Can you be a better manager by stepping back and letting teams manage themselves? As strange as this may sound, the answer is yes. Often managers stop all over the landscape like monsters in a 1950’s B-movie. Small teams actually work better when there is less management over them, and this has as much to do with the way ordinary people interact as it does in how managers misalign their abilities with what they expect their job to be. In this episode of The Art of Management podcast Jack Skeels chats with author Steve Prentice and together they cover some surprising but highly effective new approaches that managers can take to maximize their teams’ productivity.
Lazy gets a bad rap. Managing and managers can be costly to your organization’s productivity (listen to episode 2.1, The Natural Tax of Managing) and in fact less
The answer is a pretty-much unqualified “yes.” Does it need to be that way? Of course not, but it is not easy. Meetings were horrible prior to 2020, and though
Many meetings are like unpleasant dinner guests who have come uninvited. They intrude on your productive time, drone on with unnecessary conversation, and you can’t wait for them to
You know less about managing than you think. These misperceptions and fallacies include theidea that managing creates productivity, that managers can solve everything, that more managing equals better managing, and
Assemblers, architects, and the collapse of the formulation premium
Most of what we call knowledge work is formulation.
Not content production. Not information processing. Formulation — the act of applying individual
Speed has always been structural. AI just makes that impossible to ignore.
Most AI pilots return improvements somewhere around 10%. That's not nothing, but it's chump
Jack Skeels, Working paper - February 2026
Abstract
Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) explains firm boundaries and governance structures as mechanisms for minimizing coordination costs under uncertainty, opportunism, and bounded rationality.
If you follow the headlines, you would think the U.S. job market is unraveling. Mass layoffs. AI replacing humans. A future where hiring people is already a mistake. A
