4751 Posts Found

How CEOs spend their time has an outsized influence on performance, engagement, and company culture.

Content: Article | Authors: Jeff Hill, Xavier Mosquet | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Productivity / Work Tips, Time Management

A lot of mistakes are made when you frame a problem, because you could already be dismissing 60 percent, 70 percent of the potential ideas.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jony Ive | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

A practical guide to the powerful 4S method with examples for anyone.

Content: Article | Author: Alex Miguel Meyer | Source: Better Humans | Subjects: Management, Personal Development

Theories illuminate paths to value that might otherwise remain unseen. Managers and entrepreneurs who hold the flashlight of theory can avoid the streetlight effect—the human tendency to search only where the light already shines, where things are already evident.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alfonso Gambardella, Teppo Felin, Todd Zenger | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Innovation, Management

Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.

Content: Quotation | Author: Haruki Murakami | Subjects: Communication, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

The initial 100 days are a time for boldness and clarity—a time when CEOs can express the purest form of their vision for the company.

• CEOs should create an integrated narrative that lays out their ambition as well as their plans for transformation, stakeholder management, talent assessment, and communications.
• In addition to laying out their ambition and plans, they also have an opportunity to step outside their

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Christine Barton, Jim Hemerling, Mrin Nayak, Tuukka Seppä | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership, Management

Despite their importance to the global economy, most megaprojects fail to be delivered on budget or schedule. Here’s how managers could improve on that dismal record.

Content: Article | Authors: Stanislav Shekshnia, Vip Vyas | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Project Management

If you can achieve consistent growth, that’s the surest ticket to outperformance, but only 10 percent of companies manage to do that over a decade. Those that can’t should consider a strategy we call “shrink to grow.” This is like pruning back and then growing from there. Over a ten-year period, you may have one or two major dips in your growth that represent large … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chris Bradley, Rebecca Doherty | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Oftentimes, companies think that growth is sacrificial—you have to endure long periods of low profit to generate growth. That is not true. The order is not growth followed by profit; it’s high returns followed by growth. In fact, companies that begin with returns on capital higher than the cost of capital go on to grow at double the rate of those that don’t start out … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Know what your current organization is and isn’t capable of and what capabilities you need to achieve [a] newly articulated strategy. Unlike competencies, which belong to individuals, capabilities are organizational.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Organizations tend to neglect or downplay the ingenuity component in change initiatives. Leaders often prefer instead a simpler, mechanistic view of the world, which assumes they can easily specify and control actions using project management techniques. Moreover, organizations are often averse to change. Ideas like “breaking the rules” or “reinventing the organization” are less accepted in typical projects—and a departure from the norm will often … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Job, Arthur Boulenger, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Project Management

Complaining can have both positive and negative effects on organizational communication. Constructive complaining — or structured opportunities for employees to voice their concerns — offers valuable feedback to improve work processes, products, and services, and thus should be encouraged. Venting and chronic complaining have both advantages and disadvantages for the individual and the group and should be given the right space and time, rather than … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alyson Meister, Nele Dael | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In order to disrupt your own frame of reference, you have to be willing to treat your accumulated experience as sunk cost, to be discarded as circumstances require. It’s a psychologically difficult thing to do. Moreover, ordinary daily pressures make it difficult to find the time to really think about, and thoroughly analyze, environmental trends. Many people, managers among them, suffer from cognitive myopia, the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jan-Benedict Steenkamp | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development

In manufacturing, costs fall into two categories: those that respond to volume or scale and those that are driven by variety. Scale-related costs decline as volume increases, usually falling 15% to 25% per unit each time volume doubles. Variety-related costs, on the other hand, reflect the costs of complexity in manufacturing: setup, materials handling, inventory, and many of the overhead costs of a factory. In … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Finance, Management, Operations

While time is a basic business performance variable, management seldom monitors its consumption explicitly—almost never with the same precision accorded sales and costs. Yet time is a more critical competitive yardstick than traditional financial measurements.

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Integrated business planning is a well-known process, particularly among supply chain leaders. But in most companies, P&L owners are missing out.

Content: Article | Authors: Ali Sankur, Elena Dumitrescu, Ketan Shah, Matt Jochim | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Operations

A way to think about KPIs is that they’re operating metrics. There are dashboards of them, millions of them in big companies. They tell us where we are.

The big difference with OKRs is, of the million things we could measure this quarter, on a certain five or ten measures, we want to move the needle, and this is how far we want the needle to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Deidre Paknad | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

Strong deductive capabilities allow companies to go deep, applying insights from a single source across the enterprise. And strong inductive capabilities allow them to go wide and ask, “What might this outlying piece of data foreshadow?”

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alan Iny, Alison Sander, Hans Kuipers | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

A company’s culture is frequently at the heart of mismanaged planning, with management often rewarding the wrong behavior. Because financial incentives are still frequently tied to the achievement of short-term plans, employees can feel pressured to negotiate financial goals and to sandbag. Consequently, planning begins to feel like a bazaar instead of the organized, top-down process it should be. Employees may be motivated to reach … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alexander Roos, Fabrice Roghé, James Tucker, Marc Rodt, Sebastian Stange | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior

Unlike pay and other financial rewards, being praised and recognized is an expression of care, and this—and not money—affects the hearts in people. Here are five habits leaders must develop in order to maximize the effect of recognition and thereby derive its greatest benefits.

Content: Article | Author: Mark C. Crowley | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior