4751 Posts Found

No leader I’ve ever talked to has said, “I want to create the kind of environment where I can coerce everyone. I’ve also never met a single leader who says, “I want to create an organization that demands conformity.” We know that’s not going to create good results or produce innovation. And yet too often, that’s exactly what happens. There’s a reticence to examine our … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Kim Scott | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

If you don’t articulate your priorities clearly, then the people around you don’t know what their own should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you (and therefore the people around them) just by taking the guesswork out of their day-to-day life.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Iger | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Management

Most people view luck as the opposite of determinism, control, or strategic intent. But because we can often influence situations in which chance plays a role, these forces are actually linked. The first challenge is to reframe your views about luck and realize that it usually entails much more than random chance. Yes, the primary force behind luck is the way that probabilities play out, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Paul J.H. Schoemaker | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Management, Risk Management

Since 2013, First Round Review has committed itself to an annual ritual, one that serves as an opportunity to both take stock and remind ourselves of that early promise to stay tactical. Each time we turn the page to the new year, we comb through every article we published over the last one to concentrate the standout tactics into one actionable guide of advice. As … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

Our latest transformations research confirms that success remains elusive and reliant on a holistic approach. Yet some actions are especially predictive of realizing the financial benefits at stake.

Content: Article | Authors: Bill Schaninger, Brooke Weddle, Kate VanAkin, Michael Bucy | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Management

New business insights can come from changing perspectives on the company’s boundaries, resources, and time horizons. We suggest laying out the whole of the supply chain, the cradle to grave of the product life cycle, the adjacent business ecosystem, and all relevant stakeholders. Take a systems perspective to see the full ecosystem and market dynamics at work. Within this expanded business context, understand where issues … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: David Young, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Social Responsibility (ESG), Strategy

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink identifies three key motivations:

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

But these words rarely show up in job descriptions, recruitment material, performance reviews or annual meetings.

Content: Quotation | Author: Vipula Gandhi | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

OKRs only work if there is a ritual of reviewing progress and holding owners accountable for hitting their goals.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kevin Fishner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Middle managers have long had reputations as ineffective or weak supervisors. But research shows that, in fact, they’re often the people that make an organization run smoothly between hierarchies. Especially today, as companies become more reliant on virtual modes of management and communication, investing in these managers as “connecting leaders” is vital. To do so, focus on four key types of connecting leaders and their … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Zahira Jaser | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

You can either think “path forward,” or you can think “future backwards.” When you do path forward thinking, you’re trying to get ahead. When you do future backward thinking, you envision what’s going to happen in the future: “That’s where I want to be, and if I have to be there at that time, what do I have to do now to get there?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Ragy Thomas | Source: STERNbusiness (NYU) | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Why do so many great ideas just fail to take off? Executives have plenty of explanations for why their new businesses fail to scale, from poor operations to insufficient talent to simply bad luck. But in many cases, these explanations are based on gut feeling or frustration looking for an outlet, not on a deep understanding of the facts. So we have reviewed more than … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Ari Libarikian, Eike Reus, Jerome Königsfeld, Markus Berger-de León, Ralf Dreischmeier | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

Identify who among your employee base are Rainmakers (people with sales talent and an ability to manage risks), Experts (innovators with a focus on product development), or Conductors (high management talent). Capitalize on their natural talents. Develop and position them in appropriate roles on teams. Strengths-based development of your builders and teams is key to increased entrepreneurial behaviors, which, in turn, lead to higher engagement, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sangeeta Bharadwaj Badal | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Just think of a business as a process. It can be a complicated process, but essentially, it spits up outputs like revenue and profit, numbers of customers, and growth rates. To be a good operator, you can’t just focus on those output metrics — you need to identify the controllable input metrics. […] If you do the things you have control over right, it’s going … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Bryar | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Most people are actually trying pretty darn hard, and they have good intentions. So when we ran into an issue or a problem, [Jeff] Bezos would always ask, ‘Do we have a mechanism in place so it doesn’t happen again? Because if this high-performing or well-intentioned person tripped up, there’s probably a process that we need to fix.

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Bryar | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

At their core, strategy maps and scorecards describe causal chains up and down an organization, charting the stages through which final outcomes are achieved. The cause-and-effect linkages start with how the organization’s intangible assets of people, information, and culture, described within the learning and growth perspective, drive improvement in the critical processes that create the value proposition for the organization’s customers. Customer success, in turn, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: David McMillan, Robert S. Kaplan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Putting a new strategy into effect is always difficult. Andrew Campbell and Mikel Gutierrez provide a practical solution to designing the necessary changes: the Operating Model Canvas. They describe how they applied it to the merger between Siemens and Gamesa, demonstrating how this framework, along with its supporting tools, can help leaders to design changes in their organization and operations.

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew Campbell, Mikel Gutierrez | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Business Model, Business Plans, Business Rules, Management, Strategy | Companies: Gamesa, Siemens

It’s a commonly held belief, one that gets played out daily in organizations around the world: Employees who receive performance feedback are much more likely to improve their performance than those who don’t get feedback. But research tells us that it’s simply not true. Typically, performance after feedback improves only modestly — and over one-third of the time, it actually gets worse. People who receive … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Katherine Klein | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior, Training & Development

People tend not to factor their own ignorance into their decisions. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman described this phenomenon as “WYSIATI,” or “what you see is all there is.” My colleagues and I developed an antidote to this called driving to the known, which plots knowledge along two axes: what you know and what can be known. Confirmed facts are what you know. The questions … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Great meetings don’t just happen, they’re meticulously crafted. At its best, an executive meeting strengthens the bonds of your leadership team, surfaces mission-critical problems facing the business, and carves out plans for the future. But as you wade into the executive meeting waters, there are waves that can toss you around.

The executive team’s time is worth a lot, so it’s a shame to waste it. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Many companies track KPIs as a way of predicting performance.  To really exploit the predictive power of KPIs, though, you need to map how the KPIs for your key stakeholders feed into each other and ultimately into financial performance.

Content: Article | Author: Graham Kenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management