490 Posts Found

Business is not-nor has it ever been-a profession. Professions develop over long periods of time and gradually establish a set of control mechanisms and sanctions for those who violate the code. True professionals, from doctors and lawyers to engineers and architects, undergo extensive training and earn a license. If they do not act according to recognized standards, they can be expelled from their professional guild…But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Miscellaneous

If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Values

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This tart takedown of fashionable management theories is a refreshing antidote to the glut of simplistic books about achieving high performance. Rosenzweig, a veteran business manager turned professor, argues that most popular business ideas are no more than soothing platitudes that promise easy success to harried managers. Consultants, journalists and other pundits tap scientifically suspect methods to produce what he calls “business delusions”: deeply flawed … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Phil Rosenzweig | Subjects: Management, Miscellaneous

The management consultant has come to be taken for granted. But the management consultant is an extraordinary and indeed a truly unique phenomenon.

Content: Article | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Industry Specific, Miscellaneous | Industry: Consulting

Thirty-six years after his book Future Shock, the world’s most influential futurist sees the informal economy as a basis of revolutionary wealth.

Content: Article | Author: Lawrence M. Fisher | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Miscellaneous, People

Wired editor Anderson declares the death of “common culture”-and insists that it’s for the best. Why don’t we all watch the same TV shows, like we used to? Because not long ago, “we had fewer alternatives to compete for our screen attention,” he writes. Smash hits have existed largely because of scarcity: with a finite number of bookstore shelves and theaters and Wal-Mart CD racks, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Chris Anderson | Subject: Miscellaneous

The principle of obliquity…says that some objectives are best pursued indirectly. We are all familiar with one application of the principle of obliquity. While Americans, characteristically, talk of the pursuit of happiness, happiness is rarely best achieved when it is pursued. Research in social psychology confirms our intuition and experience. Happy people are not, in the main, those who selfishly promote their own interests: in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: johnkay.com | Subjects: Goals, Miscellaneous

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Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.

Content: Quotation | Source: Various | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Thought

Some of the best growth opportunities are found in fields loaded with ethical and moral difficulties, including biotechnology, providing public services for profit, serving low-income consumers in poor countries, and developing newly legal activities such as gaming. Companies working in these fields have had to make themselves more socially responsible to satisfy not only political activists but also their own shareholders. To make the most … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David Cogman, Jeremy M. Oppenheim | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Social Responsibility (ESG)

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry G. Frankfurt writes, in what must surely be the most eyebrow-raising opener in modern philosophical prose. “Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” This compact little book, as pungent as the phenomenon it explores, attempts to articulate … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Harry G. Frankfurt | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

Business, at least as it is taught in our business schools and most training programs, is about understanding and knowledge.

These are, of course, both very important. However, managing is a skill, and (as it transpires) has nothing to do with rationality, logic, IQ, or intelligence. Whether you can manage is a simple question of whether or not you can influence individuals or organizations to accomplish … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: davidmaister.com | Subjects: Management, Miscellaneous

Brad Feld postulates a different way to view the Pareto principle.

Editor’s Note: you’ll probably want to read the prior and external posts he mentions to get the full benefit of this entry.

Content: Article | Author: Brad Feld | Source: Feld Thoughts | Subject: Miscellaneous

Just as a supplier needs to do his or her homework to earn the right to do business with a client, training directors need to know how to do the right kind of due diligence about a supplier. One should understand a supplier’s basic capabilities, its content, and what is behind its pricing. But, the most important questions concern what it will be like to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Diane Hessan | Source: T+D | Subject: Miscellaneous

JVseek.com is an international joint venture search engine. On the site you can search for business and joint venture partners ranging from in transaction size from US$250,000 to U$1 billion in Asia, America, Africa and Europe. You can also submit your partnering offer free of charge.

Content: Online Resource | Source: GPMN.com | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Reference / Search

the purpose of organization is to achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a particular job. The organization exists to restrict and channel the range of individual actions and behavior into a predictable and knowable routine. Without organization there would be chaos and decay. Organization exists in order to create that amount and kind of inflexibility that are necessary to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

The business firm is one of the few contemporary institutions in which the arbitrary and gratuitous cruelty of the powerful in dealing with the weak is tolerated, even encouraged.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for distinguishing between them. And the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the test itself.

So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

Why is there a resurgence of interest among today’s business and organizational leaders in the ancient art of storytelling at a time when electronic communications might seem to make it obsolete? Human beings have been communicating with each other through storytelling since we lived in caves and sat around campfires exchanging tales. What is new today about the art of telling stories is the purposeful … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: John Seely Brown, Katalina Groh, Laurence Prusak, Steve Denning | Source: CR Web Consulting | Subjects: Management, Miscellaneous