4751 Posts Found

The best leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality, ethics, and courage. These are the four intelligences, the four forms of perceiving, the languages for communicating that are required to achieve meaningful, sustained results.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Koestenbaum | Subjects: Leadership, Management

Reflection doesn’t take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action — to be a leader. Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors: competence (your specialty, your skills, your know-how) and authenticity (your identity, your character, your attitude). When companies and people get stuck, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Koestenbaum | Subjects: Decision Making, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

We’re a memo culture, not a meeting culture, and we put a lot of time into long-form documentation. Why? My belief is that content scales; your time doesn’t. I’ve personally written many hundreds of pages of strategy and documentation to align the team. Keep in mind what content replaces: taking meetings to explain the same material over and over again, emailing people, meetings, calls, seemingly … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Corcos | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the challenges of leading remote workers is ensuring that they share a clear understanding of four key areas: their goals, their individual roles, the resources at their disposal, and the norms that will govern their interactions. This alignment can be hard to achieve when employees are co-located. But it becomes even more difficult when they are working separately and at a distance.

Content: Quotation | Author: Theodore Kinni | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Map and understand the larger system in which you operate. Businesses operate within larger economic, social, and environmental systems, which have feedback loops in both directions — businesses’ actions affect the larger systems, and vice versa. Though predicting the exact behavior of such systems is rarely feasible, leaders can improve their understanding by explicitly mapping out the most impactful forces (accelerators or inhibitors of the system’s workings) … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Kevin Whitaker, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Strategy

When I go to my manager asking for her to provide feedback on a resource or simply take a look at something, I appreciate that she challenges me to share my intent and clarify what I’m looking for in a response. This helps streamline communication and prevent any misunderstanding, and that clarity of thought is something I always remember when I’m making an ask.

Content: Quotation | Author: Lauren Jones | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

When my managers have been great, they’ve looked at my situation with compassion above all, above what they (or the company) need from me. The same goes for when I’ve been my best as a manager. That doesn’t mean the company’s priorities don’t prevail — it just means I feel acknowledged as a human being in whatever the situation is.

Content: Quotation | Author: Devan Goldstein | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

The best managers are incredibly consistent — they’re almost always on time, follow-up, and close the loop on open items. The diligence and consistency seem straightforward but are rare in a leader.

Content: Quotation | Author: Liz Kosinski | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Since businesses face more aggressive competition than ever before and have to assume increasing risk, they need to prioritize their deployment of resources even more carefully and govern their wide-ranging global activities more diligently. Smart planning has never been as important as it is today.

In this Focus, we delve into the changes and challenges that have altered the context in which companies must now undertake … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alexander Roos, Fabrice Roghé, James Tucker, Marc Rodt, Sebastian Stange | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Management

Powerful questions are open-ended questions. When you ask a closed-ended question, like a yes or no query, you cut yourself and your interlocutor off from the opportunity of deep listening. Why are open-ended questions important? They can lead to discovery, insight or even a commitment that fuels further action. Managers must become accustomed to asking good open-ended questions. The practice naturally engages partnership.

[…]

The power … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Iffet Türken | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior

The MBA has been the quintessential managerial education program and has supplied more ready and trained managers to U.S. corporations than any other graduate program. While MBA curricula are evolving to meet the changing needs of corporations, the authors assert that the pace of change must accelerate to keep the MBA degree future-proof. Otherwise, the danger is what Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, described: “When … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Anup Srivastava, Vijay Govindarajan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, MBA Related

Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Kelley | Subjects: Management, Planning, Strategy

At most large companies, the performance management system is a hodgepodge of legacy systems. KPIs are not aligned across the organization. Different information systems categorize data differently. Decision rights as to who decides what data to collect are so distributed that there is no consistent approach to reporting across the entire company.

As a result, the finance organization spends an inordinate amount of time simply putting … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alexander Roos, James Tucker, Jeff Kotzen, Julien Ghesquieres, Marc Rodt, Tim Nolan | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Finance, Management

Too often HR or legal policies solve for the exception — but then you force everyone to operate in a worse environment simply because someday there could be a bad actor who does a bad thing. I’d much rather solve for the 99%.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Legal, Management

Too many employers pay too little heed to the needs of the lower earners in their company. Here’s why—and how—they should shift gears.

Content: Article | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Tera Allas | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Usually, post-mortems is the word you use to describe analyzing the things that don’t go well, but we do post-mortems when things go well, too. That is the way in which you continually build this muscle of analyzing the outcome and asking what all of the inputs were that led you there and try to do your best in the moment when everything’s fresh in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

The thing that I’ve noticed about OKRs is the objectives aren’t prioritized in most companies. At most companies, the energy of OKRs is really around the key results. Everybody gets very focused on the metrics. And I actually think the most important part of our BPM is not the measures, it’s the priorities.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

If I can start to get people to really work that muscle — the curiosity before judgment, the listening before developing an action plan — I know I can get them down a road where they become empathetic leaders and amazing listeners who will create very safe, transparent environments for people to feel seen and heard.

Content: Quotation | Author: Mark Frein | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

At early-stage companies, where you’re still wrestling with product/market fit and building up the company foundation, management often falls to the back burner, leaving folks to generally figure it all out for themselves. However, many of the cracks that emerge as startups scale can be traced back to those missing managerial cornerstones.

One root cause? Manager training, which is largely ignored by startups as a BigCo bucket … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Johnathan Nightingale, Melissa Nightingale | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Management, Training & Development

I learned some useful things … though they were mostly about what not to do. I learned that it’s better for technology companies to be run by product people than sales people (though sales is a real skill and people who are good at it are really good at it), that it leads to bugs when code is edited by too many people, that cheap … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy