Michele Zanini

Management Tech Featured

Everything's an Exception: AI's Lessons for Business

There's a lot of buzz about AI as a productivity tool - for instance, how ChatGPT can help you write emails faster or summarize documents more efficiently. While these applications are valuable, they only scratch the surface of AI's potential. AI's ability to process

strategy Featured

From Couch to Olympics: How Open Strategy Saw the Future of Esports

International Olympic Committee recently made waves by announcing the first Olympic Esports Games, which Saudi Arabia will host in 2025. For many, this sounds far-fetched even today. Now, imagine how outlandish this idea would have seemed a decade ago. In 2015, I and my MLab colleagues were helping a global

technology

Fact-Checking the C-Suite

How crowd-powered annotation systems could dramatically improve corporate decisions

The Bureaucratization of the Federal Government in 20 charts

Last updated: May 22 If you've been following my work, you know that I've long been concerned about the steady bureaucratization in the U.S. economy. Lately, my focus has shifted to understanding how this trend is sapping the vitality of public institutions and, more importantly,

Managerialism

Do MBAs Make Better Managers?

New Evidence Suggests the Degree May Be Overrated—and Could Even Be Hurting Workers

bureaucratic drag Featured

Ferrari's CEO on Diagnosing and Treating Bureaucratic Bloat

Soon after Benedetto Vigna took the wheel at Ferrari in 2021, he realized he needed to steer the legendary automaker away from bureaucratic roadblocks and toward a more agile, innovative future. Vigna's first move was a listening tour, connecting with 300 employees at every level. These conversations quickly

Buraucracy Busting

A Radical Cure for Bureausclerosis

What corporations can learn from a novel approach to dramatically scale back government red tape.

Unlocking the Past, Inspiring the Future: The Vesuvius Challenge and the Power of Open Innovation

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius's eruption buried Herculaneum and its library of scrolls, a potential treasure trove of ancient Greek and Roman literature. These scrolls, discovered in the 18th century and now housed in a Naples library, resemble carbonized lumps of ash that cannot be unrolled

Performance Review, Management Processes

An Open Letter to Jack Dorsey on Block's Perfomance Reviews

Fixing performance reviews, for real, requires a rethink of to whom people are accountable, and for what

New Human Movement Featured

Unlocking Collective Impact

How StriveTogether solved the "wicked problem" of improving student achievement—and what it means for your organization.

Featured

From Scotch Tape to Red Tape: The Decline of 3M's Creative Culture

3M has a storied history as an innovation powerhouse. From bandages to specialized abrasives and nano-materials, the company's portfolio has long been as diverse as it was groundbreaking. The secret sauce? An open innovation culture, set in motion by William McKnight. Joining 3M as an assistant bookkeeper in

Management Economics Featured

Want to Boost Manufacturing Productivity? Unleash Worker Ingenuity.

Reversing the productivity slump doesn't require a boatload of robots. It just takes commitment to building organizations that kindle the spark of everyday genius in each human being.

Buraucracy Busting Featured

Fixing Meeting Overload, Once and For All

The real remedy: giving teams far more discretion and responsibility over their time.

Managerialism Featured

The Managerialist Takeover of General Motors

Research notes and musings on Bob Lutz's excellent book, "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters."

Buraucracy Busting Featured

How Project Re:Form busted bureaucracy and made public services more human

Americans spend a whopping 10.5 billion hours per year filling one or more of the nearly 10,000 unique forms to access services from Federal agencies (or comply with government requirements, like tax filings). That works to about 41 hours per adult. Add to that the time spent by

New Human Movement Featured

Organizing Locally with Bruce Fuller (Ep. 11)

Organizations that push autonomy and discretion to their edges succeed by unleashing a torrent of initiative and ingenuity.

New Human Movement

Conscious Leadership with John Mackey (Ep. 10)

In this episode of the New Human Movement, we talk to John about reconciling purpose and profits, encouraging grassroots innovation, and building a company based on love instead of fear.

paradox Featured

Beyond Either/Or: building organizations that can walk and chew gum at the same time

Several years ago years ago, the penalties for clumsily managed trade-offs might have been tolerable, but no longer. Today, a business must be a paragon of penny-pinching efficiency on one hand and a champion of rule-busting innovation on the other.

Empowerment Featured

Automation anxiety is largely misplaced

The experience of companies like Nucor is that we have little to fear from automation -- provided we stop treating people as semi-programmable robots, and instead give workers the incentives, discretion, skills, and safety to be creative in their jobs.

Learning from the Vanguard Featured

Dee Hock - a true management maverick

Dee Hock, the visionary entrepreneur and executive who founded and ran Visa in its formative years, passed away on July 20, 2022.  He was also one of the world's greatest management mavericks of the 20th century.   Hock's  experience building and scaling Visa as a wildly successful

New Human Movement

Thinking Bigger about Social Accountability with Brian Moynihan (Ep. 9)

Brian is the Chair of the Board and CEO of Bank of America, one of the world’s largest financial institutions.  He's also a prominent proponent of shared and streamlined metrics to hold companies accountable for their stakeholder impact, and recently led an effort to World Economic Forum

Learning from the Vanguard Featured

The organizational secrets of the Large Hadron Collider

Solving complex problems at scale requires plenty of leadership and management. What it doesn't require is a top-down structure.

Video Featured

Building Fearless Organizations with Amy Edmondson (Ep. 8)

Mistrust demoralizes, fear paralyzes. Question is, how to we wring these out of our organizations? There's no better person to answer this than Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and the world's leading expert on psychological safety and collaboration at work.

New Human Movement Featured

Busting Bureaucracy with Bill Anderson (Ep. 7)

Over the last five years, Roche Pharmaceuticals CEO Bill Anderson has been leading a crusade to create a more empowering and entrepreneurial organization. We recently sat down with Bill to learn about Roche's journey to vanquish bureaucracy.

Leadership Featured

Leading from the Heart with Angela Ahrendts (Ep. 6)

What does it mean to be a “leader?”  In most organizations, the term is applied, indiscriminately, to anybody in a management role. But, as you may have noticed, having direct reports doesn’t make you a leader. Gallup data shows that the single biggest predictor of engagement scores is the