Tag Archives: management

Public employee pensions have taken on too much risk. This entry explains the mechanics of pension funds and visualizes the surprising amount of risk associated with apparently “reasonable” investment return targets. Full entry→

The guru says management is “about people.” But this is a truth that misses the point. The extraordinary performance of today’s society is not because people are more motivated than in past era. It is because modern managers do much more than motivate and control behavior—they organize and direct innovation and they analyze and design better ways of organizing work. Full entry→

Strategy work involves large stakes and strategic decisions mobilize large chunks of resources. If there is a lack of integrity in the system, it becomes difficult to design good strategies. Any choice necessarily shifts resources from some uses to other Full entry→

One consequence of chain-link logic is quality matching. Quality matching means that the most economical approach is to balance the qualities of the chain-linked factors. That is, the presence of low quality factors reduces the incentive to invest in improving Full entry→

In 2002 Fannie Mae gave CEO Franklin Raines a salary of just under $1 million, a bonus of $3.3 million, stock options worth $6.7 million, and a “long-term” incentive payment of $7.2 million. These non-salary payments were each geared to Full entry→