It should come as no surprise that rationality is correlated with more effective decisions and politics is correlated with less effective decisions (Dean and Sharfman).

If you think about the role your managers play you’ll see that it is mostly social and political rather than fundamentally analytical. By the way, this raises a question on how we promote and recruit managers.

Everyone states that they do not like internal politics yet almost everyone plays the game. Stop it because you are damaging the business you rely on and creating a work environment that is hurting others and yourself.

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