Dear All

On this site, I collected answers to your questions, grouped them into nine sets (yes, those to the left on your desktop or follow this letter on your mobile), and added concepts (you can check them here).

The material here does not substitute the course but adds to it. If you have not taken the course, you still can benefit from the material here, as it gives a different and much better perspective on management.

Management, as taught and practiced, is currently sick with two conditions: oversimplifying and over-complicating. They might look mutually exclusive, but they are not—they both distort reality but do it differently, summing their adverse effects.

The first concerns human behavior. Complex phenomena like motivation shrink to simple recipes: this is what you (no matter who you are) should (always) do to others (no matter who they are) to get results (in whatever context).

The second condition is not seeing essential elements and the consequential temptation to treat their combinations as separate phenomena.

For instance, any project becomes a perilous journey (for some reason, it is always a journey metaphor) if we do not state that almost everything in planning is about the resources we need and boundaries we must establish to harness the uncertainty that is always present, as planning is about the future. No trick, software, or framework can make you succeed if you are unaware of these three elements.

The same inability to see basic principles concerns tools we can use at work. Dozens of fancy TM-ed tools will lose their mystery if we know that they are another case of a 2x2 matrix. Yet, stripped of the deceptive wrapper, the tools become more versatile as you can create your own that will work better in your context than any prefabricated ones.

Anyone can benefit from management without seeing it as a dark room where only the initiated are allowed, and the rest should fear to tread. Once we use a torch of our thinking (and some hints from here), there is room for all.

Let’s bring light to it.

Very Best
Serge