Market-Based Management®

Friday Links

Tableau brings a neat graph that compares the personal wealth of presidents to performance. I like stuff like this, but correlation is not always causation...

Here's a nice article about The Wooden School of Management, in honor of the great John Wooden. The bullet points are especially nice and echo aspects of MBM, like the "Control and Creativity" bullet.

The Consumerist has an interesting story about a town that prints its own money.

For those struggling with procrastination, LifeHacker brings us "How to find your procrastination hotspots."

If you have any neat articles from around the net this week, leave them in the comments or shoot me an email at ann.zerkle (at) cgkfoundation.org.

Measures?

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about measures. I wanted to bring you a brilliant video about measures that would blow your mind. However, when I went to search "measurement" in the usual places, curiously, this video came in on the top nine:

What's interesting is that I think he does hit on some interesting measures. If you were to print out your calendar for the last three months and count the scheduled hours you spent working on projects, do you think it would reflect your stated priorities? It makes me wonder about symbols. What symbols do I have around the office? What are some other ways we could measure culture?

If you want to see more of this talk, click here.

Grounded in Reality

Today I re-watched the movie "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." The Associates watch this movie during the first couple of weeks of KAP, and this year I'll be leading the session. We use the movie as an example of a decline in a company and pair it with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which shows the decline of a society.

This is probably the fifth time I've seen this movie, and I found myself thinking a few things throughout the movie:

• "Egos" and "greed" aside, the lack of grounding in reality was rampant.
• Don't confuse value creation with profit.
• The movie claims that Jeff Skilling was an advocate of free markets and tried to foster free-market thinking in his firm. However, the Enron culture blatantly ignored how freedom of speech and standards (among other things) translate into the firm. I hope my family doesn't watch this film and think that I believe he was a free-market kindred spirit.
• With the rise of wide-spread internet use and decreasing costs in communication, could such a spectacular fall happen again? Would employees out their employers?
• Moreover, where were the whistle blowers? Was everyone top to bottom okay with the behavior or were people just leaving?
• I don't think we'll ever really know everything that went on there.

I'm looking forward to hearing what the Associates have to think about the movie. They always seem to surprise me with interesting questions that I can't answer (those are the best kind of questions). 

If you've seen the film, what did you think about it? What questions would you ask to people who are new to Market-Based Management?  

Friday Links

Lifehacker brings us a study that shows, "Friendly Workplace Competition Increases Performance, Can Lead to Collaboration."

Here's a neat infographic about "How Laws Are Made." It almost made me want to go watch some School House Rock.

From Bob Sutton, via the HBR Blog, "12 Things Good Bosses Believe."

Two posts from Business Pundit caught my eye. The first is called "How Culture Problems Could Kill Facebook." The second is aboutTony Little (yes, that guy with the pony tail who does fitness infomercials). It was pretty interesting.

Thanks to Charlie, for the link to a reading list with fiction on it from one of Tyler Cowen's classes.

If you come across a neat link, leave it in the comments or send me an email at ann.zerkle (at) cgkfoundation.org.

Fiction

I'm often asked why we don't use more fiction to teach in the Associate Program. Part of it is that we'd have to give up some awesome non-fiction work that directly connects to Science of Liberty^TM. However, I think the other part is that putting together a great line up of fiction that would lend itself to nuanced topics is tough.

Currently, I can only think of very obvious choices: Ender's Game, Atlas Shrugged, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. Do you know of any great fiction books (or plays) that might connect with Science of Liberty concepts? The trick is to find a piece of work that people would read regardless of the message because it is well written. I think those are few and far between, but if you know of any, please leave a suggestion in the comments.