Mats Alvesson

Achieve more by doing less… At work, we often feel weighed down by an excess of initiatives, meetings, training, and targets. Over-enthusiastic executives, interfering consultants, and demanding stakeholders often get in the way of doing the ‘real work’. This leaves us feeling overwhelmed but underproductive. The Art of Less offers ideas for how to create a more effective and efficient...

Something strange is happening in our knowledge economy: organisations everywhere are encouraging smart people to do stupid things. At its extremes, this kind of systematic stupidity can be catastrophic: witness the institutional blindness in financial services that led to the crisis of 2008. But we can all relate to more everyday examples of losing touch with the need to question...

Today's organisations are increasingly complex with many structures, practices and rules to follow. While the organisational head—a knowing administrative class—becomes larger, the space for people doing the core job of the organisation to think outside the box and take personal responsibility shrinks. How can we tackle this and give workers more space to use their judgement? Drawing on cases from...