Many workers focus their hopes on climbing the hierarchy of their organisations. The prospect of higher pay helps explain their ambition, but so does the greater status that comes with each successive title. This scramble can often end in disappointment. The Peter principle, developed by Laurence Peter for a book published in 1969, states that workers get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. It makes perfect sense. If you are good at your job, you rise up the career ladder. Eventually, there will be a job you are not good at and at that point your career will stall. The logical corollary (推论) is that any senior staff members who have been in their job for an extended period are incompetent. There is another problem with chasing promotion. A recent study found that companies have a strong tendency to promote the best sales people. Convincing others to buy goods and services is a useful skill, requiring charisma and persistence. But, as the authors of the study point out, these are not the same capabilities as the strategic planning and administrative competence needed to lead a sales team. The research then looked at what happened after these super-sales people were promoted. Their previous sales performance was actually a negative indicator of managerial success. The sales growth of workers assigned to the star sellers was 7.5 percentage points lower than for those whose managers were previously weaker performers. Scott Adams, the cartoonist, described this problem in his book, "The Dilbert Principle". In his world, the least competent people get promoted because these are the people you don't want to do the actual work. It is foolish to promote the best salesperson or computer programmer to a management role, since the company will then be deprived of unique skills. Bartleby (a character in an English novel) is not an expert at climbing the greasy pole. In part, that is because he has observed a variant on the Peter and Dilbert principles; what might be dubbed the Bartleby curse. People get promoted until they reach a level when they stop enjoying their jobs. At this point, it is not just their competence that is affected; it is their happiness as well. The trick to avoiding this curse is to stick to what you like doing. If you like writing articles, editing other people's work may not give you the same degree of satisfaction.

There's no doubt that work deadlines can be stressful. When you have too many, you can feel overwhelmed. Yet there's no question deadlines can serve a positive psychological function—after all, without them, many students might never even finish their work. For instance, in 2015, when the US National Science Foundation dropped its usual twice-yearly deadlines for grant submissions in geoscience (地球科学), as part of an attempt to help the overburdened review system, the effect was dramatic. Annual submissions fell by 59%; without the pressure of a deadline, it seems many scientists lacked the motivation to deliver their applications. Social psychologist Nira Liberman and her colleagues recently demonstrated the motivating force of knowing when a task will be finished. They recruited dozens of undergrads to complete thousands of trials of a tricky computer-based mental task that required constant concentration. The whole boring exercise took about 90 minutes to complete. Crucially, the researchers provided half the participants with constant feedback on their progress through the exercise. The other participants, in contrast, had no idea how many more trials or blocks they had to do. There was a striking difference in the performance of the two groups—the students who knew how much further they had to go reached a superior level of peak performance in terms of their speed and accuracy; they took shorter breaks between blocks and yet they said they felt less fatigued. "We think that participants in our experiment who did not know when the task would end conserved their effort," Nira Liberman said. "In situations of uncertainty people tend to think of the 'worst case scenario'—so in our study they made a grim estimate of how much energy they needed to conserve." In contrast, she added, because the other group knew when the task was going to end, they were able to perform an "end spurt (最后冲刺)", similar to how runners are able to ramp up their effort when they see the finishing line in the distance. "Deadlines and progress monitoring help keep us in focus and advance our work," Liberman says. Managers may want to think about giving their home-working staff deadlines to work to in order to help their focus. Such top-down deadlines are not without risks, however. They can rob work of its inherent reward and make staff stressed and feel they do not have autonomy. So, it's a balancing act.

Few adults would place shorter break times high up their list of concerns about schools. Some of them may have shone at football but many will remember hours spent pointlessly milling around the playground. For a minority of children, now as then, breaks are dreadful (令人不快的). If you don't have many friends, or aren't part of the group you would like to join, the experience of leaving the classroom to spend time with your peers can be demoralising. Worse is the opportunity that gaps between lessons, and relative absence of supervision, can create for fighting or bullying. But news that breaks have continued to diminish, two decades after researchers first flagged this issue up, is awful. Socialising matters, and it matters that the people in charge of schools think it matters. The facts are that a quarter of English secondary schools now give pupils 35 minutes or less to eat their lunch, while afternoon breaks are close to extinction. At the same time, children report having less opportunity to socialise with their classmates outside school. Parents' heightened anxiety surrounding children's safety, some of it justified, is widely understood to have reduced opportunities for playing outside or unsupervised at weekends and evenings. The attractions of gaming and social media have contributed to a shift in leisure as a whole. Now we know that during the school day, too, some young people have lost the chance to interact with each other: to play games, run around, exchange news. Rising obesity is perhaps the most obvious objection. Exam stress and mental illness among teenagers are others. But the argument for breaks should not only be about damage limitation. School is for education, but even the most knowledge-focused headteacher knows that social life is an aspect of this. School is where people learn to make friends and rub along with others. It's during childhood that we develop our characters and interests; our ability to hold and express views. All of this is part of the preparation for adult life. People of all ages need a chance to rest, and we should encourage children to grow up regarding this as their right. Most of those surveyed said lunchtimes made them "very happy indeed". Grown-ups deserve that break and pleasure too.

Recent surveys show that managers tend to consider restrictions and a lack of resources as the main obstacles to innovation. This common wisdom suggests removing all constraints: by getting rid of rules and boundaries, creativity, and innovative thinking will thrive. One research, however, challenges this wisdom and reveals that managers can innovate better by embracing constraints. When there are no constraints on the creative process, self-satisfaction sets in, and people follow what psychologists call the path-of-least-resistance—they go for the most intuitive idea that comes to mind rather than investing in the development of better ideas. Constraints, in contrast, provide focus and a creative challenge that motivates people to search for and connect information from different sources to generate novel ideas for new products, services, or business processes. Therefore, managers can embrace and use a variety of constraints. These constraints take some forms. Examples include procedures on seeking early market and technological feedback, or guidelines on how small cross-functional work teams should interact. But managers also need to be mindful about imposing too many constraints. When a creative task is too constraining, employees' motivation is hampered. If the space within which creative ideas are generated becomes too narrow, it is harder to form novel connections and insights—both of which are vital for creativity. Hence, the key for fostering creativity and innovation in your organization is to strike a balance by formulating different types of constraints. Not all constraints are under managerial control. Here, it is important to realize that the same constraint may be interpreted in different ways: as a motivating challenge or as a frustrating roadblock (路障). This is where managers may mobilize their leadership abilities and influence how employees interpret constraints through communication and feedback. By framing constraints as creative challenges, managers can build an understanding of constraints as positives, and thus invite more creativity. Such framing of constraints is particularly important because not all employees naturally embrace constraints. Some need to be convinced that constraints help by providing focus and direction. One way to do this is by setting "flexible constraints": some non-essential constraints may be included as a 'nice-to-have' rather than a 'must-have'. Such flexible limitations provide a challenge for those employees who are up to it while also still engaging those who might shy away from the increased difficulty.

In the film "Glengarry Glen Ross", a group of American property salesmen are forced into a contest to maximize sales. The top two will get prizes; the bottom two will be fired. The play comes across as a critique of the corrupting effect of "dog-eat-dog" capitalism and putting performance above all else. But is competition between employees an effective way of improving overall outcomes for business? Two researchers, Jan Woike and Sebastian Hafenbradl, try to answer the question. They tested whether performance rankings helped or hindered group effort. Their approach was to use a "public goods" game in which participants are given tokens which they can invest. They had the choice of investing in an individual project or investing collectively. Two different versions of the game were played. In both games returns were higher if everyone collaborated. But in one version, investing in the individual project improved the relative ranking of the participant, even though the returns to both the individual and the group were lower. Participants included students and experienced managers. The researchers observed no significant difference in the way the two groups played the game. What mattered was the form of feedback. In one version of the game, individuals were told how well they scored and how well they were performing relative to the rest of the group. In another, they were informed about how well the group as a whole was performing. Predictably, the second feedback mechanism led to more cooperation. Less obviously, information on individual performance relative to fellow group members led players to favour moving up the pecking order over not just their group's collective returns, but also over their material wellbeing. They were willing to give up guaranteed financial gains; achieving "status" was more important. This result has implications for most organisations. "Ranking feedback, which is often used in organisational settings, prompts people to perceive even situations with cooperative outcome as competitive," Jan Woike and Sebastian Hafenbradl write. People may not be innately cooperative or competitive; they may simply respond to cues set by the organisation they work for. Businesses need to compete with their rivals but within the firm, cooperation is normally much more useful than competitive rivalry; a house divided against itself, cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln said.