Sometimes the Best Management is No Management At All

Quoting 3M’s William Coyne:

After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing.

Robert Sutton, probably best known for his “No A**holes” book, gives a quick three minutes on creativity, starting it with this interesting quote, which I like to relate to the idea (my post the Outriders last week) that creativity is not usually the result of discipline and methodology. He starts:

One of the things that gets very clear if you look at research on what it takes for creative work to happen, there’s a lot of evidence that the things that managers typically do (especially if they have MBAs) — asking a lot of questions, asking what the deliverables are, asking what your value-added is — tend to drive out creativity.

 

So I thought this was a good three-minute reminder. If you can’t see the video for any reason, click here for the source video in YouTube.

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