3590 Posts Found

Startups and established pollsters alike are working to bring the employee-engagement survey into the age of smartphones and big data.

Content: Article | Author: Steven Melendez | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you. That is a big lesson.

Content: Quotation | Author: Indra Nooyi | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Executives can view political moves as dirty and will try to distance themselves from those activities. However, what they find hard to acknowledge is that such activities can be for the welfare of the organization and its members. Thus, the first step to feeling comfortable with politics requires that executives are equipped with a reliable map of the political landscape and an understanding of the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Jarrett | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Management, Organizational Behavior

A strong sense of conviction can both encourage and discourage people from speaking out.

Content: Article | Author: Martin J. Smith | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Google research shows that those who rigidly separate their personal and work lives are significantly happier about their well-being than those who tend to blur the lines between the two.

Content: Article | Author: Megan Huth | Source: re:Work | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Every time your company gives someone a promotion, everyone at that person’s organizational level evaluates the promotion and judges whether merit or political favors yielded it.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ben Horowitz | Source: Medium | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

“People just aren’t naturally oriented towards innovation or change,” says Loran Nordgren. “If you were dealing with totally rational agents, you could sell your innovation on the grounds of its functionality—in other words, why it’s a good idea. But you are almost never dealing with totally rational agents.”

Thankfully, if you are convinced that a certain new product, fresh strategy, or overseas expansion is exactly what … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Loran Nordgren | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

If there is one thing that consistently amazes me it is that org changes are made without clearly and deliberately identifying what problems will get solved by the new structure, new leaders, and new resource allocation. In fact, most every org change I ever saw that didn’t work started off not with a problem statement but with a goal of putting a certain person in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

When you create an org chart you are creating your product — the seams in the org get reflected in the product; the depth of feature work gets reflected in resource allocation; the coordination across job functions gets reflected by the leaders you choose, and so on.

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In practice, there are few hard and fast facts that govern the sociology of organizations. I would go as far as to say that anything can be made to work for any structure. In fact, since there is no optimal or perfect organizational structure (if there was, then this post would be unnecessary) then the most important thing is to know the weaknesses of your … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

As was well-documented back around 2006, things had not been going well in developing the next release of Windows and so naturally one might ask if the organization caused the problem, if there was just a leadership/management problem, or the problem was in some process that could be addressed. That is always the issue with an org-centric view of execution problems. Is it the physical … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

[Mike Maples] spent many years watching people fight to move expenses to other teams, claim revenue for their own team, or even fight against the price of shared corporate services. This “allocation” dynamic is extreme “finance gymnastics” that grows exponentially complex as the business cross-dependencies grow. Ultimately the meaning of P&Ls derived from allocations becomes the undoing of most rational thought in an organization — hiring, investing, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Management, Organizational Behavior

Going back to the history of accounting, a P&L is a tool used by executives to inform decisions around resource and capital allocation, pricing, etc. In a large organization, it is very difficult to assign revenue and costs to a specific unit within a company and even more difficult to offer true span of control or accountability to a unit leader. The creation of P&Ls … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Management, Organizational Behavior

By far the biggest failure risk of a unit org is that the unit is created to solve a problem rather than create a business. While problems deserve attention, the unit structure implies much more than a technology or GTM problem but a focus on all 4 P’s of bringing something to market. Invariably, a unit that is a problem will struggle to “define itself” … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

If the organization feels that to get something done right/well requires a manager to force people to do so, then the problems are much larger than can be solved by the org structure.

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Many executives believe organizational change is an inherently messy, chaotic process. Without a doubt, change can derail business. But that’s because leaders have been managing it using faulty assumptions and outdated mental models. Learn how today’s wealth of data and powerful analytics capabilities have uncovered predictable patterns of how organizational change unfolds.

Content: Article | Authors: Randy Wandmacher, Tim Gobran, Warren Parry | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Charlan Nemeth at Berkeley […] finds is that people aren’t actually persuaded by devil’s advocates most of the time. One, they don’t argue forcefully enough because they don’t really believe the position: it’s “All right, I’m going to play a role here. I’ve checked the box, and now I can go right back to the majority view.”

And then, second, even if they do argue with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

There’s an amazing study by Justin Berg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor. He looks at circus performances—think Cirque du Soleil—and collects all these original acts done by different kinds of circus artists: jugglers, dancers, acrobats. He asks people to evaluate their own performances, and then he asks managers to evaluate them as well, and then he has performers judge each other’s videos.

Finally, he … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Creativity, Decision Making, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

We’ve confirmed that vocational skills can be taught (you’re not born knowing engineering or copywriting or even graphic design, therefore they must be something we can teach), while we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Seth Godin | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Skills, Training & Development

Most leaders understand the science of building trust. They understand that they need to think and communicate clearly about product and strategy and make good choices when they are hiring and promoting people into leadership positions. They understand that they have to show deep commitment and get things done. But in my experience, the truly great leaders also understand the art of building trust. Leaders … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ali Rowghani | Subjects: Leadership, Trust