Kallokain

This is a long one! You may wish to go get a cup of coffee before reading. Better yet, bring the whole coffee pot! Recently, a friend and I sat talking at a café. We talked about Science-Fiction, Fantasy, a bit of geology, and eventually, we began talking about management. Specifically, my friend asked me if I have any idea why managers so often make very bad decisions. After pushing my management rant button, my friend sat back, and watched me go off on a long lecture, waving my arms, talking a bit too loud, and much too intensely for a café environment. Luckily, we sat in a corner, so I do not believe I made too much damage to the reputation of the place. (There used to be a café in Gothenburg, Café Sirius , where passionate discussions about odd topics were part of the normal entertainment. I miss that place!) Enough rambling! This article is a somewhat consolidated, and tidied up version of my impromptu lecture. I gave six different reasons, from six different perspectives, why...

Recently, I made a short Linkedin post that was quite critical of OKRs, Objectives and Key Results. The post got a few likes, and comments who both agreed and disagreed with me. I found one of the comments that disagreed with me particularly interesting, because it referenced an article that was very positive to OKRs. That article contained pretty much everything that makes me doubt that OKRs are useful. I’ll walk through it, but first, here is my original Linkedin post: Here is why I do not trust OKRs, in three quotes: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -Goodhart's Law, https://lnkd.in/dUgcBEMT "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." -Campbell's Law, https://lnkd.in/dFyeu4K3 "Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the obje...