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Independent business blogs are blogs that aren't supported by an organization like a magazine, newspaper, company, or business school. Those people provide lots of great content, but they don't need any additional exposure. In this post, every week, I bring you posts of quality from excellent bloggers that don't get as much publicity.

This week, I'm pointing you to posts on a random walk down management street, cost control is not the only thing, do you really need stars, great bosses, and becoming one of them.

From Great Leadership: Management Best Practices or Just an Illusion?
"Thanks to Marc Effron, from the Talent Management Network, for bring this to our attention: Recent research may shake your faith in management gurus who claim that specific business practices cause high performance. In A Random Search for Excellence, researchers report that companies' sustained high performance may simply be luck."

Wally's Comment: This report seems to echo the premise of the book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by economist Burton Malkiel. That book seemed to argue that it's impossible to outperform the market, but offered investment strategies based on "life cycle investing." The Deloitte team that produced the "Random Search" paper does almost the same thing. They seem to argue that the work of writers like Tom Peters or Jim Collins is not truly "scientific," especially when compared with Deloitte's work. But they also say that you can read those books as "fables," a telling choice of words that seems to gloss over the fact that "fables" are a time-tested way of sharing wisdom.

That seems true of the "fables" Deloitte identifies. You can pump up a book's sales with publicity for a short term, but when a book has been selling well for more than a quarter century, the odds are pretty good that people are getting value from it.

This is an excellent post about a provocative "study." The comments are worth reading, too.

From KnowHR: Are You Willing to Lose Your Best and Brightest Over a Bag of Pretzels?
"There’s an important lesson to be learned here, and it isn’t that you should just give everything away forever and ever. The lesson is that if you want to keep your best and brightest, you sometimes have to continue to provide the intangibles."

Wally's Comment: Again and again, managers ignore human nature and inflict damage on team spirit and morale in the name of cost accounting. Remember Circuit City? How about Home Depot? The fact is that people are what make the business go. Ignore that at your peril.

From HR Capitalist: When Teams That Gel Make Stars Expendable
"Do you have a star system or a team system? Or a hybrid of both?"

Wally's Comment: Personally, I want to see a workplace where there's less reliance on stars. Instead, I'd like more systems that help individuals and teams succeed. Kris Dunn has some cogent comments about how team dynamics can be affected by a star in the midst and what happens in the team when a star returns, after, supposedly, saving someone else.

From Compensation Cafe: All I Want for Christmas
"I once had a really great boss.  She spoke honestly, listened sincerely, never took credit for someone else’s work and balanced her own heavy workload with coaching and developing the people on her team."

Wally's Comment: Laura Schroeder understands the people thing. This insightful and delightful post is about how that people thing works.

From Bob Sutton: The Boss's Journey: The Path to Simplicity and Competence
"Being a great boss is a lot tougher than it looks.  I realized this a few months back when one of my former students came back to chat.  When he took my introduction to organizational behavior class, he routinely ripped apart his former bosses and many bosses we studied in class, calling them “lazy,” “idiotic,” and “incompetent.”  He sure changed his tune after getting his first job as a boss -- heading a small product development team.   During our conversation, he admitted that he needed “a little therapy” and confessed “This is really a tough job.  I am confused and keep screwing-up.” This new boss was in the second phase of the journey required to develop true expertise in any craft."

Wally's Comment: Everyone may want a great boss for Christmas, but Bob Sutton reminds us that it's a long and winding road to management excellence and just when you think you've climbed the mountain of expertise, you see another, higher, range just ahead.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.