3605 Posts Found

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Content: Quotation | Author: Margaret Thatcher | Subject: Power / Authority

Of course, failure isn’t an experience to be deliberately sought, and cushioning ourselves against its harshest blows makes perfect sense. But failure isn’t something to be despised or ashamed of, either. That’s not a message we hear a lot about these days. Yet some of history’s most impressive successes started out as big, fat failures. The stories of the world’s most successful failures suggest … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Marisa Taylor | Source: Ode | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Informal networks can play a pivotal role in how organizational decisions are framed and executed. But they can also result in too much collaboration—the kind of lengthy and expensive decision making that can cost companies dearly in missed opportunities.

Content: Case Study | Authors: Rob Cross, Robert J. Thomas, Yaarit Silverstone | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior

Happy Brain Storming offers a somewhat poorly written article, but one which is full of useful character trait considerations for evaluating personality. These character traits come after a muddling introduction which you may wish to skim/skip. [Hat Tip to LifeHacker]

Content: Article | Source: Happy Brain Storming | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Powell | Subjects: Communication, Leadership

A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business about what motivates people to take action finds that the prime mover, say researchers, is acquiring a position of power. Specifically, it is people’s new, more elevated perception of themselves after assuming a position with more power that inspires them to take more risks and pursue goals more confidently. Taking on a formal position of power—be … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Adam Galinsky, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, Nathanael J. Fast, Niro Sivanathan | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Organizational Behavior

There’s no shortage of approaches to organizational and performance management — from balanced scorecard and total quality management to management by walking around and rightsizing, just for starters. One of the latest and most intriguing: the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), a management philosophy pioneered by Best Buy that lets employees decide what to work on and when. Giving them control over their time, the theory … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Lindsay Blakely | Source: BNET | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Finance professors often get criticised by ethics professors because they tell their students that the goal of the firm is to maximise shareholder value. Financial scandals such as Enron, Tyco and others are regularly blamed on the excessive focus on shareholder value maximisation. Theo Vermaelen, Professor of Finance at INSEAD, says this critique is misplaced and reflects a lack of understanding of what we teach … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Theo Vermaelen | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Ethics, Finance

Man…consciously or unconsciously assigns a time schedule for appropriate results, and this is just how long his patience lasts in any venture. He may at first expansively invite association, consultation and participation but once the set period elapses, he reverses direction to head into the conventionally more familiar territory of the mere giving of information or orders.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jharna Sengupta Biswas | Source: TheWorkingManager.com | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Making quality decisions is an intricate tapestry of experience, inquiry, and judgment that converge to form solutions. According to Michael Sacks and Steve Walton, professors at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, there are strategies that can be adopted to make the process more effective.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael Sacks, Steve Walton | Source: Knowledge@Emory | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

The Chernobyl atomic-plant explosion, observes Dorner, was entirely due to human error involving the breaking of safety rules by a team of experts who reinforced one another’s puffed-up sense of competence. This German psychology professor believes people court failure through sloppy or ingrained mental habits, whether the mistakes involve cleaning dead fish out of a garden pool, adding rooms to a schoolhouse, launching economic development … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Dietrich Dorner | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. The problem, we believe, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Adam M. Kleinbaum, Michael L. Tushman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Understanding and Changing Your Management Style, by psychologist and business consultant Robert Benfari, is a hands-on guidebook for determining the type of leader you are–and becoming the kind you want to be. It includes methods that you can use to influence others, problem-solving techniques, and exercises that reveal your psychological nature according to the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Using the resultant patterns, the book … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Robert C. Benfari | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Resilience is an enormous concept. It plays out in all domains of our lives, and until the work of Drs. Andrew Shatté and Karen Reivich, co-authors of The Resilience Factor, resilience was seen only as a single competency. Their research has shown that resilience is actually made up of 7 factors, or inner strengths – Emotion Regulation, Impulse Control, Causal Analysis, Self-efficacy, Realistic Optimism, Empathy, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Dean M. Becker | Source: Emerald for Managers | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

As a neuropsychiatrist who studies the differences between male and female brains, I’m often asked whether such differences play a role in professional achievement—and particularly, in men’s dominance of the highest ranks of many fields. Male and female brains are more alike than not, and business’s famous glass ceiling has nothing to do with raw intellect. Yet the distinct demands that are put on men’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Louann Brizendine MD | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Women in Business

Westerners divide things into parts, often opposites, rather than seeing the whole. That has been the basis of scientific method and it has led to amazing discoveries. However for the complex problems we face today, I believe we need to see the whole interconnected system and diagnose the underlying issues. We seem to have difficulty seeing the whole system and tend to chop things up … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bruce Nixon | Source: Emerald Now | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Philosophy, Thought

Many managers rely on deliberate cognition—that is, the ability of the human mind to process and analyze information—and an appeal to reason. By contrast, insurgents realize that audiences rely on automatic cognition, or shortcuts, to make sense of the world. Hence, they use symbols to communicate their point of view.

Content: Quotation | Author: Hayagreeva Rao | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion

True power requires modesty and empathy, not force and coercion, argues Dacher Keltner. But what people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power. [Hat Tip to Seth Levine, Brad Feld]

Content: Article | Author: Dacher Keltner | Source: Greater Good | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Do you notice when someone changes the subject after you ask them a question? If you don’t always notice or even mind such conversational transformations, you’re not alone. New research by Todd Rogers and Harvard Business School professor Michael I. Norton explores the common occurrence of “conversational blindness.” Q&A with Rogers.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael I. Norton, Todd Rogers | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

In her book, Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace, Michalle E. Mor Barak talks about how ancient Chinese tradition divides people into categories based on four qualities: Shi (scholars), Nong (farmers), Gong (artisans) and Shang (merchants). The belief is that to be a fully effective leader, one must acquire the ” . . . vision and ethics of the scholar, the appreciation and respect … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Al Vivian, Michalle E. Mor Barak | Subjects: Diversity, Leadership, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior