3605 Posts Found

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

History does not repeat itself, nor does it follow given laws, as Karl Marx or Oswald Spengler have suggested. Nevertheless, it can be said that the human being has changed very little during the known course of history. We gain, therefore, valuable insight when we interpret current developments and the future in light of historical analogies.

Content: Quotation | Author: Hermann Simon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: History, Personality / Behavior

During my 15 years of managing talent as dean of the Rotman School of Management, and previously as cohead of Monitor, I have managed some of the best and brightest in professorial talent and the strategy consulting industry worldwide. Over this combined quarter-century of experience, I developed three rules for managing top-end talent.

Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Editor’s Note: often mistakenly credited to Warren Buffet or Samuel Johnson

Content: Quotation | Author: Maria Edgeworth | Subjects: Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

Under nearly any circumstance, reorganizations consume a great deal of time and energy, including emotional energy. When proper communication plans are in place, though, leaders can at least reduce unnecessary anxiety and unproductive wheel-spinning. Planning should start long before employees get word of the changes, include constituents well outside the boundaries of the company, and extend far beyond the announcement of the concept design to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Rose Beauchamp, Stephen Heidari-Robinson, Suzanne Heywood | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Organizational Behavior

Michael Mankins, Bain & Company partner and head of the firm’s Organization practice, explains how organizations unintentionally fail to manage their employees’ time and energy. He also lays out what managers can do to reduce what he calls organizational drag.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Michael C. Mankins, Sarah Green Carmichael | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior