Category: Reading

Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting

[Link] The Vanishing Middle Manager, McKinsey

A perspective worth considering: what should middle management actually be doing?

Think of the role of the direct manager in performance management. Ultimately, it’s not about the system. It’s not about the form. It’s about whether your direct manager helps you understand the value of your work and how it fits into a broader strategy. It’s about coaching. It’s about real-time feedback delivered by a human. I think we’ve undervalued those elements, tried to systematize them away with data, with systems, with tools. Meanwhile, workers are asking for better leaders, better apprenticeships, better coaching. When we try to disintermediate the role of a good midlevel leader, I think we do this at our peril.

[Link] Lessons from Gian-carlo Rota Indiscrete Thoughts

HT FS Blog, 10 Lessons of an MIT Education:

Lesson Five: You don’t have to be a genius to do creative work.

The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education. It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep. Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.

 

[Link] How to make the world better, not perfect

Prof Max Bazerman’s book “Better, Not Perfect“:

Bazerman’s guiding light is the philosophy of utilitarianism, which teaches the goal of creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But he tempers that with the principle of “maximum sustainable goodness,” a term he coined based on the environmental concept of “maximal sustainable yield”—that is, the amount of goodness that a person can achieve over time without depleting their ability to do good in the future.

[Link]: There is Nothing Natural About the Way We Work

That feeling of deep satisfaction at the end of a working day is rare for many workers across the world. We are alienated, and have been for centuries. We have to work in order to survive, but while we are told to love what we do and that our workplaces are our families, meaningful work that also pays the bills is harder and harder to come by.

A fascinating article in Vice.