4751 Posts Found

We always talk about scaling companies, but companies are just collections of people. If you’re not really thoughtful about them and what they need to succeed, it’s going to be hard to succeed as a company.

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

When you are guided by consensus, it often means you are reaching the most vanilla or neutral outcomes.

Content: Quotation | Author: Noah Desai Weiss | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Alignment is the fundamental challenge with almost every large company. Communication is hard, and people are just busy. But if you can crack the code and keep your organization aligned and focused, it’s like a superpower for velocity.

Content: Quotation | Author: Noah Desai Weiss | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

What happens when a company achieves the summit? Is there nowhere to go but down? Superior performance, research shows, is neither quite as fragile nor robust as many believe—rather, it’s an attainable albeit slippery plateau. The key is to focus on profitability rather than revenue growth or value creation.

Content: Article | Author: Derek Pankratz | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

One of the conflicts inherent in the planning process is that people want to feel successful, to be part of a winning team, so they naturally set realistic or achievable goals. In contrast, the CEO wants to challenge the organization to push the limits and set stretch goals.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Management, Planning, Strategy

Team triumphs individuals. This is key. You want to have a unicorn culture eventually, but the team is more important. This implies that probably we need to redefine high-performing individuals.

What is a high-performing individual? This is what the unicorn idea does. A high-performing individual is not just the one who achieves business results. Unfortunately, too many times that’s the key criteria, the ability to perform … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mauro Porcini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

We apply the three field tests of design thinking to every function of the company. The first is desirability, people, and human beings—what they want. The second is visibility: the technology of and applied to your product, plus process and manufacturing. Does it make sense for my company? Can I scale it up? The third lens is the business lens, the viability. Do I have … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mauro Porcini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

This is one of the problems of focusing on the short term. You have many leaders that rotate every two, three years, so the idea that they’re going to invest part of their budget in something that’s going to generate value for the next manager, it’s not that attractive. So we need to rethink the way we reward these leaders and connect them to long-term … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mauro Porcini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Leading companies are using transformation to achieve profitable growth—enabled by specific behaviors.

Content: Article | Authors: Drew Goldstein, Louisa Greco, Preeya Mody, Rebecca Doherty, Sandra Sancier-Sultan, Yolanda Zonno | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

As managers, our jobs are simple: Get people to say what they’re going to do, get them to do what they said, and make sure they understand how what they’re doing maps up to making the company win.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Successful leaders keep an eye on the personality traits that have helped them achieve their success. Strengths without self-awareness become weaknesses. Strengths examined regularly become superpowers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Emily Anhalt | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development

Companies should seek ways to track real-time employee experiences and gain insights into issues affecting employees’ work lives and their organizations’ performance. Leaders realize that engaging employees takes more than sending out an annual survey. Instead, it requires a year-long people strategy aimed at clarifying expectations and maximizing performance. To that end, leaders want a way to gather employee feedback throughout the year. Thus, the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Annamarie Mann, Jim Harter | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Middle managers may have a reputation for being bureaucratic, but in reality they aren’t so much the cause of bureaucracy as a barometer for it.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, Emily Field, Stephanie Smallets | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Bureaucracy, Management, Organizational Behavior

Managers do not wake up and automatically know what great looks like, nor do they learn through osmosis. Instead, managers exhibit these [strong] behaviors when multiple factors are present: they have clear expectations, are given targeted training, understand why their actions matter, see inspiring leaders behaving similarly, and have support systems in place such as structure, role design, and rewards.

When any number of these factors … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, Emily Field, Stephanie Smallets | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Personal Development

At many companies, support functions can be a drag on business performance, with unnecessarily complex processes, bureaucratic structures, and a frustrating experience for both internal and external customers. But with the right approach—including the five priorities discussed here—companies can address these issues and turn support functions into a driver of performance. In that way, they will become true partners to business units and help companies … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Emmanuel Sissimatos, Fabrice Roghé, Martin Twesten, Mieke Gielis, Stefan Scholz | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Management

If there’s one pitfall that companies fall into, it’s that they focus on the why for the business instead of the why for the users.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jiaona Zhang | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

Can you say with confidence that each report would want to be on your team again? If you aren’t sure that the answer is yes, it’s probably no.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

“I trust you, make the call” might be the six most powerful words you can hear from a manager.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sean Twersky | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Effective leaders continually adapt their priorities, roles, time, and energy practices to stay ahead of new realities. Here’s why you need to do the same.

Content: Article | Authors: Arne Gast, Suchita Prasad | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development

Checkr VP of Engineering Krista Moroder opens up about the rotation program that’s helped keep her org’s non-regrettable attrition at near-zero.

Content: Article | Author: Krista Moroder | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior, Training & Development