As managers we love to throw out slogans - challenge yourself outside your comfort zone, or - that engineer doesn’t really contribute a lot of work, but he is harmless…

Let’s take a look at some physical aspects of concrete, and deduct fascinating managerial insights.You need to water the concrete during the drying process - which means going against basic logic or intuition to get something better at the end.

Concrete’s tensile strength is only a 10th of its compression strength, showing that when we insist on challenging someone who is extremely proficient in a specific area, “outside of their comfort zone”, we might get very disappointing results.

And three more examples.