10 Years of ManageMagazine: On Noise and Trust

Many of you reading ManageMagazine are ambitious leaders and managers, or are on your way to becoming one. I think about you often, wondering: Where do you get your knowledge about leadership today? Who do you listen to? And how do you decide whose advice to trust?

Ten years ago, I founded ManageMagazine with a simple ambition: To make valuable research and expertise freely accessible to the people who could put it to use.

Building a Bridge Between Research and Practice

Having spent years researching organizations and working with organizational practitioners, I had become increasingly frustrated by the distance between what we know about organizations and what happens inside them.

Research knew a great deal about what makes organizations work. Practice used very little of it.

Much of that valuable knowledge remained locked inside expensive academic journals, written primarily for other academics. Meanwhile, leaders and managers were making consequential decisions every day without access to knowledge that might help them make better ones.

I wanted to build a bridge between those two worlds.

And so ManageMagazine was born.

From the beginning, the idea was to bring you high-quality research and practical expertise in an approachable language, with most of the jargon left out. Knowledge you could read, understand, reflect on, and put to work.

It should take less time to read, without sacrificing substance.

The Noise Then, and the Noise Now

There was noise in 2016, too. Plenty of it. Advice without evidence, frameworks without foundations, confident claims nobody could trace back to anything.

What I set out to build was a trustworthy bridge between research and practice.

Not because readers cannot distinguish good information from bad. But spotting quality takes time, and nobody has much of it.

You cannot spend half an hour checking every half hour of reading.

So someone has to do the screening. That is part of our job. We examine the research, work with researchers and experienced practitioners, challenge arguments, and make complex ideas accessible without losing their substance.

Today, the need is even greater.

AI has made content cheap, fast, and endless. Much of it looks fine. Much of it is fine, on the surface. But the race to the bottom in quality is real, and I think it touches something beyond quality.

It touches integrity.

Because publishing knowledge comes with a responsibility for its accuracy, not merely its appearance of credibility.

When Knowledge Only Looks Like Knowledge

There is a particular problem with AI-generated information.

When we know the research, it is easy to spot AI telling a story that no researcher ever wrote. We recognize the errors immediately.

But when we ask about research we do not know, what allows us to filter out the mistakes?

And the misrepresentations can be substantial.

I once asked ChatGPT to summarize my own research paper. I recognized hardly any of the points it presented. Instead, it confidently told me about fictional research it apparently guessed my paper was about.

The writer Michael Crichton called this the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: We spot the errors on topics we know, and then trust the next story on topics we don’t.

That should give us something to think about.

The Future Belongs to Discernment

I believe the future belongs less to speed and more to discernment

I believe the future belongs less to speed and more to discernment

When noise floods every channel, a leader’s first job is filtering. Deciding what deserves attention, what deserves further examination, and what does not.

We talk endlessly about speed, agility, and keeping up with change. But what happens when we become exceptionally fast at absorbing information without becoming equally good at judging its quality?

Discernment requires awareness, curiosity, critical thinking, and the willingness to question what appears convincing.

And it requires sources that help us think more clearly, rather than simply telling us what to think.

And our choices matter.

Every view, every like, every subscription is a vote.

What we surround ourselves with shapes us. That goes for the people we follow, the ideas we absorb, and the sources we trust.

Those choices influence how we understand the world, how we make decisions, and ultimately how we lead.

Ten Years of Trust. Thank You.

Our readership has grown slowly but steadily over the years. In the past year alone, 127,000 of you chose to read ManageMagazine.

I think of ManageMagazine as a carefully curated reading and mailing list for leaders and managers, made publicly accessible to anyone who wants to learn.

For ten years, readers across the world have given us their time and attention. That is not something I take lightly.

Thank you.

And thank you to every researcher, expert, and contributor who trusted us with their work.

Our authors share their knowledge for free. We bring it to you for free. And for ten years, we have done it without a single advertisement.

Free access to knowledge has always been personal to me. I grew up in a home where money was scarce, and libraries gave me access to a world of knowledge I could not otherwise afford.

That experience has stayed with me. Whenever someone suggests that valuable knowledge should come at a price, an alarm goes off inside me.

I believe valuable knowledge should be accessible to anyone who wants to learn, regardless of their position, education, or financial means.

What Gives Me Hope

The noise will not go away.

But discernment is contagious. A leader who asks “Where does this come from?” gives everyone else permission to ask it too. A team that can trust its sources of knowledge experiences greater freedom to act. Moreover, an organization where people can question the truth is a healthier place to work.

That is where I see hope. Not in the noise getting quieter, but in leaders who refuse to let it make their decisions for them.

So here is my anniversary challenge to you:

Choose your sources with care. Choose the voices you listen to. And remember that what you give your attention to is shaping who you become.

Thank you for being part of our first ten years.

Ten years on, I believe in this work more than ever. And we will keep doing it.

Our vision remains the same:

Creating healthy organizations of tomorrow

Warm regards,

Vibeke Vad Baunsgaard, PhD
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
ManageMagazine