367 Posts Found

You’re trying to understand what makes something successful, but you’re only studying successful things. But of course, most of the things that successful people do are also done by unsuccessful people. So all successful people have breakfast, right? Maybe having breakfast is the key to being successful. Well, it turns out that’s not a very predictive feature. But you already know that if you study … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Duncan Watts | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Companies can become more agile by designing their organizations both to drive speed and create stability.

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Kirsten Weerda, Wouter Aghina | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Most executives today know their enterprises should be aligned. They know their strategies, organizational capabilities, resources, and management systems should all be arranged to support the enterprise’s purpose. The challenge is that executives tend to focus on one of these areas to the exclusion of the others, but what really matters for performance is how they all fit together. Consider the following questions, ideally with … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Trevor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Most companies understand the importance of having highly effective managers, but few invest heavily in training to help them get there. One reason is that it’s difficult to measure and quantify what good management actually looks like. While there has been a lot of great work done to identify qualitative traits of great managers — they create trust, focus on strengths, instill accountability, avoid politics, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ryan Fuller | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Personal Development

You’re a good boss. You care about your people. You have vision. You inspire others. But do you have what it takes to be a “superboss”?

Content: Article | Authors: C.J. Prince, Sydney Finkelstein | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Best Practices, Leadership, Management

Investments in traditional leadership development are often misguided and a waste of money. It’s not that development itself isn’t important. But there’s little evidence that much of it works. I’ll share some findings from a study my colleagues and I just completed at Deloitte. We surveyed and interviewed executives from more than 2,000 companies, asking extensive questions about how they develop leaders, how their companies … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Josh Bersin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

It can be easy to reduce malfeasance to the acts of a few bad apples. This kind of thinking absolves the organization, and even the larger system, of blame — it’s a comfortable place for those invested in the status quo. I take a lesson from a healthcare system where I conducted a number of interviews earlier this year. Their quality ratings had gone from … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accountability, Best Practices, Management

Management practice acts exactly as a new technology might in giving companies competitive advantage—and there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, says a new study by Raffaella Sadun and colleagues.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael Blanding, Raffaella Sadun | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Although good execution is essential for defending market share in fiercely contested markets, and thus for capitalizing on the corporate portfolio’s full-market-growth potential, it is usually not the key differentiator between companies that are growing quickly and those that are growing slowly. These findings suggest that executives ought to complement the traditional focus on execution and market share with more attention to where a company … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Mehrdad Baghai, S. Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Does following Peters and Waterman’s eight principles guarantee you business success? Almost certainly not. One big problem with their research was that they only looked at successful companies. Knowing that all successful companies have something in common tells us nothing unless we also know that unsuccessful companies lack those things. We might find that all successful business founders displayed an interest in entrepreneurship from an … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jess Whittlestone | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

Though we’re unlikely to ever distill success into a neat formula or set of principles, there is an alternative approach, which might bring more promise. [Jerker] Denrell suggests that rather than trying to demystify success, we should spend more time studying failure, which may come down to much more consistent principles. Understanding what not to do, if based on more solid evidence, could be much … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jess Whittlestone | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

The most farsighted enterprises have mastered five unconventional practices for building and using distinctive capabilities.

Editor’s Note: Perhaps it’s just me, but these capabilities don’t seem particularly unconventional. They are also like many secrets-to-success studies in that they look good on paper, but offer little in the way of practical recommendations for realizing them. And, you have the ever-present correlation-causation problem. At the least, it … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Cesare R. Mainardi, Paul Leinwand | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Google has launched what it calls a “curated platform” on the Web for sharing management ideas—both its own and those of other companies. The site features research-backed examples of how Google approaches things like hiring and anti-bias training, providing free public tools such as slide decks and checklists that the company uses internally. The site will also feature other companies: case studies of employers like … [ Read more ]

Content: Online Resource | Sources: Google, re:Work | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

It takes a mix of leaders and talent to pursue a variety of growth strategies simultaneously. Few executives can do it all.

Content: Article | Authors: Asmus B. Komm, Katharina Herrmann, Sven Smit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

Our frustration with most success studies is not that any particular directive is wrong. Rather, somewhat ironically, it is that all too often many researchers offer prescriptions that could never be wrong; that is, their claims cannot be proven to be false.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

A fine-grained approach to growth is essential for making the right choices about where to compete.

Content: Article | Authors: Mehrdad Baghai, S. Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Does following best practice in strategy, marketing, operations, and organization generally make it possible for companies to increase their revenues consistently—or does that kind of growth usually require something more?

Content: Article | Authors: Caroline M. Thompson, S. Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Finance, Management, Strategy

New research makes it increasingly clear that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially.

Content: Article | Authors: Dennis Layton, Sara Prince, Vivian Hunt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Women in Business

Ten years of research reveal the best R&D strategies for the decade ahead.

Content: Article | Authors: Barry Jaruzelski, Brad Goehle, Volker Staack | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Best Practices, Innovation

I know of no systematic attempt to demonstrate the efficacy in use of any framework described in any major success study. In the absence of hard evidence, it is far more likely that whatever benefit practitioners might have perceived or realized has been the consequence of some or all of a form of placebo effect (you expect it to help, so you perceive that it … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Success / Failure