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"This manifesto is about how to work with such an adversarial character, whether they are your boss, peer or team member. It is about how to use the specific behavior you need to use to help you manage the unclear boundaries, ambivalent motives and occasional duplicitous conduct that characterizes adversarial working relationships. By the end of the manifesto I hope you will have the insight and interpersonal know-how you need to handle these tricky co-workers more effectively and retain the degree of influence in your work with them that you would like to have."
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"The business world will never again be the same.
For more than twenty years, the growth formula for American business has been simple: increase revenues by expanding product offerings while reducing supply chain costs.
In other words, fill up the store shelves and keep the consumer's attention by constantly offering new variations on existing products, packaging and prices. Meanwhile, use the powerful new palette of Supply Chain Management tools to manage and drive down the cost of production to maintain constant productivity improvement.
As a strategy, this growth formula worked brilliantly for a generation . . .long enough for both business executives and academics to forget that this strategy was merely the appropriate response to a distinct economic era, not a fundamental law of business.
Now, we are being punished for that forgetfulness."
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"Radical management focuses the entire organization on the goal of constantly increasing the value of what the organization offers to its clients. Once a firm commits to this goal, traditional command-and-control bureaucracy ceases to be a viable organizational option. Instead the firm will, like Southwest Airlines or Starbucks, naturally gravitate towards some variation of self-organizing teams as the default management model for organizing work. That's because it is only through mobilizing the full energy and ingenuity of the workforce that the firm can generate the continuous value innovation needed to delight clients. Not surprisingly, those doing the work find more satisfaction as members of such productive teams."
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"Most companies would like to become more gender balanced at all levels, with women and men dancing together in a smooth and natural way. They have been trying for decades to attract, retain and promote more women. They have tried to grow their female customer bases. They are embarrassed by the all-male faces on the boardroom website, dancing to the tune of their own drummers. Most have gotten rid of the photos, but not the problem. Yet some companies have tried really hard, for a really long time. And almost everyone, male and female, is suffering from gender fatigue.
[...]
Why so much effort for so little result?
Because we have over-focused on kissing Cinderella awake from her slumber and inviting her to the ball. But nobody ever bothered checking if the prince can actually dance."
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"So ubiquitous have Web sites become that it's hard to believe they've been with us for less than 20 years. It was the 1994 introduction of the browser-enabled World Wide Web that gave birth to the Web site. Since then they have gone through about four stages of evolution: [...]
Now, we're entering a fifth era of the evolution: transformation of the Web site into a real-time marketing (and sales) machine. This is the natural evolutionary outcome of a process that started with a new way to slip brochures under people's doors."
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