How managing stifles initiative and prevents joy
Psychologists on the impossibility of management—even for NINA puzzles The University of Rochester psychologists Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and their associates carried, perhaps, the most ambitious contemporary theoretical and empirical research on motivation. They...Incentive plans: Addictive for people and ruinous for companies
Taleb and Whitney of why incentives are just another sick game A big bank announced its annual profits—not very big this year—with a whole third of those going as bonuses for traders. Traders ususally make many jealous and some outraged. They shouldn’t. Listen to the...
McGregor and Whitney on “making the numbers”
The exciting game of “making the numbers.” In Freedom, Inc. we wrote: “Because you get what you measure, your measurement becomes the performance. And before long, rather than boosting your firm to ever-faster growth and ever-higher profitability, you have...
Deming on invisible costs and other figures
Running a company on visible figures alone We have written in Freedom, Inc. on the invisible costs of traditional companies and illustrated it through the costs of the workplace stress. Of course, there are others and the early exponent of those was Deming. Here is a...
On Animals and Pets in the Workplace
Why animals and pets are welcome in the workplace (and we didn’t even know it) We have just “discovered” this amazing book written in 1993. Its author, John O. Whitney, spent most of his career as an executive and CEO of several companies and then became a professor...Follow Freedominc
