The Have-It-All Feel-Good Machine

The Have It All Feel Good Machine
You often leave with a rosy glow, a sense of resolve, and a commitment to do more, for other women and for yourself.  But then you return to your desk, probably next to a higher-paid male co-worker, and the old, familiar malaise sets in.  There...
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Winning The Bureaucracy Game

Winning The Bureaucracy Game
During a college job at an Air Force weapons lab in New Mexico, [Robert Mercer, co-CEO Renaissance Technologies] says, he found a life’s calling. “I loved everything about computers,” he said. “I Loved the solitude of the computer lab late at night. I loved the...
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Chowing Down On Employees’ Brains

Chowing Down On Employees Brains
When BAE learns that an employee with deep institutional knowledge plans to retire, whether in a few months or a couple  years, a knowledge transfer group of about a half-dozen people of varying ages working in the same area is formed.  The teams meet regularly...
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How To Manage A Chaos Machine

How To Manage A Chaos Machine Jean_Tinguely_-_Heureka_-_Zürichhorn
They assumed that, if a project was intensely and minutely planned, everything would naturally and inevitably proceed in an orderly and deterministic way. … And when projects did go off the rails, their response was to stop everything and replan. Sometimes that works, but sometimes...
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New Year, New Projects, Same Old Ethics

New Year New Projects Same Old Ethics
He thinks it’s pretty obvious why any engineers who may have been involved have not come forward to date. For one thing, anyone who does stand up will most likely be swept aside … Confronted with questionable orders or restrictions, they find themselves in the...
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Why Our Innovations Fail Us

Why Our Innovations Fail Us
Yet the media telling of the story makes it sound as if ideation—the creation of ideas—is 90% of the work of innovation. Ideation has produced many inventions that never became innovations because no one adopted them. Many people are misled by stories that inaccurately equate...
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How To Avoid Great Ideas That Go Awry

How To Avoid Great Ideas That Go Awry
China wasn't even the first country to experiment with forcible population control. In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, introduced a program that involved the involuntary sterilization of many men and women.
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Why Hands-Off Leadership Does Not Work

Why Hands-Off Management Does Not Work
I thought that people wanted lots of autonomy, which meant that I only needed to be there when they needed help. But that doesn’t create a very motivated team because you’re not actually helping people play—find new ideas, experiment, learn, develop and grow.
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Too Much Money And Not Enough Time

Although Pompeii is frozen in time, the workers are in a hurry — to spend money. In the next 11 weeks they have to burn through almost $100 million — about five times what they’ve spent in the past three years — or risk losing...
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Cheaters Promoted to Top Jobs

Cheaters Promoted To Top Jobs
Two top Volkswagen engineers who found they couldn’t deliver as promised a clean diesel engine for the U.S. market are at the center of a company probe into the installation of engine software designed to fool regulators …. The two men, Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi’s chief...
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