Harvard Business Publishing

The aim of this blog – and just about everything else I work on these days – is to help managers do their difficult jobs better, and to have better lives along the way. I am not naïve or arrogant enough to believe that anything that I do can instantly make any manager wiser, more humane, and happier. But I am optimistic enough, and have seen enough good things happen, to believe that managers who are persistent, listen, and care about others can SLOWLY become wiser, more humane, and happier.

There are three intertwined questions that I think and worry about constantly, themes you will see in my posts that reflect my efforts to help managers – both current and future – on this journey:

First: How can I develop and communicate an authentic understanding of what managers do on their jobs, how it feels to do those things, and how managers affect their people and organizations? This theme runs through my research, writing, teaching, speaking, and consulting: academics, consultants, or just about anyone else who tries to give managers advice without understanding the pressures they face are useless – and probably frauds.

Second: How can I develop evidence-based ideas that managers can actually use? I’ve spent more than 20 years doing traditional academic research and publishing in, reviewing for, and editing obscure and obtuse academic journals – and much of the past ten trying to figure out how to make it useful. My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I are working to bring research-based practices to managers in forms that they can use on their jobs. We believe that, as in medicine, being a manager is a craft that can only be learned through experience. But, also like medicine, we believe that there is a lot of management snake oil being sold out there, and that taking an evidence-based approach can help managers do more good (and less harm) for themselves, their people, and their organizations.

Finally: How can I teach students to practice the craft of management, to actually become wiser, more humane, and more effective? I have changed my teaching a lot over the past few years. My introduction to organizational behavior class now takes an explicitly evidence-based approach. And I am working with a wonderful team of people at the new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford to teach classes on business and design thinking that require students to work in teams that provide deliverables to executives from companies such as Wal-Mart and Disney. We also have started an executive program with the Graduate School of Business called Customer-Focused Innovation that, among others things, entails delivering design solutions to real clients.

Perhaps the fastest way to understand my perspective on organizational life is look at my list, Ten Things I Believe, which I give to my students on the last day of class:

1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all – first do no harm!
2. Indifference is as important as passion.
3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can't have both at the same time.
4. Learning how to say smart things and give smart answers is important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.
5. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; self-interest is a learned social norm, not an inherent feature of human behavior.
6. Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.
7. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.
8. The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power.
9. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.
10. Work is an over-rated activity.

And now I’ll add two more beliefs that are especially important to managers:

11. Have strong opinions, weakly held (thanks to Paul Saffo).
12. Argue as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong (thanks to Karl Weick).