The Five Worst Ideas In Management

Businesses are full of bad ideas. (And that’s not including the Segway scooter or Pets.com).

No two organizations are exactly alike, and each organization is an experiment in organizational design. Lots of policies and procedures are experiments. Some work to create value and some don’t. Ideally, the end result of all this experimentation is that best practices rise to the surface and, as a whole, leaders move closer to an ideal organization.

But sometimes, bad ideas rise to the surface too. Sometimes bad ideas get momentum-either because they sound compelling on the surface or because they seem to have led to a result that turns out to be coincidental.

And sometimes, it takes a long time to discover those “best practices” are actually bad ideas.

In this article, we’ll cover perhaps the five worst times that’s occurred-the five worst ideas in management in no particular order-in the hopes of correcting some errors and keeping the same error from happening again.

Stack Ranking

The first worst idea in management is stack ranking. Stack ranking happens after the performance review (and we’ll cover those soon) and involves managers assigning labels or rankings to their team members. In perhaps the most famous example-Jack Welch and General…