http://controlfreak.net how to spot their tricks Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:36:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Why do some managers think they are the only people who have good ideas?  Okay, maybe they don't think that way, but they certainly act like it. Here are some obvious behaviour display of this weakness: Do they automatically reject any big idea they have not had themselves? Do they always want ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/12/15/a-monopoly-of-ideas/ Setting up a straw man is one of the most blindingly obvious techniques a control freak will use in an argument. I've seen it being used so often with such success that I just cannot believe people do not pick up on it more often. There are two basic ways ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/11/30/setting-up-a-straw-man/ There you are in a meeting when someone pipes up with a problem they've spotted that needs fixing and your jaw drops open because you know perfectly well that they were the person who caused the problem in the first place. What seems really odd is that they've just lobbed the ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/11/25/but-youre-the-one-who-caused-the-problem/ Everyone has their own limit on what is good enough, what will do, what they will accept.  Some people have fairly low limits and some have extraordinarily high limits. From what I've seen, those who set the higher limits, those that really push others for things to be done well, those ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/11/10/perfection-is-the-enemy-of-the-good/ The culture of an organisation does not sustain itself. Left to its own devices culture shifts in unpredictable directions as new people arrive with different backgrounds and others, who were part of it, move on. In small places were the people don't change then maybe it can remain fairly constant, ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/10/31/sustaining-a-culture/ I love a good plan and I normally plan everything at work. It is only by an effort of will that I don't plan what order to walk down the aisles in a supermarket. After all, too much planning can be the anti-thesis of spontaneity. Most of my plans ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/10/09/stick-to-the-plan-no-matter-what/ Telling a bare faced lie can be fraught with difficulties. The most awkward one is making sure that you are not found out, which of course means that you can't give anything anyway. The best bet to avoid giving anything away is to lie in such a way that it ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/09/09/how-to-tell-a-lie/ This is a clever trick used by control freaks to get their way when they have the time to spare. It works by exploiting the frailty of human memory, or possibly just the frailty of peoples' belief in their own memory. Step one: You start by presenting the first ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/06/27/two-step-argument-trick/ Having worked fairly low down the hierarchy in some places where there was almost an epidemic of consultants, I always believed that the managers that employed them were incompetent fools. After all, in those places, the consultants didn't bring in any knowledge that didn’t exist within the company already. ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/05/14/what-price-consultants/ To some managers, knowledge is power and a lot of their power base is built by accumulating and hiding sources of information. You can get hints of this all the time - you chat to someone and discover they were talking to this manager the other day and told them something ... http://controlfreak.net/2007/05/09/a-duty-to-share-knowledge/