4757 Posts Found

Humans need boundaries as much as they need sleep. Humans need meaning and connection, and they need these things — as working people or consumers of business products or leaders of businesses themselves — as much they need convenience, speed, or scale.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julia Hobsbawm | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Organizational Behavior

Fractal innovation enables large companies to be more responsive to customer needs, leverage their global scale, and set the pace for their competition. Multinationals often face strong competition in geographies where nimble, local companies are able to succeed by meeting the changing demands of local customers with speed, responsiveness, and innovation.

• Large companies face two main innovation challenges: They have a limited understanding of the

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Saurabh Chhajer, Sharad Verma | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Innovation, International, Management, Strategy

Time spent on talent is high value. For some managers, though, administrivia is a great excuse to avoid scarier tasks. Filling out a form, while tedious, takes time away from the difficult coaching necessitated by, say, the three employees who may be a little problematic.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Schaninger | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

There are two problems with relying so much on data.

The first problem is our desire to make business a science and identify cause and effect in isolation. The outcomes of so many decisions that companies make are not determined by inescapable laws of science. They’re determined by the actions of leaders who have agency to affect those outcomes.

The second problem with data is that when … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Zeynep Ton | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

While your strategic goals may be the right ones, is the organization built to achieve them? New research reveals a dynamic system that creates value in the face of volatility.

Content: Article | Authors: Alexis Krivkovich, Amadeo Di Lodovico, Brooke Weddle, Dana Maor, Deepak Mahadevan, Richard Steele | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Build self-awareness to build mutual awareness. If you don’t understand yourself—your work style preferences, your motivators, your strengths, your blind spots—you’re going to have trouble being an effective manager and a leader.

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development

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