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Idea 45 - Tipping point   The combative former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously used the term 'tipping point' to describe the position that the Iraq war had not yet reached. On his and many, many other lips, 'tipping point' has passed its own tipping point, and business has leapt aboard the bandwagon.   A quick dance around the Web reveals the term - usually prefaced by 'Have we reached the .. .' - applied to the Iraq war, opinion on the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, online media, oil, various proprietary brands of software, online advertising, online video and autism. It also shows that a surprising number of businesses have hijacked it as a trading name, including advertising agencies, marketing agencies, training companies and, bizarrely, an IT security business.   It was coined by US political scientist Morton the late 1950s. He found that white families would stay for a while after the first few black families moved in, but the

 Idea 44 - Theories X & Y (and Theory Z) Management's ideas about motivating employees have changed a bit since scientific management first considered how to make workers more efficient. Today, most managers would at least pay lip service to the idea that employees are human beings, with human needs and aspirations, and that you need to recognize this to get the best from them. This may seem obvious today, but as a management precept it owes much to Douglas McGregor and his Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X and Theory Yare a double act - a Mr Nasty and Mr Nice of human resource management - that leave you in no doubt as to which McGregor prefers, even though he insists that the optimal management style should draw from both. McGregor believed that the way a company was managed reflected its managers' view of human nature. His theories look at how satisfying the needs of employees can be used to motivate them, though each makes very dif(erent assumptions about what those needs