Entrepreneurship Tips — Management

A new report finds that STEM programs and professional degrees often pay off, while those in arts and humanities frequently do not. Many M.B.A. programs also offer a negative return on investment. It’s no secret that some advanced degrees don’t pay off. But a new report from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity offers some surprising insights—including that 60 percent of M.B.A.s and other business-related master’s degrees fail to provide a positive return. The report, “Is Graduate School Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis,” analyzes data for nearly 14,000 graduate degrees—11,600 master’s degrees plus 2,300 doctoral and professional...

Get More Done, but Also Get the Right Stuff Done Effective time management is accomplished by using the Pareto principle of 80-20.  Making sure that  80% of your time is spent on the 20% of the work that makes most of the difference.  Some have called this the Picasso work. Where creativity, talent or experience is critical.  The book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell also discusses this principle and calls it reaching the level of unconscious competence.  Brain science and scanning have recently proven the biology behind this, whereby human beings used neuroplasticity to rewire their brain for certain sophisticated tasks....

The Bigger Picture Annual Planning Process Hopefully, you have already read my article or book chapter on Management By Objective and learned about managing individuals and departments to monthly goals. If you have not it is recommended, but not required, to understand this piece. This chapter is really the next level “up” in terms of developing a more strategic annual plan.  It is no so much about deciding where the business will go; that should be part of the vision process and already known. It is about setting the milestones to be achieved in a particular year.  I recommend a simple and...

From the moment a new company is founded to its appearance on the Fortune 500 list, executives must be able to transform the way they manage a company — shifting gears, often dramatically to a different management style — to ensure the company’s optimum development. I am not referring to individual executive style here. What I am talking about is the total adjustment and evolution of the context in which major management decisions are made. I call this the “Mode of Management”, which is very dependent on the company’s current developmental stage. Would you make the same product development decisions...

There are far too many texts and systems on management, and I do not want to create another.  However, there is a simple and effective system I use that leverages many of these wonderful systems that can be anywhere from fantastic to disastrous in a particular situation.  In every case, some thought must be given as to which technique is appropriate for each special circumstance and individual.  A simple, yet very effective, model for people management uses the following combination of well known management styles by selecting the appropriate method for each individual.  This is an easy model to understand...