Effective managers say the same thing twice

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only twice…

‘To get employees to do something, managers need to ask them at least twice.’ –  Harvard Business Review.

Managers are combining different types of communication, such as email, IM and phone calls, to repeat and reinforce key messages, and so:

‘Managers who were deliberately redundant [i.e. used multiple channels of communication] moved their projects forward faster and more smoothly.’

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Are you Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg?

Steve Jobs obsessively tinkered and polished Apple’s products (and his yacht, apparently). Jonathan Ive said that Apple doesn’t do focus groups. As Jobs once remarked, before Henry Ford, if you asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a more efficient horse.

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How to manage creativity

I came across this speech transcript when I was writing a piece about managing geeks. I wrote it eons ago when I was running Intelligent Games (IG), a computer games company. I’m sure that I didn’t always practice what I preached but looking back some of the points still seem pretty valid for how to manage creativity more generally.

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What makes a great leader: lessons from MI5

Thanks to franchises like James Bond, an air of glamour and mystery surrounds the British intelligence services (cue music).

This secretive and exciting institution seems so far removed from our everyday working lives that it’s hard to imagine it has anything in common with mundane management or business basics.

The reality, however, is very different from Fleming’s fiction. Continue reading “What makes a great leader: lessons from MI5”

What’s your ‘profit to pain’ ratio for client management?

I love my current clients – this isn’t about them. But in the past, mainly when I was a freelance journalist, I have had to deal with a few clients that were very difficult. They went from profit to pain.

playing chess with clients

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