Articles

Well Bob, it worked. This great PR offensive (see these posts about it here and here) worked wonders, the board bought all this stuff, and they rewarded you handsomely. In the last five years, you’ve received some $200 million in salary, bonus, stock, stock options, and other perks. In 2005 […]

Not long after Home Depot‘s Bob Nardelli unleashed his silly PR offensive designed to get him more money (see the post here), he managed to get someone to whip up an article designed to show he reads management articles too. The Harvard Business Review‘s Ram Charan wrote a puff piece […]

For crying out loud, it is one of the most touchy yet most important elements of organizational culture. I mean, holy f%&*ing christ, few things draw such a clear line between those that do, and those that don’t. Of course, dumbs*&t, I mean cursing in the workplace With the simultaneous […]

Back in March Home Depot unleashed what could only be called a PR offensive [ed: pun intended]. There was this great BusinessWeek cover story, a couple of other minor articles and mentions, and then a Harvard Business Review piece, all about how Bob Nardelli was wonderful. Heck, the BusinessWeek article […]

Microsoft just announced a number of changes in personnel policies designed to improve sagging morale. Good for them. It’s the result of a year of work by a longtime colleague of mine and now SVP of HR, Lisa Brummel. According to the reports, she spent a year listening to people […]

Job titles serve a number of purposes, and treating them lightly is done at your peril. Job titles help to indicate organizational structure to newcomers and outsiders, they tell people the relative importance of the person they are working with, and they reward their holders. Job titles serve a number […]

Set the time for reviews to be off-schedule from your main business processes, especially budgeting. The last thing you want is for your team to be overwhelmed with non-line-of-business work, or to give either budgetting or reviews short shrift. Neither your business, nor your employees will appreciate that. For example, […]

Immediately after an organization decides to do performance reviews, the first thing they ask is: how often should we do them? There is very real tension between providing enough feedback to the employees, and making painful busy work for the management team. Fortunately there is a good compromise that many […]