nickshanagher

Pay Unfairly is chapter 10 of Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules! Ever provocative this book shares the thinking behind Google’s people strategy. What is remarkable is that it is 24 times harder to get a job at Google than to get a place at Harvard University. And three million people a year apply for jobs there. Bock is Google’s senior vice president of people operations. The most important rule is to hire great people and people who are better at your job than you are. He devotes two chapters to this subject. Later on we get to the Pay Unfairly chapter where Bock offers four pieces of advice: -          Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay the reflect the power law distribution of performance -          Celebrate accomplishment not compensation -          Make it easy to spread the love -          Rew...

A friend bought a copy of the One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson in the 1990s and kept it by his desk. I have often been told about the book and judged its relevance by the problems my friend had hitting his targets and motivating his team. When he moved on, he left the book to me and for a year it has sat in my in-tray. As a raving fan of Gung Ho!, I believed that I should read One Minute Manager and I read the first half without great enthusiasm. The business fable of a young executive setting out to find how to manage and the people that he met seems a bit forced. The concept of one minute goals, one minute praisings and one minute reprimands seems like a cheat. I was ready to sneer... I had two issues with the book. Firstly, managers need to have domain knowledge before their reports will give them the credibility to be one minute managers. Secondly, the idea of managers having lots of spare time seemed like a cheat. This book will mess lots of people ...

Shopkeeping is a passion of mine, Theo Paphitis, owner of Rymans, the office supplies company and UK TV star, told an audience of leading retailers last week. The simple act of owning a store provides you with 70% of the skills of running a business, he estimates. The reason why is that running a local shop requires a huge mix of skills: people skills, stock control, merchandising, and so on. Shopkeeping is also an area where you can join with no qualifications and get to the top. Cheerleading for the retail sector is important. Retailing done well adds value to the economy. Mr Paphitas is right to say that anyone can open a shop. But to do it well you need to master a broad set of skills. The good news is that there is lots of help easily available to the local retailer prepared to make the effort to seek it out.