Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon, 2008

Brainstorming

Sometimes an apparently foolish idea, one that wouldn't even be mentioned in a more formal session, can turn out to be the prize. There is no evaluation of proposed ideas during the brainstorming. The evaluation phase comes later. Discourage negative comments, like "That's a dumb idea," since dumb ideas often lead others to think of smart ideas.

Peopleware

Work patrol

The most common means by which bosses defend themselves from their own people is direct physical oversight. They wander through the work areas, looking for people goofing off or for incompetence about to happen. They are the Parkinsonian Patrol, alert for people to kick.

...

If you've got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally. Any
easily separable task is a perfect opportunity. There is no real management required for such work. Send them away.

...

Such a plan will cost you some points with your own management and peers, because it's so audacious. How can you know, they'll ask you, that your people aren't loafing this very minute?
How can you be sure they won't knock off for lunch at eleven and drink away their afternoons? The simple answer is you'll know by the product they come back with.

Peopleware

Open Kimono

...the company was about to enter into a contract that was larger than anything it had ever done before. The entire staff was assembled as our corporate lawyer handed Jerry the contract and told him to read it and sign on the last page. "I don't read contracts," Jerry said, and started to sign. "Oh, wait a minute," said the lawyer, "let me go over it one more time."

...

It's heady and a little frightening to know that the boss has put part of his or her reputation into the subordinates' hands. It brings out the best in everyone. The team has something meaningful to form around. They're not just getting a job done. They're making sure that the trust that's been placed in them is rewarded. It is this kind of Open Kimono management that gives teams their best chance to form.

Peopleware

A spaghetti dinner

...good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot sub-projects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together. The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best
boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they've been "managed." These bosses are viewed by their peers as just lucky. Everything seems to break right for them. They get a fired-up team of people, the project comes together quickly, and everyone stays enthusiastic through the end. These managers never break into a sweat. It looks so easy that no one can believe they are managing at all.

Peopleware

Insecure manager

Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity. The greater the insecurity, the more frightening the idea of a clique can be. There are reasons for this: Managers are often not true members of their teams, so the loyalties that exclude them are stronger than the ones that bind them into the group. The loyalties within the group are stronger than those tying the group to the company. Then there is the awful thought that a tightly knit team may leave en masse and take all of its energy and enthusiasm over to the competition. For all these reasons, the insecure manager is threatened by cliques. He or she would feel better working with a staff of uniform plastic people, identical, interchangeable, and unbonded.

The jelled work group may be cocky and self-sufficient, irritating and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager's real goals than any assemblage of interchangeable parts could ever do.

Peopleware

Hawthorne effect

Interesting effect I've come across - Hawthorne effect.

It is said that:

The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they're being studied,[1][2] not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.

Yes! This is true. From my experience these small changes made me work better. It looks like nature of human being.