"the most innovative workers — also the “happiest,” by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy"

"

I say they. But I am and have been a manager, and I may well have been the reason someone left the office and went straight to a bar for a stiff drink, or resented even the thought of having to come to work the next day.

How much more often than, “why can’t people just get things done?” should we be thinking, “I take responsibility for this. How might I make this better? How might I be better?”

"

"you probably can’t identify world-class in fields that you’re not an expert in."

"So what about by-when commitments to clients, or other external deadlines? Sometimes you do have to make a by-when commitment and manage to it, though there’s much to be gained by making that the exception, not the rule. And even when it feels normal and needed, there are often other options. As I’d say to my clients when I ran a software development contracting company: Do you want me to promise you a date that we both know is a lie, and surprise you shortly before that date with an unexpected change which you’re then at the mercy of? Or do you want me to give you so much day-to-day transparency and control that you don’t have to trust me, because you’ll see exactly where we are and where we’re headed at every moment, and be able to influence the project’s direction throughout? Most clients chose the latter, and we had the organizational processes in place to support it."

"

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010…
SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.

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"Process is being created not as means of control; it’s being built as documentation of culture and values…Imagine all process as a means of capturing and documenting culture and values. Unfortunately, in a larger company, it doesn’t work that way. Even if qualified cultural bellwethers took the time to document their pain and to write a process, these folks eventually leave. When they leave so does their cultural context, and the root pain that defined the process leaves with them. The company forgets the stories of how we ended up with all these bulleted lists, and when someone asks why, no one knows the story."

"Why do we reward success on the job with a promotion out of the job and into management? It’s a phenomenon that reveals antiquated flaws in organizational design (neither employees nor companies are in the long-term pension-building loyalty business anymore) as well as a 20th century, pre-behavioral economics lack of understanding about what really makes people tick at work. Companies continue to cling to the notion that one of the only mechanisms they have to acknowledge employees’ talent is to make them managers and then to continue to promote them into ever-higher levels of management — reflecting the misguided assumption that being good at something also means being able to (and wanting to) manage others doing the same thing…because we often identify ourselves with our job titles (I’m Director of Marketing) — buying into the idea that clear titles confer status and meaning — it remains hard to envision work in the absence of titles. Management titles allow us to mark our growth, and our maturity."

"Citigroup today announced a series of repositioning actions that will further reduce expenses and improve efficiency across the company while maintaining Citi’s unique capabilities to serve clients, especially in the emerging markets. These actions will result in increased business efficiency, streamlined operations and an optimized consumer footprint across geographies."