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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Senior management relations
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
There's an interesting article on CNet News about Sun and McNealy's management. That's not really what caught my eye though. Down near the bottom of the article is this quote from McNealy:
"The thing that scares me to death is that people are afraid to tell me what they really think," McNealy told CNET News.com in 1996.
That's a problem for lots and lots of companies - all you have to do is spend some time consulting and you'll figure that out. The "rank and file" workers have many complaints, but how many of them ever filter up to the top? In the most successful companies, I'd guess that the feedback reaches the executive offices. In too many cases, it doesn't - for a variety of reasons:
People fear repercussions for speaking their mind
People believe that management "will never listen"
Senior management is blockaded by a wall of real or perceived sychophants
It may even be the case that management would be overjoyed to hear what regular employees think - but some combination of corporate culture and people issues prevents the interaction from ever happening. It would be interesting to find out how many senior execs actually want honest feedback, but are prevented from getting it due to layers of preventative culture.
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