February 2026
- Feb 24, 2026ConceptsEthical Tradeoffs Organizations Face in Decision-MakingMost business ethics writing assumes doing right and making money never truly conflict, and that the right course is obvious. Both assumptions are wrong: resources are finite and stakeholders hold legitimate but incompatible interests. Six recurring tradeoffs, from profit against people to efficiency against fairness, each with what is gained and what is sacrificed, and how Boeing's rushed 737 MAX certification shows the cost of choosing speed.
- Feb 22, 2026ConceptsUnderstanding Ethical Failures: The Incremental ProcessEnron, Wells Fargo and the Boeing 737 MAX get told as bad-apple stories, but most ethical failures involve normal people in systems that reward harm and punish dissent. Diane Vaughan's Challenger analysis showed how O-ring erosion became routine because nothing had gone wrong yet, which she called normalized deviance. Theranos escalated from overpromising to false patient results one justified step at a time, and Bandura's eight mechanisms of moral disengagement explain how.
- Feb 20, 2026ConceptsResponsibility vs Accountability ExplainedResponsibility is the duty to do the work and can be split across many people; accountability is answerability for the result and stays with one person, which is why a RACI matrix permits multiple Rs but only one A. The page explains why accountability without authority or consequences is performative, and contrasts Amazon's single-threaded owner model with the failures at Challenger, Wells Fargo, and Grenfell Tower.
- Feb 5, 2026ConceptsWhy Measurement Changes BehaviorMeasurement is an intervention, not neutral observation. The article works through four mechanisms (attention, accountability, feedback, signaling) and the laws formalizing them: Goodhart's observation that targeting a monetary aggregate broke its relationship with inflation, and Campbell's Law on corruption pressure. Wells Fargo rewarding products per customer produced roughly 3.5 million fraudulent accounts while the goal itself was undermined.
July 2025
- Jul 17, 2025ExplainersIncentive Design Failures ExplainedSeven cases of incentives producing the opposite of what was intended, from Wells Fargo's sales quotas to Microsoft's stack ranking, dropped in November 2013. The sharpest evidence is Gneezy and Rustichini's "A Fine Is a Price": in ten Israeli day care centers in Haifa, a fine for late pickups made late pickups rise, and removing the fine never restored the old rate. Goodhart's and Campbell's laws and seven design principles follow.
- Jul 16, 2025ExplainersEthical Failures in Organizations ExplainedVolkswagen installed defeat device software in roughly 11 million diesel vehicles, letting them emit nitrogen oxides at up to 40 times the legal limit outside the test cycle, across multiple platforms over about six years. Enron's collapse erased $74 billion in shareholder value while its auditor Arthur Andersen took $25 million in audit fees and $27 million in consulting fees from the company in 2000 alone.
June 2025
January 2025
- Jan 28, 2025ConceptsUnderstanding Social Loafing in Group DynamicsLatane, Williams and Harkins had people shout alone or in groups and found per-person output fell to roughly 71 percent of solo capacity in pairs and about 40 percent in groups of six. Kerr and Hertel's work on the Kohler effect shows the reverse is achievable: when members can see each other's performance and the weaker one believes their failure would sink the group, that member exceeds their solo level. Identifiability is the lever in both directions.
- Jan 14, 2025ConceptsGroupthink: How Cohesion Leads to Poor Decision-MakingAldag and Fuller's 1993 critique in Psychological Bulletin identified the method problem: Janis selected his case studies by outcome, analyzing decisions already known to have failed and finding the symptoms in them, while decisions made under identical group conditions that succeeded were never examined. That makes the model hard to disconfirm. What survives is narrower and still useful: cohesive groups under directive leadership routinely underperform their own members.
November 2024
October 2024
December 2023
- Dec 23, 2023ConceptsWhat Is the Peter PrincipleLaurence J. Peter's 1969 joke, that everyone rises to their level of incompetence, survived empirical testing. Benson, Li and Shue's 2019 study of 214 firms, 53,035 sales workers and 1,531 managers found top salespeople were far more likely to be promoted, and that the highest pre-promotion sales ranks predicted the worst management ratings, worst subordinate sales and highest attrition. Dual-ladder tracks and competency-based promotion are the documented fixes.
- Dec 19, 2023ConceptsAnalyzing Campbell's Law and Its ImplicationsThat distinction decides how bad the damage is. In Atlanta an investigation found 178 teachers and principals across 44 schools altering answer sheets, and NHS hospitals met the four-hour target by holding patients in units that were not counted as emergency care. The page explains why awareness does not protect you, since anyone who reduces gaming is at a disadvantage relative to those who continue, and why removing a metric rarely restores what it reshaped.
August 2023
March 2023
- Mar 15, 2023Work SkillsUnderstanding the Role of a Manager in Effective LeadershipWhat the research says the job actually is. Drucker's 1954 framework set five functions: setting objectives, organizing, motivating, measuring and developing people. Google's Project Oxygen then tested it against years of internal data and found coaching was the top predictor of manager effectiveness while technical skill ranked near the bottom, which is the opposite of how most firms promote. Project Aristotle found psychological safety predicted team performance best.
- Mar 14, 2023Work SkillsWhat Is Psychological Contract at WorkDenise Rousseau reframed the psychological contract as an individual's belief about what was promised, which means two people in identical roles can hold different contracts and both think theirs is accurate. Robinson and Rousseau's 1994 study found 55% of employees reported at least one breach within their first two years. What separates healthy employment relationships is not the absence of breach but the quality of the response to it.
- Mar 3, 2023Work SkillsCharacteristics of High-Performing Teams: Research InsightsWhat research says actually drives team performance. Google's Project Aristotle, which analyzed 180 internal teams between 2012 and 2016, found that how team members interact is a stronger predictor of performance than who is on the team, so a group of brilliant professionals can underperform a less distinguished team that trusts each other and holds each other to account. A 2014 Psychological Science study examined how proportion of top talent relates to results.
October 2022
- Oct 10, 2022ConceptsThe Abilene Paradox: Group Decisions Gone WrongHow groups commit to things nobody wanted. Jerry Harvey named it in 1974 after his family drove to Abilene in 104 degree heat for a meal none of them wanted, each assuming the others did. The mechanism is pluralistic ignorance: private doubt is suppressed because each person assumes their skepticism is unique. The distinction from groupthink matters, because groupthink involves real social pressure while here the agreement is a shared misreading of silence.
- Oct 9, 2022ConceptsWhat Is Parkinson's Law of Triviality (Bikeshedding)C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 thought experiment is still the sharpest account of it: a committee approves a 10 million pound nuclear reactor in about two and a half minutes, because nobody wants to admit they do not understand nuclear engineering, then spends 45 minutes arguing over a 350 pound bicycle shed that everyone feels qualified to judge. Poul-Henning Kamp named the pattern in a 1999 FreeBSD mailing list post. The cause is asymmetric familiarity.
September 2022
- Sep 22, 2022Work SkillsAn Overview of Servant Leadership and Its ImpactEva and colleagues reported wellbeing at r = .37 and organizational citizenship behavior at r = .35, against task performance at r = .24, so the strongest evidence is for the people rather than the numbers. One caveat the page is careful about: several competing scales each define the construct differently, which means findings cannot be compared directly across studies. Greenleaf's 1970 essay came from reading Hermann Hesse, not from management research.
- Sep 21, 2022Work SkillsUnderstanding Toxic Leadership and Its ImpactIn a 2010 study of 203 corporate professionals selected for high-potential leadership development, Babiak, Neumann and Hare found roughly 4 percent scoring at levels consistent with clinical psychopathy, around four times the estimated prevalence in the general population. The article traces abusive supervision, narcissism and the Dark Triad through the research, and the structures that shield toxic leaders from accountability.
- Sep 20, 2022Work SkillsPsychological Contract Breach: What It Means for EmployeesWhat happens when an employer misses an unwritten obligation. Morrison and Robinson separated breach, the judgment that a promise went unmet, from violation, the betrayal felt afterward, which does not always follow. Zhao and colleagues pooled 55 samples and over 14,000 employees in 2007 and found breach cut organizational citizenship behavior more sharply than in-role performance, because goodwill contributions are the first withdrawn. Turnover intention correlated at .41.
August 2022
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