Root cause of failure, root cause of success
Love this exercise: Thought exercise: locate an event that is deemed widely to be a success in your organization, and then look for the single "root cause" of that success. You will include this "root cause" in a company-wide report, so make sure it's specific enough to defend and support.
Collaboration Overload Is Sinking Productivity
Many people have had the experience of being asked to do something and knowing with every fiber of their being that they should say no, but in a nano-second convince themselves why they need to do this thing after all. They jump in and then wonder six weeks later why they never have time for work that interests them. Collaborative work — time spent on email, IM, phone, and video calls — has risen 50% or more over the past decade to consume 85% or more of most people’s work weeks, and the Covid-19 pandemic caused this figure to take another sharp upward tick. These invisible demands are hurting organizations’ efforts to become more agile and innovative. And they can lead to individual career derailment, burnout, and declines in physical and mental well-being. But there’s a lot that organizations can do to equip their employees to work more efficiently in this context, ultimately improving employee well-being, productivity, and retention.
How Netflix's Corporate Culture Works
An interview with Erin Meyer, co-author of ‘No Rules Rules,’ one of Marker’s ‘5 Best Business Books of the Year’
Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5
Harvard professor Willy Shih explains the existential problem affecting cars, phones, computers, and more …
^ADJ: Must read to understand some of the supply chain issues
Managing Through Crunch Time — Without Burning Out Your Team
Crunch times — the long, stressful hours of work that are often required in the final weeks before a new product launch — can have an inordinate impact on the success of businesses and they’re powerful shapers of organizational culture. Effective leaders understand that during these times, it’s difficult to achieve excellence without placing significant demands on personnel. Yet any success that comes at the cost of employees’ mental or physical health is a Pyrrhic victory. In studying senior U.S. Army officers, who served in extremely stressful and pressure-filled environments, researchers identified the ability to balance this tension between getting the job done and managing the impacts on people as its own leadership competency — one with special relevance to high-performing organizations
Man who bribed AT&T employees to install malware on the company’s network gets 12 years in prison
The story about bribes paid to AT&T employees to install malware on the company’s internal network, which allowed him to unlock more than 1.9 million phones, causing the US telco losses in excess of $201 million.
^ADJ: interesting article on a few levels, how social engineering and insider threats can affect all firms, and secondly how did they not have exception / anomaly reporting to catch this - do you?
How to Influence Without Authority
^ADJ: From the team at Atlassian - who are pretty amazing at getting stuff done.