Why Feedback Rarely Does What It’s Meant To
The debate about feedback at work isn’t new. Since at least the middle of the last century, the question of how to get employees to improve has generated a good deal of opinion and research. But recently the discussion has taken on new intensity. The ongoing experiment in “radical transparency” at Bridgewater Associates and the culture at Netflix, which the Wall Street Journal recently described as “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and awkward” real-time 360s, are but two examples of the overriding belief that the way to increase performance in companies is through rigorous, frequent, candid, pervasive, and often critical feedback.
How Traeger's CEO Cleaned Up a Toxic Culture
One morning in October of 2014 I pulled into the parking lot at my office to find it surrounded by fire trucks. On the previous visit I’d made a big announcement: Traeger, the Oregon-based outdoor cooking company where I had recently become CEO, would be closing its warehouse and trucking operations and outsourcing them to UPS. The move made strategic sense, and we had offered generous severance and outplacement assistance to the several dozen employees affected. Nonetheless, the news hadn’t gone over well. When I got out of the car, I learned that one of our big-rig trucks was on fire. We didn’t know who was responsible, but it was obviously arson.
Why Is Drinking Water Important? 6 Reasons to Stay Hydrated
Do you drink enough water each day? If not, your overall health may be taking a toll. And why is drinking water important? Drinking water regularly can help you to lose weight, think better, be in a better mood, prevent disease, and more.
Will Half Of All Colleges Really Close In The Next Decade?
Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen consistently turns heads in higher education by predicting that 50% of colleges and universities will close or go bankrupt in the next decade. Christensen and I made a more measured prediction with more nuance in the New York Times in 2013: “a host of struggling colleges and universities—the bottom 25 percent of every tier, we predict—will disappear or merge in the next 10 to 15 years.”
People are the last competitive advantage
“One of the few sources of lasting advantage left is people”, according to academic Rita McGrath. In her opening keynote at the 2019 HRD Summit, the Thinkers50 thinker, professor of management at Columbia Business School and author of The End of Competitive Advantage described the critical importance of “strategic inflection points” to organisational success. She defined these as “those moments that tell you you’re on the brink of something really different” and that the business must change strategic direction.
Netflix is trying to make TV into a more active experience—and it's starting with kids shows
Watching TV used to be a passive experience. We’d turn on the set, flip through channels for something to watch, then sit back and consume whatever was offered up by the networks. Video-on-demand, and then subscription-video-on-demand services like Netflix, changed that by letting audiences pick what and when they wanted to watch ...