Billy Beane revolutionized the way baseball players are valued and also exploited the advantages of timing. The reason his Oakland A’s played like a different team in the second half of their 2001 season is because they were a different team. Their general manager, on a shoestring budget, had scooped up undervalued players right before the trading deadline ...
Leaders & Managers
From the nitty gritty of daily management to addressing your aspirations of leadership, this section for leaders & managers tells you how to make strong leadership decisions, build effective teams, delegate and stay above the everyday management muddle.
Get tips, strategies, tool and advice on: performance reviews, preventing workplace violence, best-practices leadership, team building, leadership skills, people management and management training.
The wisdom of Eileen Gittins is that she keeps learning. In 2004, Gittins launched Blurb, where anybody can produce a pocket-size book for $2.95 or a coffee table book for about $200. Business is almost doubling every year.
Q. One of our employees secretly did an audio recording of his performance review meeting with his iPhone. Is that legal?
Imagine you’re up for an award at work ... for Best New Mistake. That might not sound too appealing, but at SurePayroll, the award is coveted. Why do they do it? To encourage employees to try new things—even if it means sometimes failing or making a mistake.
Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos wants us to think long term. The company was founded in 1994, listed in 1997, but didn’t post profit until 2001. His company isn’t the only one to get off to a slow start:
Albany, Mo., population 1,730, was sorely lacking doctors and nurses. So John Richmond, the hospital’s retired CEO, started speaking at local schools. Those who showed an interest got financial aid for their medical studies in exchange for coming home to work for a number of years.
Today, Paul Allen says that each of his big ideas—which now include aspects of brain science and aerospace—has begun with a development that sets the stage. In co-founding Microsoft, that development was the evolution of Intel’s early chips.
The downfall of a prominent CEO offers a cautionary tale about the need for self-awareness and continual self-improvement: Jeff Kindler was forced to resign a little over four years after becoming Pfizer's CEO. One reason for his fall: As a leader, Kindler had a combative style, yet agonized over every decision and second-guessed everyone else’s.
The reason Taco Bell's admin team came up with its "Team of Two" training program is clear when you listen to admin Karen Walters describe managers in her building. "There were a few managers in the group who maybe weren't using admins to their greatest capabilities," explains Walters. "In their defense, they didn't have a good model." So the admin team decided to give them one...
By almost any standard, Sara Blakely was living an ordinary life. Blakely had never taken a business course and was clueless on patent law. But doggedly, without quitting her day job, she did the research and took time off to get her invention manufactured and sold. She named it SPANX ...
