MANAGEMENT WISDOM FROM DIRTY HARRY

Well, Clint Eastwood actually:

"If you hire the right people, you can give them the responsibility and then keep your mouth shut and get your pay cheque"

After years of doubting, I now take this as an inviolable truth. So if it's not working for you, get the right people and keep your mouth shut.

HOLIDAYS? TAKE AS MANY AS YOU WANT...

I've been struggling to work out a holiday policy for staff at my current interim GM assignment. Making it 'fair' seems to have the inevitable consequence of making it more complex and less practical.

Then I came across Netflix:
Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want – and it works.

What a great endorsement of individual responsibility. Although I'm not sure we're ready for it, Netfilx's radical policy certainly stopped me in my tracks and is making me re-think the whole issue...

WHY FORGIVE OR FORGET?

I've always thought of forgiveness as a big effort which is great for the person that's wronged you - it's let them off the hook - but with not much in it for me, apart from a sanctimonious feeling of superiority as I've been "the bigger person".

Well, my latest revelation is that it's all cobblers. It's nothing to do with the other person at all. It's actually none of their business whether I forgive them or not.

BUT, forgiving and forgetting is great for me as it immediately banishes all those dreadful feelings of anger, hurt, bitterness and being a victim, and releases me from the burden of carrying them around with me. So forgiveness is health-promoting and utterly selfish. And what's wrong with that?