Connecting Across Boundaries: The Fluid-Network Organization

The principal strategic challenge for global companies is the reconciliation of seemingly conflicting goals: thinking long-term while delivering short-term results, developing global scale while being locally responsive, and investing in innovation while increasing operational efficiency. In each aspect of this challenge there is a tension between two necessary but apparently opposing goals, which needs resolution.

The solution to both kinds of tension is to convert … [ Read more ]

Moral Hazard: A Novel

This short, self-assured novel by Australian-born Jennings (Snake) brilliantly depicts the complicated life of a working woman on Wall Street during the dot-com boom. Cath, a freelance writer in her 40s, is married to Bailey, who’s 25 years her senior. When he develops Alzheimer’s, she takes a speech-writing job at an investment bank to pay for his expensive medical care. Wry but realistic, and realizing … [ Read more ]

Daniel Webster

Effective communication does not consist in speech. Words and phrases may be marshaled in every way, but they cannot encompass it. It must consist in the speaker, in the subject, and in the occasion.

Creating Temporary Organizations for Lasting Change

Faced with a rapidly evolving competitive marketplace, the chief executives of many of today’s leading companies have embarked on major change initiatives. The goal is twofold: to challenge the existing ways of conducting business and to drive step-level improvements in operating performance. The method is two-pronged as well: cut costs significantly and build capabilities to better serve the marketplace. These initiatives, then, often involve the … [ Read more ]

A New Look at the Life-cycle Theory of Relationships

How customers perceive or feel about a firm changes over time. Building trust and a mutually satisfying relationship with customers is an important goal for many organizations. Understanding how these relationships build and deteriorate is thus critical. By helping shed light on that process, this study by Professors Sandy Jap and Erin Anderson offers some important insights into relationship management.

Art Kleiner

Great or miserable or in-between, the core group sets the organization’s direction. The organization goes wherever its people perceive that the core group needs and wants to go. The organization becomes whatever its people perceive that the core group needs and wants it to become. If a goal is perceived as irrelevant to the core group, then it will not be reached, no matter how … [ Read more ]

Entrepreneurial Culture Clash

Entrepreneurs come in two flavors-near-term and future-oriented. They mix like oil and water, but companies need both to sustain innovation and execute brilliantly. This piece talks about how to strike the right balance.

Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days

This pair of Canadian b-school profs detail a change process utilizing 10 “Winning Conditions” to create shared understanding, speed, and critical mass. They also show how to apply the process to five common organizational challenges: acquisition integration; new venture launches; IT roll-outs; organizational turnarounds; and culture changes.

What the Heck Is a Company Anyway? Reflections on Identity

In an age of mergers and acquisitions, identity management is becoming increasingly difficult, yet necessary in terms of both customers and employees. The key to make it work? Creating a feeling of community.

Dan Danbom

Say what you will about how the United States is superior to Denmark, Finland, Austria, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand and Colombia, but those countries have us beat when it comes to how much vacation time they give employees. Even the stingiest of these countries – New Zealand and Colombia – give employees 50 percent … [ Read more ]

Organization: Helping People Pull Together

In even the largest and best-managed companies, hundreds of organizational muddles take place every day. Throughout the economy, they add up to a staggering waste of our national resources.

Editor’s note: This article comes from the fifth chapter of Marvin Bower’s 1966 book, The Will to Manage. It is interesting how timeless the analysis is…

Limits To Diversity?

No one wants to be the one to challenge the importance of diversity. But a new study shows that we need to look more closely at how much diversity initiatives really contribute.

Harness the power of the informal communications network

You can dismiss it as the rumor mill, but the truth is that this form of communication has its place in the corporation. Here’s how to work with, not against, this phenomenon.

Michael Mainelli

According to Prospect Theory, if you want to drive decision-makers towards a riskier decision, convince them that they are already losing. If you want to drive decision-makers towards a risk-averse decision, convince them that they are ahead and stand to lose quite a bit.

The Practice of Innovation

Peter M. Senge offers an excellent look at Peter Drucker’s discipline of innovation (focus on mission, define significant results, and do rigorous assessment), providing along the way some of the best comments about mission and vision that I have ever read.

How ‘Gen X’ Managers Manage

Generation X managers are different from those in the baby boom generation. They are more skeptical, cooler and have different values. The way to get this independent group to perform is to make them understand.

The Psychology of Change Management

Companies can transform the attitudes and behavior of their employees by applying psychological breakthroughs that explain why people think and act as they do.