“Why the Best Managers Stop Managing”
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Title: Under New Management
Author: David Burkus
Category: Leadership & Team Building, Workplace & Company Culture
What if the best managers stopped managing altogether? Sam and Sophie dig into David Burkus's radical argument that most workplace rules—vacation policies, schedules, performance reviews—are relics of the industrial age that actually hold people back.
They walk through Burkus's alternatives: unlimited vacation that signals trust, Results-Only Work Environments (ROWE) that ditch fixed hours, bossless companies where teams self-manage, and separating pay conversations from development. They also cover the counterintuitive practice of paying new hires to quit, as Zappos does, to ensure cultural fit.
This episode is for anyone who's ever felt micromanaged or wondered why meetings and reviews exist. The takeaway: the leader's real job is to remove obstacles, not control people.
Under New Management by David Burkus. If you want the full written summary, the whole library is on 7minutebooks.com/app — over 6,000+ fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language, unlimited access from $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 lifetime.
Chapters
00:00Rethinking Vacation Policies01:23Results-Only Work Environments01:54Bossless Companies and Self-Management02:21Fixing Performance Reviews and Pay03:11Office Design, Meetings, and Paying to Quit04:50Takeaway: Trust Over Control
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