Category Archives: Management

I have been in management since 1995, and I literally have hired many dozens of people and interviewed hundreds of people in the process. I have heard just about everything you can imagine in an interview. After a recent interview, I thought it might be useful to mention a few things not to do in an interview: Continue reading →

I saw an interesting discussion on the Dynamic Ecology web site about publishing research papers. As I read the article, I saw that analogies could be drawn between doing research and developing new products. The Dynamic Ecology post was centered on observations made by William Shockley , 1956 Physics Nobel Prize winner, on what makes a successful researcher. Continue reading →

I just finished reading Bob Gate's A Passion for Leadership, and I am a bit torn. I regularly read books on management and most of them do not contribute anything to improving management– that is not true for A Passion for Leadership. The book is a well-written memoir in which Gates shows how he applied standard management lessons in difficult circumstances. These standard management lessons are worth repeating. My feelings about the book are torn because there is nothing new here. I understand that one could argue that the principles of good management are timeless, but I tend to like authors who give me a new way to look at things. Continue reading →

I saw in the news that Walmart is in the process of closing 269 of its stores, including 154 in the US. I became curious where the US store closures were occurring, so I downloaded the closings file and generated a pivot table of the data (Figure 1). Continue reading →

I am often asked to evaluate the focus of my team's efforts relative to company's priorities. There are different ways of expressing these priorities – one common approach is to look at how your group resources are allocated relative to the Ansoff matrix (Figure 1). Continue reading →

I have always liked Volkswagen (VW) cars – I actually rebuilt a Beetle engine during a shop class in high-school (Figure 1). My respect for VW took a serious downturn this morning when read the following headline,"Top U.S. VW Exec Blames 'A Couple of Software Engineers' for Scandal". Continue reading →