Jürgen Klopp’s departure holds lessons for leaders everywhere

Simon Kuper in The FT

In an era short on admired leaders, Jürgen Klopp has been a rare role model. The German football manager, who announced on Friday that he is resigning at the end of this season after nine years at Liverpool, offers numerous lessons for his counterparts in business and politics. 

First, he turned himself into the embodiment of the institution he led. He always presented himself not as a mere technocrat but as somebody who loved Liverpool FC. Having joined the club as an outsider, he worked to understand what it meant to everyone involved in it. In his hugs and emotional sprints along the touchline (and sometimes into the field), the giant with football’s most joyous smile expressed the feelings of every Liverpool fan. 

When the club won its first English league title in 30 years in 2020, he said, “I never could have thought it would feel like this, I had no idea,” and cried. He told Liverpool’s supporters: “It is a joy to do it for you.” He probably wasn’t faking it, giving that he has kept up the act practically daily since 2015. He understands that the whole point of professional football is shared communal emotion. 

Second, he treated his players and staff as humans, not as mere instruments for his own success. When one staff member was unaware that full-back Andy Robertson would soon become a father for the first time, Klopp asked: “How can you not know that? That is the biggest thing in his life now.” 

Klopp wanted to know everything about his players — “who they are, what they believe in, how they’ve reached this point, what drives them, what awaits them when they depart training.” And he meant it: “I don’t pretend I’m interested, I am interested.” 

Klopp is often praised as a motivator, but in fact few top-class footballers need motivation. His man-management was more sophisticated than that. His understanding of people helped him find the right words in clear, simple and cliché-free English, his second language. In 2019, after a 3-0 defeat in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final at Barcelona, he bounded smiling into Liverpool’s deflated changing-room shouting, “Boys, boys, boys! We are not the best team in the world. Now you know that. Maybe they are! Who cares? We can still beat the best team in the world. Let’s go again.” Before the return leg at Anfield, he told his players: “Just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.” 

He was lifting his men while also lifting the pressure: he gave them permission to fail. Instead, in perhaps the most breathtaking match of his tenure, they won 4-0, and went on to clinch the Champions League. His Liverpool lost two other Champions League finals. With a touch more luck, their achievement could have been generational. But even at the leanest moments, all the constituencies that make up a club — owner, players, staff, fans, media — wanted him around. Klopp made ruthless decisions without making enemies. 

Another leadership lesson: he could delegate. A football manager today is less autocrat than chief executive, overseeing a staff of dozens. Klopp provided the guiding vision, of a pressing game played at frenzied pace: “It is not serenity football, it is fighting football — that is what I like . . . Rainy day, heavy pitch, everybody is dirty in the face and they go home and can’t play football for the next four weeks.” 

He left most of the detail to specialists. For years he outsourced much of his training and match tactics to his assistant, Željko Buvač, whom Klopp called “the brain” of his coaching team. 

Klopp was so obviously the leader, an Alpha male blessed with empathy, that he felt secure enough to listen to others and admit error. In 2017, when Liverpool needed a striker, the club’s data analysts lobbied him to sign the Egyptian Mo Salah. Klopp preferred the German forward Julian Brandt. It took time, but eventually Klopp was persuaded to buy Salah. The Egyptian became arguably Liverpool’s most important player. Klopp later apologised to the analysts for his mistake. 

In a profession that attracts many megalomaniacs and then places them under inhuman stress, he was rare in never taking himself too seriously. He had views outside football — for leftwing politics, against Brexit — but he rejected the temptation to cast himself as a universal leader. When Covid-19 was spreading in early 2020, and a journalist fished for his views, he said experts should speak, not “people with no knowledge, like me . . . I don’t understand politics, coronavirus . . . I wear a baseball cap and have a bad shave.” 

His last leadership lesson: leave at the right time, with dignity. Today he explained his resignation: “I came here as a normal guy. I am still a normal guy, I just don’t live a normal life for too long now. And I don’t want to wait until I am too old to have a normal life, and I need, at least, to give it a try.” 

He also admitted fallibility, with a typically well-chosen metaphor: “I am a proper sports car, not the best one, but a pretty good one, can still drive 160, 170, 180 miles per hour, but I am the only one who sees the tank needle is going down.” It was a message to every failed leader currently clinging grimly to power.

English football: why are there so few black people in senior positions?

Simon Kuper in The FT

Possibly the only English football club run mostly by black staff is Queens Park Rangers, in the Championship, the English game’s second tier. 

QPR’s director of football, Les Ferdinand, and technical director, Chris Ramsey, have spent their entire careers in the sport watching hiring discrimination persist almost everywhere else. Teams have knelt in protest against racism, but Ferdinand says, “I didn’t want to see people taking the knee. I just wanted to see action. I’m tired of all these gestures.”  

Now a newly founded group, the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), argues that it is time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities. Voluntary measures have not worked, says its executive director, Delroy Corinaldi. 

The BFP has commissioned a report from Stefan Szymanski (economics professor at the University of Michigan, and my co-author on the book Soccernomics) to document apparent discrimination in coaching, executive and scouting jobs. 

It is a dogma of football that these roles must be filled by ex-players — but only, it seems, by white ones. Last year 43 per cent of players in the Premier League were black, yet black people held “only 4.4 per cent of managerial positions, usually taken by former players” and 1.6 per cent of “executive, leadership and ownership positions”, writes Szymanski. 

Today 14 per cent of holders of the highest coaching badge in England, the Uefa Pro Licence, are black, but they too confront prejudice. Looking ahead, the paucity of black scouts and junior coaches is keeping the pipeline for bigger jobs overwhelmingly white. Corinaldi hopes that current black footballers will follow England’s forward Raheem Sterling in calling for more off-field representation. 

There have been 28 black managers in the English game since the Football League was founded in 1888, calculates Corinaldi. As for the Premier League, which has had 11 black managers in 30 years, he says: “Sam Allardyce [an ex-England manager] has had nearly as many roles as the whole black population.” The situation is similar in women’s football, says former England international Anita Asante. 

Ramsey, who entered coaching in the late 1980s, when he says “there were literally no black coaches”, reflects: “There’s always a dream that you’re going to make the highest level, so naively you coach believing that your talent will get you there, but very early on I realised that wasn’t going to happen.”  

Reluctant to hire 

He says discrimination in hiring is always unspoken: “People hide behind politically correct language. They will take a knee, and say, ‘I’m all for it’. You’re just never really seen as able to do the job. And then people sometimes employ people less qualified than you. Plenty of white managers have failed, and I just want to have the opportunity to be as bad as them, and to be given an opportunity again. You don’t want to have to be better just because you’re black.” 

When Ferdinand’s glittering playing career ended, he worried that studying for his coaching badges might “waste five years of my life”, given that the white men running clubs were reluctant to hire even famous black ex-players such as John Barnes and Paul Ince. In Ferdinand’s first seven years on the market, he was offered one managerial job. “People tend to employ what looks, sounds and acts like them,” he shrugs. Yet he says he isn’t angry: “Anger’s not the right word, because that’s unfortunately how they see a lot of young black men, as angry.” 

He suspects QPR hired him in part because its then co-chair, the Malaysian Tony Fernandes, is a person of colour. After the two men met and began talking, recalls Ferdinand, “he said, ‘Why are you not doing this job [management] in football?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve not been given the opportunity.’ The conversations went from there. Had he not been a person of colour, I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to him in the way that I did.” 

Szymanski can identify only two black owners in English football, both at small clubs: Ben Robinson of Burton Albion, and Ryan Giggs, co-owner of Salford City. 

Szymanski believes discrimination persists for managerial jobs in part because football managers have little impact on team performance — much less than is commonly thought. He calculates that over 10 seasons, the average correlation between a club’s wage bill for players and its league position exceeds 90 per cent. If the quality of players determines results almost by itself, then managers are relatively insignificant, and so clubs can continue to hire the stereotype manager — a white male ex-player aged between 35 and 55 — without harming their on-field performance. 

For about 20 years, English football has launched various fruitless attempts to address discrimination. Ramsey recalls the Football Association — the national governing body — inviting black ex-players to “observe” training sessions. He marvels: “You’re talking about qualified people with full badges standing and watching people train. And most of them have been in the game longer than the people they’re watching.” 

Modest though that initiative was, Ferdinand recalls warning FA officials: “A certain amount of people at St George’s Park [the FA’s National Football Centre], when you tell them this is the initiative, their eyes will be rolling and thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re doing something for them again, we’re trying to give them another opportunity.’ What those people don’t realise is: we don’t get opportunities.”  

Rooney Rule 

After the NFL of American gridiron football introduced the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for job openings, the English ex-player Ricky Hill presented the idea to the League Managers Association. Ramsey recalls, “Everyone said, ‘God, this is brilliant’.” Yet only in the 2016/2017 season did 10 smaller English clubs even pilot the Rooney Rule. Ramsey says: “We are expected to accept as minority coaches that these things take a long time. I have seen this train move along so slowly that it’s ridiculous.” He mourns the black managerial careers lost in the wait. 

In 2019 the Rooney Rule was made mandatory in the three lower tiers of English professional football, though not in the Premier League or anywhere else in Europe. Clubs had to interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) candidate (if any applied) for all first team managerial, coaching and youth development roles. Why didn’t the rule noticeably increase minority hiring? Ferdinand replies, “Because there’s nobody being held accountable to it. What is the Rooney Rule? You give someone the opportunity to come through the door and talk.” Moreover, English football’s version of the rule has a significant loophole: clubs are exempt if they interview only one candidate, typically someone found through the white old boys’ network. 

Nor has the Rooney Rule made much difference in the NFL. In 2020, 57.5 per cent of the league’s players were black, but today only two out of 32 head coaches are, while one other identifies as multiracial. This month, the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three clubs, accusing them of racist and discriminatory practices. He and other black coaches report being called for sham interviews for jobs that have already been filled, as teams tick the Rooney Rule’s boxes. 

Voluntary diversity targets 

In 2020 England’s FA adopted a voluntary “Football Leadership Diversity Code”. Only about half of English professional clubs signed it. They committed to achieving percentage targets for Bame people among new hires: 15 per cent for senior leadership and team operations positions, and 25 per cent for men’s coaching — “a discrepancy in goals that itself reflects the problem”, comments Szymanski. Clubs were further allowed to water down these targets “based on local demographics”. 

The FA said: “The FA is deeply committed to ensuring the diversity of those playing and coaching within English football is truly reflective of our modern society. 

“We’re focused on increasing the number of, and ongoing support for, coaches who have been historically under-represented in the game. This includes a bursary programme for the Uefa qualifications required to coach in academy and senior professional football.” 

A report last November showed mixed results. Many clubs had missed the code’s targets, with several Premier League clubs reporting zero diversity hires. On the other hand, more than 20 per cent of new hires in men’s football were of Bame origin, which was at least well above historical hiring rates. 

Do clubs take the code seriously? Ferdinand smiles ironically: “From day one I didn’t take it seriously. Because it’s a voluntary code. What’s the repercussions if you don’t follow the voluntary code? No one will say anything, no one will do anything about it.”  

The BFP and the League Managers Association have called for the code’s targets to be made compulsory. Ferdinand cites the example of countries that set mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of listed companies. 

Asante says it takes minorities in positions of power to understand the problems of minorities. “If you are a majority in any group, when are you ever thinking about the needs of others?” Corinaldi adds: “When you have a monoculture in any boardroom, you only know what you know, and it tends to be the same stories you heard growing up.” He predicts that once football has more black directors and senior executives, they will hire more diversely. 

The BFP’s model for English football is the National Basketball Association in the US, a 30-team league with 14 African-American head coaches. For now, that feels like a distant utopia. Ramsey warns: “If there is no revolutionary action, we’ll be having this same conversation in 10 years’ time.” And he remembers saying exactly those words 10 years ago.

The paradox that leads professionals into temptation

 Andrew Hill in The FT

Before her first ward-round as a medical student, Sunita Sah watched as the consultant leading the group stuffed his pockets with branded pens and notepads from a hospital cart piled with drug company freebies. 

Noting her astonishment, he remarked, “these are the only perks of the job”, and continued to stock up. “I couldn’t help but think: ‘What’s the end-effect of this?’” Sah told me. 

She found part of the answer to that question when she moved from medicine into management consulting and started analysing how every interaction between healthcare companies and doctors had an impact on their prescribing habits. 

Now a professor at Cornell University and an honorary fellow at Cambridge’s Judge Business School, Sah has filled in more gaps with a new study that sheds light on the dark side of professionalism and how to avoid it. 

Her findings are stark and surprising. The greater a manager’s sense of professionalism, the more likely he or she is to accept a gift or bribe. Worse, high-minded professionals may be more susceptible to unconscious bias towards gift-givers, precisely because they are convinced they think they know how to ignore their blandishments. 

“I NEVER turn down something for free that I know isn’t going to kill me!” retorted one manager in response to Sah’s survey. “A free lunch from someone? Go for it! If the guy is fool enough to think his free lunch/dinner/use of cabin, etc, is going to influence me, he doesn’t know me at all! People don’t influence me beyond what I, and I alone, allow!” 

In the study for the Academy of Management Perspectives, Sah equates this “professionalism paradox” to the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to which poor performers lack even the ability to recognise their own hopelessness. 

Sah’s study is based on surveys of managers, but some of the pernicious real-world effects of her paradox are clear. In the extreme case of the opioid epidemic, books such as Empire of Pain and Dopesick (now also a television series) have chronicled the way respected physicians were dragged into the overprescription of painkillers after receiving free gifts and conference invitations from manufacturer Purdue Pharma. 

Yet their ability to self-regulate against conflicts of interest is still many professionals’ first line of defence when watchdogs and legislators start threatening to curb their autonomy with new rules. 

One problem is that we are all professionals now. The term used to be almost the exclusive domain of lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, and others who had laboriously acquired specialist knowledge, shown integrity, and deserved an elevated status. Now the same status is loosely claimed by everyone from salespeople to, yes, journalists. The currency has been debased. 

In law, behaving professionally and ethically is “part of your training, it’s part of your identity, it’s what makes you tick — which isn’t necessarily true elsewhere”, David Morley, former senior partner at Allen & Overy, says. But the head of a professional services firm adds that professionalism “can’t be an excuse or a cover story” for a lack of underlying principles. 

These senior leaders are describing the difference between what Sah calls “deep” and “shallow” professionalism. 

Deep professionals should recognise the risk of undue influence and avoid exposing themselves to it in the first place. Her parallel is Odysseus plugging his ears with wax to avoid falling for the sirens’ song, or, more prosaically, managers who decline all gifts, rather than relying on a corporate threshold to protect them. It is “easier for individuals to rationalise and morally disengage the acceptance of [small] gifts”, Sah writes, or even to stop noticing them altogether. 

Deep professionals should embrace continued ethical training, to help embed principles, and embrace an understanding that they may be prone to bribes and influence-seeking. They should also continue to practise their values, just as a concert pianist goes on rehearsing scales. 

Professionalism “isn’t an individual characteristic, or a feeling”, says Sah. Instead, she would like to redefine it as “repeated behavioural practices that demonstrate a deep understanding of the concept”, backed by appropriate rules and codes. In that form, anyone can aspire to deep professionalism. 

“The law as a profession doesn’t give you some status or standing: you have to earn that,” the senior partner of another law firm told me. “We shy away from [the attitude] ‘It’s OK, we’re professionals’.” In fact, professionals who catch themselves saying or thinking anything similar should be on their guard. They may be in the ethical shallows and about to run aground.  

No surprise Leeds lost to Manchester United, just look at the wage bills

Although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult

Manchester United’s Fred celebrates celebrates after completing Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds. Photograph: Jon Super/AP
 

Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian

The easy thing is to blame the manager. It has become football’s default response to any crisis. A team hits a poor run or loses a big game: get rid of the manager. As Alex Ferguson said as many as 14 years ago, we live in “a mocking culture” and reality television has fostered the idea people should be voted off with great regularity (that he was trying to defend Steve McClaren’s reign as England manager should not undermine the wider point).

Managers are expendable. Rejigging squads takes time and money and huge amounts of effort in terms of research and recruitment, whereas anybody can look at who is doing well in Portugal or Greece or the Championship and spy a potential messiah. Then there are the structural factors, the underlying economic issues it is often preferable to ignore because to acknowledge them is to accept how little agency the people we shout about every week really have in football. 

That point reared its head after Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds on Saturday. There was plenty to discuss: are Leeds overreliant on Kalvin Phillips, who was absent? Why does Marcelo Bielsa’s version of pressing so often lead to heavy defeats? Can Mason Greenwood’s movement allow Ole Gunnar Solskjær to field Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes without sacrificing a holding midfielder and, if it does, what does that mean for Marcus Rashford?

Yet there was a weird strand of coverage that insisted Solskjær had somehow outwitted Bielsa, even in some quarters that Bielsa needed to be replaced if Leeds are to kick on. (They finished ninth last season with 59 points, the highest points total by a promoted club for two decades). A Bielsa meltdown is possible; they do happen and he has never managed a fourth season at a club. There should be some concern that, like last season, Leeds lost by four goals at Old Trafford, insufficient lessons were learned, even if Bielsa said this was a better performance. But fundamentally, Manchester United’s wage bill is five times that of Leeds. 

Everton, who finished a place below Leeds last season, had a wage bill three times bigger. Of last season’s Premier League, only West Brom and Sheffield United had wage bills lower than that of Leeds. To have finished ninth is an extraordinary achievement and nobody should think to slip back three or four places this season would be a failure. Modern football is starkly stratified and although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult.

There is still a tendency to talk of a Big Six in English football and while it is true six clubs last season had a weekly wage bill in excess of £2.5m, it is also true that within that grouping there are three with clear advantages: Manchester City (who had kept their wage bill relatively low, although if they do add Harry Kane to Jack Grealish that would clearly change) and Chelsea because their funding is not reliant on footballing success, and Manchester United because of the legacy that has allowed them to attach their name to a preposterous range of products across the globe.
Mikel Arteta is struggling to revive Arsenal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Liverpool can perhaps challenge for the title this season, but their wage spending is 74% of that of United. That they were as good as they were in the two seasons before last was remarkable, but last season showed how vulnerable a team like Liverpool can be to a couple of injuries. Similarly, Leicester’s two fifth-place finishes with the eighth-highest wage bill are a striking achievement, their decline towards the end of the past two seasons less the result of them bottling it or any sort of psychological failure than of the limitations of their squad being exposed.

Which brings us to the other two members of the Big Six: Arsenal and Tottenham. Spurs’ last game at White Hart Lane, in 2017, brought a 2-1 win over Manchester United that guaranteed they finished second. Since when Spurs have bought Davinson Sánchez, Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier, Fernando Llorente, Juan Foyth, Tanguy Ndombele, Steven Bergwijn, Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Bryan Gil, while United have bought, among others, Alexis Sánchez, Victor Lindelöf, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku, Fred, Daniel James, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Donny van de Beek, Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho. Money may not be everything in football, but it does help.

The irony of the situation is that it was investment in the infrastructure that should allow Spurs to generate additional revenues and better develop their own talent (much cheaper than buying it) that led to the lack of investment in players largely responsible for the staleness resulting in Mauricio Pochettino’s departure. That Daniel Levy compounded the problem by appointing José Mourinho – acting like a big club as though to jolt them to the next level – should not obscure the fact that until that point he had pursued a ruthless and successful economic logic.

Arsenal had gone through a similar process the previous decade, investing heavily in a new stadium at the expense of the squad, only to discover that by the time it was ready the financial environment had changed and the petro-fuelled era had begun. It was easy after the timid performance against Brentford on Friday to blame Mikel Arteta and ask why he gets such an easy ride. For all that Arsenal have finished the past two seasons relatively well, that criticism will only increase if there are not signs the tanker is being turned round. But the gulf to the top of the table is vast and a desperation to bridge that has contributed to a bizarre transfer policy.

That does not mean managers are beyond reproach and limp displays like Arsenal’s deserve criticism. But equally we should probably remember that where a side finishes in the league has far more to do with economic strata than any of the individuals involved.

The workers who bought out their bosses – and secured their futures

By Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


It had all been going so well. In this smoothest of seductions, John Clark and Alistair Miller hadn’t had to do a thing. There they were, itching to sell their business and get on with retirement. Then one day in the middle of 2015, this American firm – big-time, way out of their league – swung by the factory outside Glasgow and asked: what price do you have in mind? This was followed by an invitation back to the multinational’s European headquarters in the home counties.

So off popped Miller. The two sides were inching towards the dotted line when he casually inquired what the Americans would do with their new Scottish premises. This one question sent the needle screeching across the record. 

As soon as the managing director across the desk started talking about “exploring possibilities” and “transferable technologies”, Miller knew what she meant. Their Scottish operation would run for another six months, a year tops. Then it would be shut – and the order book and the technology shifted down south. And when the factory disappeared, so too would the jobs and the livelihoods of 60-odd workers and their families. Selling up would hand the owners a huge cheque, and leave their staff on a tiny giro.

“You’d be sitting back with your piles of cash,” says Clark, “but at some point you’re going to bump into those guys. Some of them have been there longer than me. I know their families.”

“Those guys” helped to build this place. Since its launch in 1986, Novograf has gone from printing signs for vans to working with some of the biggest chains in Britain. It has become expert in the branding that envelops you while shopping, eating or holidaying, but which you never take in. Walk around a Co-op supermarket, and the signs guiding you to the wine and beer or fruit and veg aisles will be Novograf’s. Pop into a Pizza Hut and the wood-look flooring will have been made and laid by Novograf employees. Stay at an Ibis Styles hotel and the big fat number on your room door probably comes from their East Kilbride factory. Then there’s Greggs, Iceland, Tesco, Waitrose …

Miller and Clark hadn’t poured six decades of their combined lives into this venture only to leave a plump carcass for others to feed on. But the two sixtysomethings had run smack into one of the central problems of British capitalism: how to ensure a company’s owners look after it. Pretty much any spiv with a chequebook can buy a business in the UK and ruin it as they want. Westminster will ask few questions, expect even less accountability, and never learn any lessons. That fanatical British adherence to open markets and property rights leaves the staff, the suppliers and the public counting for little. 

The publisher of Horny Housewives, Richard Desmond, bought the Express stable in 2000 without New Labour ministers raising an eyebrow. A once-great paper was wrecked and hundreds of journalists lost their jobs, but Desmond pocketed nearly £350m before he sold it to Trinity Mirror this year.

In 2005, Manchester United football club was snapped up by the Glazer family, who paid for it by borrowing hundreds of millions that they loaded on to the club’s balance sheet – before shifting its headquarters to the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, a 10,000-mile round trip from the club’s Old Trafford stadium.

Philip Green may strip BHS bare; Cadbury can be ravaged by Kraft; Australian investment bank Macquarie can run Thames Water into the ground then, as a reward, get the public’s Green Investment Bank. Each time owners damage a business, employees and often customers get shafted, and local economies suffer – while a handful right at the top cash in.

But Miller and Clark can tell you how much depends on the simple fact of ownership. It helps shape the business model, the ethos and culture of a company. However, even as they tried to secure a careful owner for their business, all the plausible options were a no-go.

Sell to a rival? Their staff and values would be discarded like used wrapping paper. Cash out to private equity? A green light for a corporate ransacking. Neither man’s children wanted to trudge in their dad’s footsteps, and senior management were not in a position to buy them out.

‘I could be sitting back on piles of cash. But at some point you’re going to bump into those guys. I know their families.’ John Clark, chairman and former owner of Navograf. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Just then, a postcard flopped on to the doormat. “Thinking of exiting your business?” it asked. When the man from Scottish Enterprise, an agency of the Holyrood government, told them about worker ownership, he got blank faces. The biggest employee-owned firm in the UK, John Lewis, was a Novograf customer, yet all Clark knew about its structure was that once a year the company would be on the news for paying “partners” a tax-free bonus. Which was lovely, Clark and Miller thought, but what did that have to do with them?

Employee ownership is as simple as selling a company to its staff. Over 300 British firms have done it, from Arup architects to Waitrose. But it is as radical as giving the people who create a business’s wealth the right to share in it. That wealth is no longer handed over to remote shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends.

When Clark and Miller “got off our butts” and visited a few of the 95 Scottish firms now owned by their employees, “we learned that their productivity was higher, that they were more resilient in bad times, that they were more inclusive of all their staff”.

Giving workers control over their companies doesn’t just make the firms more successful, it also makes the workers a lot better off. Last year, the California-based National Center for Employee Ownership analysed US jobs figures and found that younger workers who are worker-owners enjoy 33% higher wages and 92% higher median household wealththan those who aren’t owners.

The British government knows much of this, because it commissioned a report that told it so. The very first line of Graeme Nuttall’s 2012 review reads: “Employee ownership is a great idea.” After lobbying by Liberal Democrat ministers, two years later chancellor George Osborne scrapped capital gains tax for employers who transferred a majority share of their business to workers. This was back when Osborne and David Cameron would hymn “the John Lewis model”.

Just like “the march of the makers” and the “big society”, the fad has left little trace. Of the 2,617 full-time equivalent civil servants at the Department for Business, not one is dedicated to promoting worker ownership, as advised by the Nuttall review. The same report also recommends “the appointment of a minister responsible for promoting employee ownership across government”. Yet this department confirmed to me that not even its most junior minister holds any such brief.

That silence partly explains why employee ownership remains so exotic. When Clark and Miller announced their idea for selling the company to their staff, they hired a local hotel, put on fancy nibbles and gave a great presentation. “The very first question we got was, ‘Have we still got a job?’” remembers Clark. “Nobody had a clue what it meant,” recalls factory technician David Anderson. “People assumed that everyone was going to have to get a mortgage to buy the company.”

Four hundred miles north of Whitehall, the far smaller Scottish Enterprise employs eight full-time staffers to promote and advise on worker ownership and other “inclusive models” of organising companies. The SNP government is full-square behind it, and the Herald, the Record and the Scotsman newspapers trumpet this Inverness holiday resort or that Hebridean jewellers being taken over by its employees.

Just two decades ago, newly devolved Holyrood paid through the nose for inward investment and prayed that the multinationals would repay their lavish subsidies with lasting jobs. They rarely did. Hewlett Packard, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and many others pulled the corporate equivalent of a one-night stand.

 ‘Everyone received a decent tax-free bonus last year, and also took part in the first-ever staff survey, which led to sick-pay and leave entitlement becoming more generous.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Holyrood can still relapse – such as when it gifted Amazon £2.5m of taxpayers’ money and got back a distribution warehouse in Dunfermline. But Scottish Enterprise’s Sarah Deas talks of fostering a Mittelstand – a German-style dense network of medium-sized businesses that think long term and honour their social obligations.

Which is a reminder that British business is not some political monolith – that it can break left as well as right. White-haired Clark is appalled at “the FTSE guys”, the chief executives paid 100 times the average wage of their workers. “What are they doing to deserve that?”

Clark is not, he says, “some paternalistic capitalist” or a “crusader”. He’s “hardnosed”, and with Miller got a fair price for Novograf. But they’ve also taken big risks to ensure their workers could afford it. It proved impossible to raise cash upfront for the purchase price. “Not one of the major banks was interested. Not even our own.” So Clark and Miller turned themselves into a bank – handing over the company shares while allowing employees to pay them back over a few years, with interest. And with conditions: as long as the pair retain an interest in the firm it cannot relocate more than 200 miles away, “because that would defeat the entire purpose of the deal”.

At the end of 2016, all the shares in the company were transferred from the two original owners into a trust held on behalf of all staff. Just over a year later, the all-new, same-old Novograf still feels eggshelly, as if everyone is trying to gauge what’s changed. Its new managing director, Jennifer Riddell-Dillet, has to tell employees: “Remember you’re an owner.” She both manages and works for her staff, one of whom sat on the panel that interviewed her for the job.

Novografers like to tell you that this isn’t “some socialist paradise”, that there are still bosses and workers; but the priorities have changed. Formerly a senior manager for two PLCs, Riddell-Dillet says: “Public companies are only about external shareholders. There, employees are the asset of the business – but they’re a sweatable asset. Here, you think, ‘If I just drive them into the ground it will be less fulfilling, less rewarding and it will be more ruthless.’”

Everyone received a decent tax-free bonus last year, and also took part in the first-ever staff survey, which led to sick pay and leave entitlement becoming more generous. Anderson, a Novograf lifer, says: “The people on the factory floor definitely feel more in control than before. Anybody can now say, ‘I don’t see why things have to be done that way’ – and someone’s got to answer.”

That power requires some growing into. Production manager Michael Carr has become a director of Novograf, and has struggled to get his head around the accounts. And with no previous experience, Anderson and business development manager Margaret Nelson now make up half the trustee board. The other two trustees will be Miller and Clark, until they’re finally paid off. “It’s obvious that they know what they’re talking about and we don’t,” says Nelson. “Challenging your old boss is an intimidating thing.”

But employees will challenge on their expert subject: their daily work. Just last week, an employee showed Carr a cheaper and quicker way of assembling signs. They would never have spoken up before, he says, yet that one simple thing could save “a few thousand pounds in man-hours and material”.

In its first full year of employee ownership, Novograf’s sales shot up 20% and the company took on an extra 22 people. That success followed on from a strong performance in 2016, but Riddell-Dillet reckons their direct stake in the outcome did drive employees to put in “the blood, sweat and tears”.

Not all the savings are strictly necessary. Not so long ago, now-chairman John Clark, while washing his hands in the gents, reached over to the soap dispenser. He remembers a thin jet of lotion flying out – “Whoosh ... it hit me amidships” – all over his stomach. He charged over to the man responsible for ordering in supplies and told him the new soap was far too thin. While Clark stood dripping, the man nodded. “Aye, that was me,” he said. “I’ve watered down the soap by half to save money.”

Bonuses are the enemy of progress

Andrew Hill in The Financial Times



When my children were still in primary school, I once let my English stiff upper lip slacken and asked them whether I had ever said how much I loved them. “Yes,” responded my truculent son, “but not with money.” 

I am reminded of his precocious attempt to persuade me to apply hard cash to a soft problem every time I hear about efforts to use monetary bonuses to encourage executives to hit non-financial goals. 

Reduced emissions, safer factories, better gender balance: companies everywhere are enshrining such creditable objectives as “key performance indicators”, putting a price on the target, and letting greed take care of the rest. 

“I think we’ve got to do more to tie the outcomes to compensation, so that it’s meaningful and it’s real,” declared Alexis Herman, a former US labour secretary and Coca-Cola board member, at the recent Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Paris, discussing how businesses can become more “human”. 

More than once I heard delegates suggest similar solutions in similar terms. The argument went like this: make bonuses dependent on progress, particularly on diversity, because bonuses are “the only language executives understand”. 

In that case, it is about time executives learnt another language, because at the highest level, bonus-based pay packages are a mess. 

Indeed, there is something perverse about suggesting that companies should hammer away at the vital, sensitive question of how to improve their environmental, social and governance performance using a blunt instrument — the cash bonus — that has helped deepen mistrust of business, and widen inequality. 

When misused, monetary bonuses foster selfishness, backbiting, even cheating among employees. Staff who start taking bonuses for granted become resentful if the cash is withdrawn, as banks that have tried to rein in such rewards since the financial crisis have discovered. When bonus packages are too complex, evidence suggests that managers simply ignore the targets altogether. 

Adding non-financial goals undeniably complicates what is already a baffling array of executive incentives. Measuring how managers have performed against softer targets is also notoriously hard. That is one reason why, at board level, directors seem to have wide discretion to adjust chief executives’ bonuses for non-financial performance. 

Coca-Cola, for example, assessed the 2016 performance of its then chief executive, Muhtar Kent, on no fewer than six strategic initiatives — “People, Planet, Productivity, Partners, Portfolio and Profit”. To decide his bonus, the compensation committee took account not only of his efforts to refranchise US bottling operations, but also to replenish water, reduce sugar and accelerate diversity. 

I would question whether Mr Kent pondered for long the impact on his pay of the many non-financial decisions he took. Most of his eventual bonus of $4.1m (out of a total package of $16m), was the outcome of a formula based on financial results rather than other worthy actions. 

Leaders should do their best to encourage and harness workers’ love of the job. But cash bonuses can get in the way of this intrinsic motivation to do the right thing. 

Ioannis Ioannou, Shelley Xin Li and George Serafeim have studied attempts to meet demanding carbon emission targets.They found using stretch goals alone was quite effective. But adding monetary incentives seemed to undermine companies’ ability to hit the ambitious targets. 

Not to say that incentives are worthless. BHP Billiton, the miner, is making progress towards its demanding goal of achieving gender balance by 2025, helped by the fact that bonuses for senior staff are tied to advances towards the objective. Prof Ioannou of London Business School says bonuses spurred on managers whose job description already included cleaning up emissions. 

Still, I am queasy about offering cash rewards for good intentions that should be the norm. I don’t like promising cash incentives to my children for excellent exam results, either, let alone for loading the dishwasher or vacuuming their bedrooms. 

As Nobel-winning economist Richard Thaler wrote in Misbehaving, it is “overly simplistic” to assume that financial incentives to children (or their parents or teachers) will improve performance. Likewise for many subtler corporate objectives. 

In fact, I fear the main effect of focusing executives’ attention on cash bonuses for being cleaner, safer or more inclusive will be to remind them that the most “meaningful and real” rewards are available for the headlong pursuit of pure profit.

What the Kohli-Kumble saga tells us

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo



Pakistan soundly beat India in the Champions Trophy final, and it has been interesting, to say the least, to witness the aftermath.

Firstly, the Indian coach, Anil Kumble, resigned. Then the Pakistan players - not surprisingly - were welcomed home as heroes. This was followed by an ICC announcement that Afghanistan and Ireland have been added to the list of Test-playing nations, increasing the number to 12.

Kumble's resignation was no great surprise, as he's a strong-minded individual and the deteriorating relationship between him and the captain, Virat Kohli, had reached the stage of being a distraction. Kumble's character is relevant to any discussion about India's future coaching appointments. The captain is the only person who can run an international cricket team properly, because so much of the job involves on-field decision making. Also, a good part of the leadership role - performed off the field - has to be handled by the captain, as it helps him earn the players' respect, which is crucial to his success.

Consequently a captain has to be a strong-minded individual and decisive in his thought process. To put someone of a similar mindset in a position where he's advising the captain is inviting confrontation.

The captain's best advisors are his vice-captain, a clear-thinking wicketkeeper, and one or two senior players. They are out on the field and can best judge the mood of the game and what advice should be offered to the captain and when.

The best off-field assistance for a captain will come from a good managerial type. Someone who can attend to duties that are not necessarily related to winning or losing cricket matches, but done efficiently, can contribute to the success of the team.

The last thing a captain needs is to come off the field and have someone second-guess his decisions. He also doesn't need a strong-minded individual (outside his advisory group) getting too involved in the pre-match tactical planning. Too often I see captaincy that appears to be the result of the previous evening's planning, and despite ample evidence that it's hindering the team's chances of victory, it remains the plan throughout the day.

This is generally a sure sign that the captain is following someone else's plan and that he, the captain, is the wrong man for the job.

India is fortunate to have two capable leaders in Kohli and the man who stood in for him during the Test series with Australia, Ajinkya Rahane.

It's Kohli's job as captain to concentrate on things that help win or lose cricket matches, and his off-field assistants' task is to ensure he is not distracted in trying to achieve victory.

India's opponents in the final, Pakistan, were unusually free of any controversies during the tournament. They were capably led by Sarfraz Ahmed, who appeared to become more and more his own man as the tournament progressed.

What is Strategic Thinking

Ron Carucci in Harvard Business Review


It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get a shrug and a blank stare in response. Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Others assume that watching TED talks or lectures by futurists will help them think more strategically.

How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?

In our 10-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. More than half (58%) said they were expected to know details about work and projects they believed were beneath their level, and more than half also felt they were involved in decisions that those below them should be making. This suggests that the problem of too little strategic leadership may be as much a function of doing as of thinking.

Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found in his research that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness. Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. Both issues appear to be symptoms masking a fundamental issue. In my experience helping executives succeed at the top of companies, the best content for great strategic thinking comes right from one’s own job.

Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.

Identify the strategic requirements of your job. One chief operating officer I worked with was appointed to her newly created role with the expressed purpose of integrating two supply chain organizations resulting from an acquisition. Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints. Her adept problem-solving skill had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues. I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?” She answered readily, “To take out duplicate costs from redundant work and to get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her succinct clarity surprised even her, though she quickly realized how little she was engaged in activities that would reach that outcome. We broke the mandate into four focus areas for her organization, realigned her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensured all meetings and decisions she was involved in directly connected to her mandate.
 

Unfortunately, for many executives, the connection between their role and the strategic contribution they should make is not so obvious. As quoted in Horwath’s study, Harvard Business School professor David Collis says, “It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else.” He also cites Roger Martin’s research, which found that 43% of managers cannot state their own strategy. Executives with less clarity must work harder to etch out the line of sight between their role and its impact on the organization’s direction. In some cases, shedding the collection of bad habits that have consumed how they embody their role will be their greatest challenge to embodying strategic thinking.

Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. For many new executives, the large pile of resources they now get to direct has far greater consequence than anything they’ve allocated before. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm. Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money.

This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.

For some, the word insight may conjure up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments.” But studying basic patterns within available data gives simple insights that pinpoint what truly sets a company apart. In the case of the supply chain executive above, rather than a blanket cost reduction, she uncovered patterns within her data that identified and protected the most competitive work of her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, which is where she focused her cost-cutting efforts. She was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving the customer’s experience.

Such focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.


Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. An executive needs those she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.

That’s far more difficult than it sounds. One study found that only 14% of people understood their company’s strategy and only 24% felt the strategy was linked to their individual accountabilities. Most executives mistakenly assume that repeated explanations through dense PowerPoint presentations are what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.

To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.

Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy. They need to be armed with insights that predict where best to focus resources. And they need to build a coalition of support by inviting those who must execute to disagree with and improve their strategic thinking. Taking these three practical steps will raise the altitude of executives to the appropriate strategic work of the future, freeing those they lead to direct the operational activities of today.

World’s largest hedge fund to replace managers with artificial intelligence

Olivia Solon in The Guardian


The world’s largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.

Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he’s not there, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn’t be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn’t working,” wrote the Journal, which spoke to five former and current employees.

 

Ray Dalio, president and founder of Bridgewater Associates. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The firm, which manages $160bn, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM’s development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011.

The company is already highly data-driven, with meetings recorded and staff asked to grade each other throughout the day using a ratings system called “dots”. The Systematized Intelligence Lab has built a tool that incorporates these ratings into “Baseball Cards” that show employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Another app, dubbed The Contract, gets staff to set goals they want to achieve and then tracks how effectively they follow through.

These tools are early applications of PriOS, the over-arching management software that Dalio wants to make three-quarters of all management decisions within five years. The kinds of decisions PriOS could make include finding the right staff for particular job openings and ranking opposing perspectives from multiple team members when there’s a disagreement about how to proceed.

The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.

“It’s ambitious, but it’s not unreasonable,” said Devin Fidler, research director at the Institute For The Future, who has built a prototype management system called iCEO. “A lot of management is basically information work, the sort of thing that software can get very good at.”

Automated decision-making is appealing to businesses as it can save time and eliminate human emotional volatility.

“People have a bad day and it then colors their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that’s a big deal,” he added.

Will people happily accept orders from a robotic manager? Fidler isn’t so sure. “People tend not to accept a message delivered by a machine,” he said, pointing to the need for a human interface.

“In companies that are really good at data analytics very often the decision is made by a statistical algorithm but the decision is conveyed by somebody who can put it in an emotional context,” he explained.

Futurist Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party, disagrees. “People will follow the will and statistical might of machines,” he said, pointing out that people already outsource way-finding to GPS or the flying of planes to autopilot.

However, the period in which people will need to interact with a robot manager will be brief.

“Soon there just won’t be any reason to keep us around,” Istvan said. “Sure, humans can fix problems, but machines in a few years time will be able to fix those problems even better.

“Bankers will become dinosaurs.”

It’s not just the banking sector that will be affected. According to a report by Accenture, artificial intelligence will free people from the drudgery of administrative tasks in many industries. The company surveyed 1,770 managers across 14 countries to find out how artificial intelligence would impact their jobs.

'This is awful': robot can keep children occupied for hours without supervision



“AI will ultimately prove to be cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more impartial in its actions than human beings,” said the authors writing up the results of the survey in Harvard Business Review.

However, they didn’t think there was too much cause for concern. “It just means that their jobs will change to focus on things only humans can do.”

The authors say that machines would be better at administrative tasks like writing earnings reports and tracking schedules and resources while humans would be better at developing messages to inspire the workforce and drafting strategy.

Fidler disagrees. “There’s no reason to believe that a lot of what we think of as strategic work or even creative work can’t be substantially overtaken by software.”

However, he said, that software will need some direction. “It needs human decision making to set objectives.”
Bridgewater Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

The stupid, avoidable mistakes that make good employees leave

Travis Bradbury in Quartz

It’s tough to hold on to good employees, but it shouldn’t be. Most of the mistakes that companies make are easily avoided. When you do make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most options.

If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees. While this should be common sense, it isn’t common enough. A survey by CEB found that one-third of star employees feel disengaged from their employer and are already looking for a new job.

When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler, who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it as brownout. Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs.

“Brownout is different from burnout because workers afflicted by it are not in obvious crisis,” Kibler said. “They seem to be performing fine: putting in massive hours, grinding out work while contributing to teams, and saying all the right things in meetings. However, they are operating in a silent state of continual overwhelm, and the predictable consequence is disengagement.”

In order to prevent brownout and to retain top talent, companies and managers must understand what they’re doing that contributes to this slow fade. The following practices are the worst offenders, and they must be abolished if you’re going to hang on to good employees.

They make a lot of stupid rules. 

Companies need to have rules—that’s a given—but they don’t have to be shortsighted and lazy attempts at creating order. Whether it’s an overzealous attendance policy or taking employees’ frequent flier miles, even a couple of unnecessary rules can drive people crazy. When good employees feel like big brother is watching, they’ll find someplace else to work.

They treat everyone equally. 

While this tactic works with school children, the workplace ought to function differently. Treating everyone equally shows your top performers that no matter how high they perform (and, typically, top performers are work horses), they will be treated the same as the bozo who does nothing more than punch the clock.

They tolerate poor performance.

 It’s said that in jazz bands, the band is only as good as the worst player; no matter how great some members may be, everyone hears the worst player. The same goes for a company. When you permit weak links to exist without consequence, they drag everyone else down, especially your top performers.

They don’t recognize accomplishments. 

It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Rewarding individual accomplishments shows that you’re paying attention. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it’s a raise; for others, it’s public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you’re doing it right.

They don’t care about people. 

More than half the people who leave their jobs do so because of their relationship with their boss. Smart companies make certain that their managers know how to balance being professional with being human. These are the bosses who celebrate their employees’ successes, empathize with those going through hard times, and challenge them, even when it hurts. Bosses who fail to really care will always have high turnover rates. It’s impossible to work for someone for eight-plus hours a day when they aren’t personally involved and don’t care about anything other than your output.

They don’t show people the big picture. 

It may seem efficient to simply send employees assignments and move on, but leaving out the big picture is a deal breaker for star performers. Star performers shoulder heavier loads because they genuinely care about their work, so their work must have a purpose. When they don’t know what that is, they feel alienated and aimless. When they aren’t given a purpose, they find one elsewhere.

They don’t let people pursue their passions. 

Google mandates that employees spend at least 20% of their time doing “what they believe will benefit Google most.” While these passion projects make major contributions to marquis Google products, such as Gmail and AdSense, their biggest impact is in creating highly engaged Googlers. Talented employees are passionate. Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction, but many managers want people to work within a little box. These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. This fear is unfounded. Studies have shown that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm.

They don’t make things fun. 

If people aren’t having fun at work, then you’re doing it wrong. People don’t give their all if they aren’t having fun, and fun is a major protector against brownout. The best companies to work for know the importance of letting employees loosen up a little. Google, for example, does just about everything it can to make work fun—free meals, bowling allies, and fitness classes, to name a few. The idea is simple: if work is fun, you’ll not only perform better, but you’ll stick around for longer hours and an even longer career.

Bringing It All Together

Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.