Dumb but widely used American management practices

Bob Sutton on dumb but widely used American management practices:

1. Dangerous Complexity. The assumption that when we can’t understand an expert, they must be both smart and right.  This is certainly part of the Wall Street story — for years the financial wizards and economists have conveyed to the rest of us that we are far too dumb to ever understand what they are doing.  An interesting contrast, by the way, is JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.  If you read Fools Gold, you will see that one reason that JP Morgan avoided the worst of the collapse was that Dimon believed that, if you were investing in something you couldn’t understand, you should get out.  Clearly, most companies did not follow and are not following P&G ‘s A.G. Lafley’s advice to keep things “Sesame Street Simple.”

2. Dysfunctional Internal Competition. This is a big theme in The Knowing-Doing Gap and Morten’s Hansen’s masterpiece Collaboration. If you dig into the problems in the banks and a lot of other companies, they actually punish people who help others succeed, both via the reward systems and who gets the most prestige.  This seems to persist even though the evidence against such assumptions and systems are so clear.

3. Breaking-up Teams Constantly.  American companies often seem to love moving people around constantly, breaking-up teams, giving people new experiences, and so on.  Certainly, there is a time for fresh blood, but if you read J. Richard Hackman’s Leading Teams you will see that the weight of the evidence is that breaking up teams less often rather than more often is linked to all sorts of effectiveness indicators.  Also, see this post about the Miracle on the Hudson where I discuss this literature.

Nothing to add.