This document provides a satirical list of 11 ways for managers to stifle creativity and innovation in their organizations. It suggests embracing new ideas without implementing them, taking credit for others' ideas, creating barriers between groups, pretending to know more than employees, micromanaging work, withholding praise, and over-emphasizing bureaucracy. The overall message is a critique of authoritarian management styles that inhibit new thinking.

1. Based on Managing & Organizations - Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis (2005)

2. 10: When the proposed idea is not
radical enough, just say that the
idea is not really new – and that
someone else already did it
Pet Shop Boys: Actually (1987)

3. 9: When the proposed idea is too
radical, you can always argue that
no one has done it before – and
that there might be reasons for this

4. 8: Embrace new ideas when
you talk, but do not do
anything about them

5. 7 Be the exclusive
spokesperson for
every new idea,
regardless of
whether it is your
own or not

6. 6: Never talk to
employees on a
personal level,
except for annual
meetings – at
which you praise
your social and
communicative
leadership skills

7. 5: Create boundaries between
decision-makers, technical
staff, and creative minds.
Make sure that they
speak different
languages

8. 4: Always pretend to know more than
anybody around you. Especially be
suspicious when people from below
come up with ideas. You know better!

9. 3:Make sure that
creative staff do a
lot of technical and
detailed work.
Make sure that they
do their own
bookkeeping, and
count everything
you can count as
often as possible

10. 2: Run daily checks on
the progress of
everyone’s work. Be
critical (they love it!)
and withhold positive
feedback, which would
only encourage them to
do things that are
potentially dangerous

11. 1: Police your employees by every procedural
means that you can devise. Insist that they stick
to the rules of good old bureaucracy and fill in
many forms that need to be signed by almost
every senior manager in the organization