Leander Kahney, editor and publisher of Cult of Mac and author of the New York Times bestseller Inside Steve’s Brain, provides a fascinating interview about Steve Jobs from John Sculley, former CEO of Apple. It’s amazingly frank; among other things, Sculley suggests it was a “big mistake” to hire him to run the company when…
A few weeks ago, a newly minted manager asked my advice on how to best manage by walking around. I gave him an encouraging – but non-specific – answer. This post is my follow-up to his question. Wander frequently Your employees may worry that you’re spying on them the first few times that you show…
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that pointed out the benefits of management by walking around can be achieved without actually leaving your desk. Some examples are as follows: Management can mimic the shopping experience of a prospective customer by visiting a Web site and trying to find/buy a particular product. It’s…
After last week’s post, Scrum By Walking Around, a reader emailed to ask if I knew the the origins of the phrase management by walking around (MBWA). Rather than replying immediately based on what I believed, I spent a fair amount of time doing Web research but the results were inconclusive. Most sources credit the Hewlett-Packard culture for…
Since the title of this blog is manage by walking around, kudos to Haruka Nishimatsu, the president and CEO of Japan Air. According to a CBS News article, he practices management by walking flying around: “If management is distant, up in the clouds, people just wait for orders,” Nishimatsu told CBS News through a translator….
I generated the above word cloud using wordle on my ten most popular posts. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of word clouds, the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. While most of the larger words make sense, I’m surprised by the relative…
Since the title of this blog is “manage by walking around,” I thought I’d share a few examples of how I use that philosophy myself. While there is plenty of debate as to whether there is a difference between managing and leading, I describe myself as a leader rather than a manager. By that, I…
You can accomplish your management by walking around goals without actually walking around. The walking (or wandering) around was never the point. As I said in my initial 2006 post, For Hewlett and Packard, managing by walking around (MBWA) was a way to get everyone on the same page; what they believed was the secret…