Boss Man Blues

http://whyfiles.org/shorties/121nastyboss/index.html

Kelly Zellars, an assistant professor of management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte:

Abusive managers, she says, make subordinates less likely to go the extra mile. The underlings won’t speak well of the organization to outsiders, will be less likely to help co-workers, and more likely to kvetch over trivialities, not to mention more likely to find another berth, I mean job.

. . .

Subordinates of abusive bosses were less willing to extend themselves. But why?

Planning your future

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/planning_your_future

A few years ago, a manager of mine gave me the assignment to work on a five-year career plan. I had never created a career plan before (not even to plot out goals for the coming year), so I was completely unprepared for how and why I should do this. Luckily, she shared her own plan as a guide, but I still agonized through the exercise. Over time I have become aware of how important this was for me to do. Looking and assessing where I was at the time, really thinking about what I wanted to be doing in the future, gave me the tools to make the right decisions to make things happen.

Joel On Software: Hiring Programmers--The Interview

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html

If even two of the six interviewers thinks that a person is not worth hiring, don’t hire them. That means you can technically end the “day” of interviews after the first two if the candidate is not going to be hired, which is not a bad idea, but to avoid cruelty you may not want to tell the candidate in advance how many people will be interviewing them. I have heard of companies that allow any interviewer to reject a candidate. This strikes me as a little bit too aggressive; I would probably allow any senior person to reject a candidate but would not reject someone just because one junior person didn’t like them.

Don’t try to interview a bunch of people at the same time. It’s just not fair. Each interview should consist of one interviewer and one interviewee, in a room with a door that closes and a whiteboard. I can tell you from extensive experience that if you spend less than one hour on an interview you’re not going to be able to make a decision.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: "Rules for Stifling Innovation"

http://www.solle.net/kanter.html

1. Regard any new idea with suspicion - because it’s new, and because it’s from below.

2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures.

3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge or criticise each other’s proposals. (That saves you the trouble of deciding - you just pick the survivor.)

4. Express your criticisms freely, and withhold your praise. (That keeps people on their toes.) Let them know they can be fired at any time.

5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area isn’t working.

6. Control everything, carefully. Make sure that people count everything that can be counted, frequently.

7. Make decisions to reorganize or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly. (That also keeps people on their toes.)

8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given out to managers freely. (You don’t want data to fall into the wrong hands.)

9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move people around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions that you have made. And get them to do it quickly.

10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

From The Change Masters: Corporate Entrepreneurs at Work. Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Men who hate women on the Web

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2007/03/31/sierra/

Joan Walsh
Saturday, Mar 31, 2007

Is there really any doubt that women writing on the Web are subject to more abuse than men, simply because they’re women? Really? I’ve been following the Kathy Sierra blog storm, thinking I had nothing new to say, but the continued insistence that Sierra, and those who defend her, are somehow overreacting, or charging sexism where none exists, makes it hard for a mouthy woman to stay silent.
See: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/media/2007/04/03/sierra_letters/index.html

Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography

http://bibs.slu.edu/sidney/index.html

An annotated bibliography of material by and about Sir Philip Sidney from his lifetime to the present.

Donald Stump, Principal Author and Editor
C. Stuart Hunter, Co-Author
Jerome S. Dees, Co-Author
Tim Moylan, Assistant Editor

This site is the largest collection of bibliographic references on Sidney in existence. It includes all the items originally published in Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Texts and Criticism, 1554-1984 (New York: G.K. Hall, Macmillan 1994) as well updates from 1985 to the present.

Year for year, it includes nearly 30% more material than the MLA International Bibliography.