Introduction

I managed people for over 30 years and came to realize that they are far, far more capable than we give them credit.  Early on, I believed them to have a certain maximum capability.  After changing my own management methods I learned that they were really 2 times as capable as I thought.  And later, after more changes, they turned out to be more than 4 times as capable as I had originally thought.

In my career, I successfully turned around four reasonably large organizations including a nuclear-powered cruiser and a 1300 person unionized group in New York City.  I will be blogging about the specific whats, whys and how tos I developed in the process.  I provided these to my subordinate managers so that the entire organization could allow employees to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation and commitment.  Only that way could we really achieve significant and sustained performance improvement, north of 300% per person in productivity.

The key to all this is to allow each person to develop a strong sense of ownership.  Without that, employees will treat their work as if it was a rental car, and that's the definition of a real disaster.  Have you ever caught anyone washing a rental car?

Best regards, Ben Simonton

Author Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed