CHAPTER 5
MAXIMS OF MANAGING
Dave’s Law of Advice: Those with the best advice offer no advice.
[Anon]
Maxims are not myths – not quite. (Check your dictionary.) But they can sure lead you down the garden path too. Dave’s opening quote of this chapter is just one of many maxims, from A to Z, in our first reading. The second takes us to the grand-daddy of all this management maxim-ising: Parkinson’s law. Here Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, with tongue utterly in cheek, explains the mechanics about how ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’.
This takes us into a discussion of a book by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton that challenges management’s more popular axioms – about incentive pay, layoffs, mergers and ...
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