363 Posts Found

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

To understand success, it’s natural to study successful people and organizations. Thousands of business books are published each year, claiming to have done this very thing, and distilled success into a set of practical principles.

These books almost always contain an empowering message, whether explicitly or implicitly: that anyone can be successful if they just understand what it takes, and follow the key steps. The problem … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jess Whittlestone | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior

When it comes to corporate financial performance, we typically think in absolute terms, measuring ROA in percentage points. We are less accustomed to thinking of corporate performance in relative terms, but knowing a company’s relative performance is essential to setting and achieving performance improvement targets and, eventually, exceptional performance.

Editor’s Note: another excellent entry in Deloitte’s Three Rules research series; this one offers fairly intuitive … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, Rob Del Vicario | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Do the Three Rules of exceptional performance apply to smaller companies? Differences in size and ownership structure, as well as resources and the demands of explosive growth, can make for a very different set of pressures and opportunities.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, Rob Del Vicario, Robert Rosone | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Companies invest staggering sums of money on marketing with surprisingly little rigor. Because measuring and optimizing spending on marketing is notoriously difficult, companies often rely on rules of thumb, such as spending as a percentage of revenues. A recent benchmarking study conducted by BCG and Marketing Analytics indicates that these shortcuts can be imprecise and unreliable. This report describes a better approach—one that encompasses all … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jens Harsaae, Kevin Richardson, Neal Rich, Rohan Sajdeh, Ross Link | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Best Practices, Marketing / Sales