The Productivity Guru

THAT G-D @#$%&$# Boss of Mine!!!! Ah!!  Now don't tell me there hasn't been a time that you haven't had thoughts like that.  Well maybe not using those exact words, but words that clearly express your dislike for your boss.  Tell the truth, we've all had them at one point in our lives. Well Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal has done it again in her indomitable style, with another of her great articles.  In this one, "The Best Ways to Manage a Demanding Boss."  Ms. Shellenbarger is one of the most incisive authors at the Journal.  I always try to read her columns!  If you don't you should. I remember my first boss on my first full-time job out of graduate school.  We'll just call him by his initials, DB.  I hated him. He was the most demanding, intractable men I had ever met or dealt with.  Now the truth was -- this was my first job and I hadn't met that many bosses before.  So in reality he was actually pre...

In my more than 36 years of working with executive teams, I used a tool that measured the correlation of how well the various executives at the most senior level, the C-suite, correlated with their CEO on the goals that the CEO had for the organization. In all those years, I was constantly fascinated by how wide the gap was between the executives and their CEO in the priority of those goals.  In many cases it was as much as 100% from the CEO with some of his or her executives.  To be clear if the CEO had as their highest goal to increase sales by 15%, as an example, and all of the other senior managers in the organization had that as the goal but at lower priorities, then the correlations would not be on target and could be as much as 100% away from the CEO.  I have even seen CEO's with goals like the one I mention and the VP of Sales for the same organization whose main goal was to improve the incentive system for the people in his department.  Now the p...

Are you surprised by this?  Our tax code is so out of date, our educational system is so far behind so many other countries, we have imposed ridiculous barriers to the immigration of skilled workers, and an overvalued US dollar all are combining together causing more and more jobs to flow overseas.  The Wall Street Journal recently carried an excellent print piece on April 19, 2011 by David Wessel, "Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704821704576270783611823972.html?KEYWORDS=David+Wessel The video version of this article is also included in the following link: http://online.wsj.com/video/news-hub-globalization-means-less-us-jobs/07B46F49-FAB4-496A-93A4-53EB31D20762.html?KEYWORDS=David+Wessel As stated in the article, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported that companies cut their work forces in the U.S.  by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.  In t...