The common sense solutions that never work

摘要

One of the traps politicians regularly fall into is assuming that management is just common sense. The snag is that it's only common sense to those who don't know anything about management. Several recent measures fall foul of this, management's version of Catch-22, often in the area of pay and incentives. A good example is the government's Work Programme for getting the unemployed back into jobs. At the heart of the initiative is belief in a kind of mechanics: pull this to get that. We want to get people into employment - so pay job agencies to do just that, and only pay them when they succeed. Sounds reasonable? Except when you look at the underlying assumptions.