Category: Evidence-based Management

To mark my return to more regular blogging, I thought I would start with the best management book I've read on anything in a very long time, and certainly, if the Jack and Todd were to published a revised version of the 100 Best Business Books, I would put it at the top of the list among all the business books published since they picked their favorites. The book is Collaboration, by Morten Hansen, who is a Professor at both UC Berkeley and Insead, and also has extensive experience working and consulting in industry.  The questions of when encouraging versus discouraging collaboration is Best, what gets in the way of it happening, how to make it happen when you want it, and how to be a collaborative leader– without being a doormat — are issues that face every organization and every manager.  Hansen knows more about this subject as a researcher than anyone out there right now, and because he has worked with real organizations and real leaders, the result is a book that is based on the best evidence, a delight to read because the stories are so good, and relentlessly useful.

For example, while most authors present simple minded arguments, Hansen's Chapter 2 shows the costs and benefits of collaboration, and provides a simple way for managers to decide when it is worth the trouble or not.  The next three chapters, the heart of the book, really show-off Hansen's skill, as they provide three simple and powerful solutions — Unify people, cultivate T shaped management, and build nimble networks.  Hansen was co-author of the original Harvard Business Review article that popularized the notion of T shaped people, a mantra that is used at both IDEO and the Stanford d.school to describe people who have both deep skills in one or a few areas and who do their own jobs well and also have the ability to work with others, to share ideas with them, to be be civilized, and contribute to the whole.  This the best chapter I've ever read on hiring, breeding, and (when necessary) firing people to create a collaborative workplace — rather than getting hung up on theory, research or ideology, or committing the alternate sin of make excessive claims, telling stories that are fun but useless, or glossing over the difficulties,  Hansen provides evidence-based ideas that bosses can actually used and shows how they have been used, things like not tolerating destructive lone stars, how to use both selection methods to find T shaped people and pay, coaching and promotion to breed T shaped people. And he shows how the most widely used pay for performance systems often undermine collaboration and what can be done to design systems to reverse these ills.

If you want to get a fuller taste of the book and Morten, there is a free video at BNET of Morten talking about the book here, check it out.

Finally, a little editorial note. This book was published in May, and although everyone I know who has read it will tell you how great it is, it has not exactly become a blockbuster bestseller. Some 11,000 business books a year are published and it is difficult (and requires a lot of luck) to write a book that has a big impact on the market. Morten even got Jim Collins to write a very nice foreword. In fact, with all due respect to Collins, I think Collaboration is better book than Good to Great — because it is based on better evidence and provides more details about what managers can actually do.  I am hoping that, like Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, which languished for a year before Andy Grove discovered it and talked it up, that despite Collaboration's modest start, the story will be the same.  This is a book that can help every manager do his or her job better, it is a delight to read, and does not contain an iota of breathless hype or bullshit.  This is the kind of book we need right now.  I think that, in addition to this post, I will put up an Amazon review today to do my little part too. I urge you to check out Morten on BNET and read the opening pages on Amazon, this is quite a book.

My favorite "research translation" site, BPS Research Digest, reports a new study that provides an interesting counterpoint to yesterday's post about how, after seeing just 30 seconds of video of teachers (with the sound off), research subjects were able to predict the evaluations given by students who had these same teachers for 16 weeks.  This study by Wilhelm Hoffman and his colleagues found that, although outside observers can detect personality characteristics by watching a videotape of others, when people watch videotapes of themselves, they don't detect these characteristics.  In other words, because of some kind of cognitive blindspot or "egocentric bias" we are able to decode others' nonverbal behavior, but not our own.  As BPS summarizes:

The key question was whether seeing their non-verbal behaviour on video
would allow the participants to rate their personality in a way that
was consistent with their earlier scores on the implicit test. Long
story short – they weren't able to. The participants' extraversion
scores on the implicit test showed no association with their subsequent
explicit ratings of themselves, and there was no evidence either that
they'd used their non-verbal behaviours (such as amount of eye contact
with the camera) to inform their self-ratings.

This research is part of a long line of studies that show people can be remarkably clueless to their own behavior and how others perceive them. As I have written here before, if this research is valid, it means that you — as a leader or follower — should come to grips with the fact that others' perceptions of your actions are probably a lot more accurate than your own.  It seems we are all, to some degree, living in a fool's paradise. 

Check-out the BPS story and you will see that this may happen, in part, because "One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance – the need for us to hold
consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well be extremely
reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of
powerful objective evidence."  In other words, we don't decode data about ourselves very well because our brains some "defend" against challenges to our sense of self. We believe what we believe about ourselves, evidence be dammed!

This helps explain a lot of things, for example why the Zogby survey a couple years ago found that over one-third of American's reported being bullied at work and yet less than 1% ever ever reported bullying others.

P.S. The reference is Hofmann,
W., Gschwendner, T., & Schmitt, M. (2009). The road to the
unconscious self not taken: Discrepancies between self- and
observer-inferences about implicit dispositions from nonverbal
behavioural cues. European Journal of Personality, 23 (4), 343-366

I was reading through some old research on emotional expression, and in the process re-read one of the most astounding studies I've ever seen.  It is by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal and is called "Half a Minute: Predicting Teaching Evaluations from Thin Slices of Behavior and Physical Attractiveness." It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1993; I think you can download it here (at least it worked for me).  They report three studies, but I will focus on the first, as it is makes the point.

Here is what they did.  They brought in nine female undergraduates and showed each just 30 seconds of videotape (with the sound off) of 13 different instructors.  For each instructor, these undergrads saw 10 seconds of them teaching at the start of class, 10 seconds in the middle, and 10 seconds at the end.  On the basis of these 30 seconds, the undergraduates rated the instructors of 15 dimensions, things like competent, confident, honest, likable, professional, warm, and dominant.   They then correlated these "thin slices" with the evaluations given by (different) students who had taken a semester long class from these same teachers. The correlation's were staggeringly and disturbingly high.  The overall correlation for the 15 item scale was .76 — meaning that those 30 second silent slices were remarkably similar to what students concluded about their instructors after spending 16 weeks in class with them.  Looking at the individual dimensions, some of the individual correlations were even a bit higher, such as confident (.82), optimistic (.84), and dominant (.79).  But to me the really striking ones were judgments that seem mighty hard to make from 30 seconds of silent video, notably competent (.56), professional (.56), and supportive (.55).  If you read the rest of the paper, you will see that they then replicated the study with high school teachers (achieving similar but slightly weaker results, as the overall correlation was .68) and then in a study with even thinner slices of teacher behavior (6 second and 15 second clips) they also replicated the pattern.

I was also taken with two other things about these studies. First, the researchers used statistical controls to remove any effects of physical attractiveness (it had little effect, although in one study the effects were even stronger when the controls were used). Second, all of these ratings were done by female undergraduates, and my guess is that they were female undergraduates at Harvard University. They say they used women because studies have shown that women are more skilled than men at decoding nonverbal emotions.  I would also add that, as the population of Harvard undergraduates is from a similar pool as Stanford undergraduates, I expect that this is as emotionally sensitive a group of young people as you can find.  To get into a university like Harvard, you need to not only have great grades and scores, you need to impress a lot of people along the way and often hold diverse leadership positions — accomplishments that depend on being able to read and respond to small emotional cues from others, especially from your teachers. So, as impressive as these results are, the question of how strong they are in broader population remains — although it does appear that this "thin slices" approach has since been replicated in more diverse samples.

These details aside, this research is stunning because –even if the effect is say only half as strong in the general population– the degree to which people can make accurate evaluations on the basis of the smallest hints is scary for job candidates and for bosses… it means that people size you up very quickly and make judgments that may turn out to be quite consistent with those who know you well.  It also is related to the research I talked about on the toxic tandem and the baboon stuff — one reason I suspect these undergrads were so skilled at judging teachers was that by the time they get to the university, they had 13 years of experience watching for tiny emotional cues among those who wielded power over their grades and recommendations. This continues in the workplace, of course, as underlings become remarkably astute at making correct interpretations of their bosses non-verbal behaviors, as we saw with the "interesting shoes" story and the stuff on baboons and bosses.

Let me know what you think about this research.  I know it seems hard to believe, but the power of "thin slices" has been replicated in multiple studies now.

Jeff Pfeffer has, for years now, been remarkably articulate about why some economic theories are often wrong and believing them can be hazardous to organizational health (full disclosure: I am biased as I have written some of these papers with him, but he worked in this area long before I started writing with him and he continues to do so).  Jeff has an especially lovely gem over at BNET that reflects his sense of humor, smarts, and persistent penchant to rely on evidence rather than to accept strong assumptions that cloud judgment on the trouble with "efficient market" thinking.

A taste:

You know the joke about two economists walking down the street and
seeing a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. The first economist says,
“Look at that $20 bill.” The second says, “That can’t really be a $20
bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up
already.” So they walk on, leaving the $20 bill undisturbed.

The logic — that there are no opportunities for achieving
exceptional returns because if such opportunities existed, they would
be quickly discovered and implemented by almost everyone — underlies
not only the efficient market theory in the world of finance but is
incredibly pervasive in management decisions about all sorts of topics.
I have had people tell me that downsizing must be effective —
notwithstanding lots of empirical evidence to the contrary — because if
it weren’t, companies wouldn’t be doing it. Similarly for individual
pay-for-performance incentive schemes and those pervasive, but
despised, forced-curve performance evaluations that neither managers
nor employees like but companies mandate. Most companies are doing
them, so they must be a good thing to do, again, evidence to the
contrary. Efficient market thinking presumes that not only are crowds
wise — if everyone is doing something it must be optimal — but that, by
inference, doing what everyone else does is the path to success or at
least to avoiding calamity.

We should know better. In fact, we do: Numerous behavioral scientists ranging from Duke University social psychologist Dan Ariely to University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler,
have shown that cognitive biases and irrational behavior are pervasive,
crowds can be foolish as well as wise, and neither asset prices nor
management practices necessarily make sense.

Jeff's arguments (read the rest, it gets even better) for some reason reminds of what one of my friends in college used to say when people were following the herd rather than thinking for themselves or taking a different path: "Eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong."

I was just reading an old article by Karl Weick, one of my intellectual heroes that you hear about here now and then.  It is called "The Collapse of Sensemaking," Weick published in it in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1993.  I played a modest role in its publication because I was an associate editor there at the time and after hearing Karl present the paper in Michigan, I asked him to submit to ASQ.  Karl certainly knew about ASQ, as he edited it for years, but his reaction was that this analysis of Norman McClean's lovely Young Men and Fire might just be too weird for this respectable (and I confess) rather stuffy publication (Note that both us were editors there, and it is a great journal, but well, that is how academic publications can be).  But I begged a little and argued that the reviewers would love it, and I think that helped convince him to submit it.  Luckily, it got rave reviews from distinguished peers and was soon published, and remains one of the most intriguing articles I've ever read. It is an interesting paper in that, every time I read it, I learn something new because there are so many twists and turns and Weick's mind works like no one else's I have ever read.

Here is a great part, which argues, essentially, that (near) randomness is sometimes the most rational decision process.  On page 641, Weick talks about how a hallmark of wise people is that they are neither too cautious nor too confident — both of which are dangerous because the overly cautious fear new information as it only deepens their uncertainty. And those who are too confident also are not curious, because of course, they already know all the answers and feel little need to learn more or to question their own ideas. 

Then, over pages 641 and 642, Weick tells a lovely story, and provides an intriguing analysis, which I reproduce below:

A good example of wisdom in groups is the Naskapi Indians' use of caribou shoulder bones to locate game (Weick, 1979).  They hold bones over a fire until they crack and then hunt in the directions to which the bones crack. The ritual is effective because the decision is not influenced by the outcomes of past hunts, which means that the stock of animals is not depleted. More important, the final decision is not influenced by the inevitable patterning in human choice, which enables hunted animals to become sensitized to humans and take evasive action. The wisdom inherent in this practice derives from its ambivalence toward the past. Any attempt to hunt for caribou is both a new experience and an old experience. It is new in the sense that time has elapsed, the composition of the hunter band has changed, the caribou have learned new things, and so forth. But the hunt is also old in that if you have seen one hunt you have seen them all: There are always hunters, weapons, stealth, decoys, tacks, odors, and winds.  The practice of divination incorporates the attitude of wisdom because past experience is discounted when a new set of cracks forms a crude map for the hunt.  But past experience is also given some weight, because a seasoned hunter "reads" the cracks and injects some of his own past experience into an interpretation of what the cracks mean.  The reader is crucial. If the reader's hunches dominate, randomization is lost.  If the cracks dominate, then the experience base is discarded.

The lesson, or at least one lesson (there are dozens in this paragraph), is that there is a delicate balance between acting as if everything brand new and everything is the same as it ever was, and wise people find constructive ways to strike that balance.  And the implication is also that, in many decisions we make, we are so biased by our past experience and cognitive biases that introducing more randomness (and perhaps naivete and ignorance than usual) rather than less might do the trick. Along those lines, I have had numerous people tell me that the first iPhone was designed by people who had never done a phone before, so they didn't know what it was "supposed to" do.  Is that so?

More generally, I would appreciate any comments on how Weick's perspective on wisdom does — does not have — implications for other decisions.

Today's New York Times describes a fascinating trio of studies — by a clearly brilliant undergraduate named Emily Glassberg Sands (her research is a lot better than most doctoral dissertations) — that reveals some sexism against female playwrights. Check out the article Rethinking Gender Bias in the Theater. The first study shows that the main reason that fewer plays written by women are produced is because they write fewer plays than men.  The third study shows that plays that do get produced that are written by women make more money than those written by men — on average, they were 18% more profitable — the implication being that standards are higher for female than male playwrights.  But the second study is really fascinating, as it revealed clear sexism — by WOMEN, but not men.  I quote the article:

'For the second study, Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic
directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference
was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker),
while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s
scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality,
economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s. The biggest
surprise? “These results are driven exclusively by the responses of
female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said.'

If both men and women were biased against women, as there are numerous studies that show that negative stereotypes against women, minorities, and are often held just as strongly by members of those groups as outsiders — notably by John Jost at NYU.  I also want to emphasize that plenty of other research documents gender bias by men against women. Just look at the top management teams and boards of Fortune 500 firms — that is mostly a story of men bringing in people who look and act like their favorite person on the planet: Themselves! Or as Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter called this process, "Homosocial Reproduction."

Nonetheless, this is pretty compelling evidence of unabashed sexism by women against themselves? Do you believe this is true in other settings?  If so, why would this happen?  

P.S. You can find many of John' Jost's articles at his website, where he offers free downloads. And you might also check out his most controversial  research on "Why are conservatives happier than liberals?"

All of us are taught from a young age about the importance of having a firm handshake and looking people in the eye.  There is plenty of folklore out there about how important it is too shake hands properly, and most of us notice when someone is awkward about it, does it weakly, or has sweaty palms. Nonetheless, I always am intrigued by how clever researchers can be about studying such mundane things, and how they often generate insights about things in life that we all take for granted.  A great example is a 2008 study of handshakes conducted by Greg Stewart and his colleagues at the University of Iowa, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2008.  They had local managers and executives give mock interviews to 98 undergraduate (50 women, 48 men) job seekers, and then the interviewers give the students feedback about how they might improve their interviewing style, and also give the researchers a rating of how likely they were to hire the student. The interesting twist — which makes this study strong from a methodological standpoint — was that neither the student interviewees or corporate interviewers knew that Stewart and his colleagues were doing a study of handshakes.  The ratings of the students' handshakes were measured completely independent of the interviewer's ratings of whether or not they would hire the candidate — although doing a handshake with the candidate was part of 45 minute or so mock interview.

The researchers somehow set things up so that, in the course of meeting the interview and going through the mock interviewer, the undergraduate shook hands with five different "raters" (and the job interviewer).  I can't describe this as well as the researchers, so let me show you the paragraph from page 1141:

"The raters shook hands while greeting each participant, either before or after the mock interview, so both interviewees and interviewers were unaware that handshakes were being evaluated. None of the handshake evaluators served as an interviewer. Two raters greeted and shook hands when a participant arrived for the mock interview. Participants were then introduced to a third rater, who shook hands. After the mock interview, a fourth rater greeted participants, shook hands, and introduced them to the fifth rater, who shook hands. Within 5–10 s of shaking hands, raters excused themselves from participants and completed an evaluation form. To avoid priming interviewers to pay undue attention to the handshake, we did not ask them to provide explicit assessments of the handshake."

Each of these five hand shakers was trained to rate the quality of the handshake on 1. completeness of grip; 2. vigor; 3. strength; 4. duration, and 5. eye contact during the handshake.  There was much agreement (inter-correlations between .68 and .85 among the raters).  The researchers then (after using introducing fairly extensive statistical controls) looked for the link between the handshakes and the interviewers ratings of whether they would hire the candidate (and remember that the interviewer didn't know it was a handshake study and had a lot of other kinds of interaction with the undergraduate). 

Despite all these other factors, the researchers found a significant (if modest) independent effect of handshake quality on whether the interviewer would be inclined to hire the student. To me, the most interesting finding pertains to women.  The researchers found that, on average, women had weaker handshakes than men. Probably because their are different expectations for men and women, women's weaker handshakes did not lead to weaker hiring recommendations (In fact, overall, the interviewers were more positively disposed to hire women than men).  BUT those women who had firmer and stronger handshakes, and used more complete grips, benefited more than men who had firm handshakes and complete grips — the researchers suggest that this effect may have been seen because men are expected to have firm shakes, and because it is more unusual among women, those women with firm handshakes were more memorable.  In other words, having a weaker handshake didn't seem to hurt women, but having a stronger handshake seemed to help them.

I like this study because it confirms common sense and business lore, and adds an interesting twist — if you are a woman, make sure you've got a great handshake. it may help you gain an advantage over both male and female candidates.

P.S. Go here to see the complete reference and abstract.

There is big body of research on theft by employees, as it costs employers billions of dollars, is something that is possible to measure with some accuracy, and — as a diverse body of qualitative and quantitative research shows — often happens for complex reasons.  In some cases, studies have shown that both supervisors and employees will reach quite explicit agreements that stealing is a useful way to make-up for low wages.  In other cases, supervisors will makes subtle deals with employees that, if they work overtime or do something else extra, they can steal something (or steal more). And, in research on dock workers in the UK, the amount and type of things that people could steal was carefully regulated by the peer culture. If you stole nothing, you were seen as dangerous because you were potential rat; but if you stole too much, you were also seen as dangerous because your actions put everyone else at risk, and such employees were ridiculed, shunned, and forced out by peers.

The most extensive and impressive stream of research on employee theft has been conducted by Jerald Greenberg, who has done a host of laboratory and field studies (e.g, in manufacturing plants and retails stores) that show stealing is driven, in large part, by employees' desires to "get even" with companies and managers who treat them in cold and unfair ways. The incentive to get something valuable is part of the story with theft, but his research suggests that giving people bad explanations and treating them without dignity is what really pisses people-off and drives them to exact revenge –to steal to get even.

I have been reading this research for years and always been fascinated by it, but I had missed a 2001 study that just floored me when I saw it for the first time last week.  It was done by renowned researcher Gary Latham in a large sawmill (about 1000 hourly workers and 200 managers). He was called in to help management because employees were stealing about 1 million dollars in equipment years from the mill.  There was a very strong union and imposing discipline was proving to be impossible. One story Latham tells is about a worker who was stopped by a supervisor because his tool boxes looked very heavy — in response, the union flooded the HR department with so many grievances that they so begged the supervisor to back off; so supervisors adopted a "hear no evil, so no evil" approach to employee stealing as they were helpless to stop it anyway.  As Latham did his interviews (under conditions were he promised anonymity), he realized that employees didn't need most of the stuff the stole (like a 2000 pound piece of machinery called a "head ring").  They were doing to for thrill of it, because it was challenging and they wanted to brag to their buddies about it.  Indeed, when management started talking about putting in surveillance cameras to catch the thieves, instead of being upset, workers got excited because because the equipment would be so challenging to steal!

Working with management, Latham came up with a system to "kill the thrill."  First, they installed a library system where employees could "check-out" the same kind of equipment for personal use anytime.  The effect was immediate, because it was no fun to steal anymore and bragging  about stealing something that was free did not earn you prestige in the peer culture, so theft drop to virtually zero immediately. It continued that way from then on (at east for three years until Latham published the article).

Second, in a perhaps even more astounding turn, management had an amnesty day — also following the library analogy — where employees were invited to return missing equipment without fear of punishment. Management said they assumed that anything being returned was as a favor to a friend and the employee had not stolen it.  On that day, employees showed-up with one truckload after another of stolen stuff; and in  fact, management had to extend the amnesty period, as truckload after truckload came in for days and days. Apparently, the root cause for returning stuff wasn't the thrill; it was that workers (mostly men) were in trouble with their wives because the stolen stuff was taking up so much room in garages, storage sheds, and so on! And so they prevailed on their husbands to get rid of the stuff while they had a place to bring it.

Certainly, the thrill is not the main motive in many cases of theft, but I think Latham was brilliant in identifying the root cause in this case and coming-up (in concert with management) with a way to stop its motivating effect. Sure, from an ethical point of view, stealing is wrong (and a big subset of workers Latham interviewed did not steal for that reason), but this is a situation where management couldn't punish effectively — but they did have some power of rules and practices, and used it very creatively.  I also wonder, looking at this more broadly, how much human behavior explained by the search for excitement among people who having boring jobs — and boring lives too.

Here are two key citations:

Greenberg, J. (1997). The STEAL motive: Managing the social determinants of employee theft. In R. Giacalone, & J. Greenberg (Eds.). Antisocial behavior in organizations (pp. 85-108). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Latham, G.P. The
importance of understanding and changing employee outcome expectancies
for gaining commitment to an organizational goal," Personnel
Psychology, 54, 2001, pp. 707-716.

I just read a most instructive academic article called "Sleep Deprivation and Decision-Making Teams: Burning the Midnight Oil or Playing with Fire?"  It was written by Christopher Barnes and John Hollenbeck and published earlier this year in the Academy of Management Review (Volume 34: 56-66).

The authors start with the astute observation that although a large body of research shows that individual sleep deprivation has consistently negative effects on performance and interpersonal relations, the impact on group performance has hardly been studied.  They point out that some of these negative individual effects — reduced ability to process information, reduced ability to learn and perform novel tasks, irritability, and impatience — can disrupt team performance in all sorts of ways. They point out, for example, that some of the worst accidents in history were caused by errors that teams made between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM, a time when people are especially likely to be sleep deprived,  Examples include the mishaps at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island. They also report that widespread sleep deprivation was identified as a contributing factor to the errors and poor judgments leading up to the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle.

The article then goes on to describe various ways in which groups can magnify or dampen the effects of sleep deprived members.  I was especially interested in their argument that when a team has a very hierarchical structure (in other words, is led by a "my way. or the highway" boss), that when the boss is sleep deprived, the rest of the team will have a hard time overcoming his or her errors. Indeed, if you think about some of the effects they describe, if you already have an authoritarian boss, sleep deprivation will make things even worse because he or she will have a harder time processing opposing arguments and be more likely to snap at members who openly disagree.  Another factor they touched on, and I think is worth developing more, is that when people on a team are sleep deprived — regardless of their personalities — the resulting irritability and grumpiness is likely (regardless of personality) to cause the kind of nasty interpersonal conflict associated with poor performance and decision-making — as I have written here before, the best teams have people that fight as if they are right and listen as if they are wrong. Listening as if you are wrong is really tough when you haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks.

Finally, this paper also helped me understand why people in Silicon Valley start-ups are often so grumpy and interpersonally insensitive.  If you wanted to create a recipe for breeding and spreading asshole poisoning, we may have invented the perfect system around here — take a bunch of people who encourage (and often require) one another to suffer from sleep deprivation for weeks and months on end, force them work very closely together, and then add a big dash performance pressure.  The research cited by Barnes and Hollenbeck, and other research on group effectiveness as well, suggests that this is nearly perfect way to create grumpiness, nastiness, and finger-pointing. It also suggests, most interestingly, that it is also an effective way to dampen creativity.  Plenty of creative work has been done by sleep-deprived teams around here.  But this all makes me wonder, has this happened DESPITE all that fatigue?  As the authors of this intriguing paper suggest, a lot more research is needed on sleep deprivation and team performance, but it is fascinating topic.

My last post was about the interesting story that Jason Zweig published in the Wall Street Journal on how to run groups so that they do the most good — and least harm — when making financial decisions.  As I said in that post, Harvard's J. Richard Hackman is arguably the world's expert on group and team effectiveness. Richard's dissertation was on group effectivness and he has been chipping away at the problem for over 40 years.  This current Harvard Business Review has a great interview with Richard called Why Teams Don't Work.   It cannot capture all the nuances of his book Leading Teams, but it is the best single compact summary I know of what Richard has learned and come to believe during his impressive career — it is in simple language with clear guidelines, and the stories and evidence are good, but the part that can't be made clear in such a short interview are the literally thousands of studies (by Richard and many others) and thousands of experiences in groups and teams Richard has had that underpin this interview.  It is as great example of profound simplicity in the management world– the holy grail for wise researchers and leaders.  It looks like you have to pay to read the whole thing. But it sure is good.