.

The Factory vs. the Workshop

2005-01-17 12 min read Essays Marco

The Factory vs. The Workshop

Who wasn’t smart enough to know that Internet startups had to disappear sooner or later? We all thought the situation had gotten completely out of control, and we somehow wished the pull of gravity would get those highly egomanic startup captains of venture crashing to the same place from which they had soared.

No doubt a lot of the rise and fall of the dot.com era was inherently due to fundamental economic factors that hindsight so easily knows about. There must be a generation of Americans that thinking back smugly affirms: “I told you so!” For you and me that unlike them didn’t know it was happening, their 401k is down just where yours and mine is.

The Curse of the Competent

2005-01-17 7 min read Essays Marco

Cursing the Competent

As long as the Internet economy was happily bubbling ahead, the Peter Principle reigned supreme: Peter joined a startup and got promoted quickly. Invariably, he would land in a position where he not only started failing, but dragged the entire startup down with his incompetence. Which of course didn’t quite matter, since the Peter Principle was (and is) democratic and made everybody else look just as stupid as Peter himself.

Newer posts