November 10, 2016
Interview with Ray Fisman, author of the book The Org
Mike Carruthers:
In organizations a common complaint is that we have to attend too many meetings. Maybe we should just do away with them.
Ray Fisman:
We could do away with meetings is all useful information to travel up and down and across the organization could be conveyed by written reports and spreadsheets. Though I would point out you’d be writing a lot more reports and putting together a lot more spreadsheets if that were the case.
Ray Fisman, author of the book The Org…
The fact is there’s a lot of information, soft information that can only be conveyed face-to-face -as inefficient as it may seem when you’re sitting there. And in fact top executives, CEO’s spend upward of 80% of their time just sitting in meetings.
Complaining about the boss is another common pastime in the workplace. But in defense of managers Ray says…
It’s a hard job I would actually argue that managing is much harder than doing. The other thing I think you have to keep in mind is that a lot of people don’t like their managers because they feel like the manager isn’t making them happy. And that is not the manager’s job.
In fact a study was done in Cambodian textile manufacturing firms.
Where they gave empathy training the supervisors and the workers under these supervisors subsequently reported liking their managers more. But they weren’t any more productive – being productive and being happy are not the same thing.
