9 Posts found for Author: Andrew McAfee

If you are defensive, you’re obsessed with being right. If you are open, you’re obsessed with getting it right.

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Personal Development

What we human beings do—if we’re left alone—is go create something out there in the world. Unfortunately, because we love status so much and we love to be involved, we wind up creating ever more elaborate bureaucracies. I think that’s the default that we should expect, unless we deliberately try to trim that back and make sure it never has a chance to latch onto … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Bureaucracy, Organizational Behavior

The norm of science is just a community that has come together to agree on how they’re going to resolve their arguments. They’re going to resolve them with evidence. That norm of evidence-based arguments can be brought into any company and put to work right away. We have to make a decision about what we are going to do next, how the future is going … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Culture, Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Seek the company of those who search for truth. Run from those who have found it.

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Personal Development

For us, ultra-social human beings, all you need to do to maintain a culture is put in place the pain of social exclusion. Follow the norms, and if you don’t, we’re not going to beat you to a pulp. We’re just going to exclude you. That is legitimately and truly painful to human beings. That’s the glue that holds human cultures together, is that threat … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Confidence is a great thing for a human being to have. We follow more confident people. We’re more likely to trust them, to listen to them, to ally with them. The data on this are overwhelming. And so what appears to have happened—and this is a theory that I believe; I think it holds up really well—is that we have been wired to be chronically … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

HIPPO is my new favorite business acronym. It stands for “highest-paid person’s opinion.” And it’s how most companies make most of their decisions. There could be some analysis that the data nerds did, but then they tee it up to the HIPPO. And the HIPPO essentially says, “Look. If the evidence aligns with my prior beliefs, with my intuition, with my big HIPPO gut, great, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Too often, business initiatives get mired in bureaucracy, overconfidence, and lack of ownership. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Andrew McAfee explores reasons for the dysfunction—and how to fix it.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Andrew McAfee, Raju Narisetti | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior

HBS Professor Andrew McAfee blogs about social networking software (SNS) like Facebook and its direct applicability within companies. Notably, he discusses the work of Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who wrote “The Strength of Weak Ties” (SWT) in 1973, a seminal article which argues that weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing.

Content: Article | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior