Mauro Porcini

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 ]

Mauro Porcini

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 ]

Breaking the mold: Five behaviors of leading growth transformers

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

James Everingham

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.

Emily Anhalt

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.

Amid Rapid-Fire Workplace Change, Pulse Surveys Emerge

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 ]

Emily Field, Bryan Hancock, Stephanie Smallets, Brooke Weddle

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.

Emily Field, Bryan Hancock, Stephanie Smallets, Brooke Weddle

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 ]

Designing Support Functions for Innovation and Growth

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 ]

Jiaona Zhang

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.

Julie Zhuo

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.

Sean Twersky

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

Warning: Upgrade your personal operating model

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.

David Reimer, Harry Feuerstein, Adam Bryant

We have developed two simple frameworks—an authenticity index and a self-awareness index… To gauge authenticity, we ask an executive to choose ten from a long list of values that they hold dearest. We then ask 20 to 30 people who work with the executive to select from the same list the top ten values that best describe the leader. Comparing the candidate’s top ten to … [ Read more ]

Blair Epstein, Caitlin Hewes, Scott Keller

The value of working together is intuitive to most leaders. Capturing the full value of operating as one firm, however, is elusive for most. Those who drive integration and standardization from the top down often stifle business-level innovation, entrepreneurship, and client responsiveness, which can further create talent attraction and retention issues. Those who emphasize local autonomy, however, often create massive inefficiencies, competing priorities, and inconsistent … [ Read more ]

What Drives Managers to Sabotage Talented Employees

Intense competition in the workplace may lead managers to sabotage talented employees to protect their own job security, says research by Hashim Zaman and Karim Lakhani.

Ted Iverson

If we have measurables that are not connected to elements of purpose, then we need to ask ourselves, “Is there an opportunity to better align these?”

Crossing the mental Rubicon: Don’t let decisiveness backfire

We demand that leaders be decisive, but research in social psychology and behavioral economics suggests that decisiveness is not an unequivocal good. Studies on “mindset” reveal that, when contemplating an important decision, prematurely focusing on execution can exacerbate decision-making biases and lead to overconfidence and excessive risk-taking.