3590 Posts Found

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

Everybody values the drive for results, the quality of decision making, dealing with ambiguity, but there are some valuable skills that you don’t see everywhere. One is learning on the fly. People who can learn fast will take charge of a situation and can be mobile between businesses and functions. Another one is managing innovation. To manage innovation, you have to have the ability to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jose Almeida, Ron Williams | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

A lot of people call me and ask how they should structure their product organizations. I always tell them to do it based on outcome. If you do it based on features, then you’re going to be perpetuating those features whether they’re useful or not.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonathan Golden | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Some incentive schemes encourage hard work—others reward those who game the system.

Content: Article | Authors: Daniel Barron, George Georgiadis, Jeroen Swinkels | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Human beings evolved in groups, and most of us still work in groups every day. Our affinity for groups is wired deeply into our basic biology. Indeed, humans are unique among primates in that we readily cooperate with in-group members–even if they are completely unknown to us. […] Group identification is one ingredient that can bring strangers together.

Given that group membership is such a deeply … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jay Van Bavel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

To promote ethical behavior, firms should emphasize community, not only consequences.

Content: Article | Author: Natalia Karelaia | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

Processes are extremely important, which is: How does it work? What are the activities that, when you string them together in a particular way, add value? And what are the decisions that are made along that chain of activities? Who makes them? How do they get measured? This is one of the most important things.

When we develop metrics for an organization and set targets and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey & Company Inc. | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Process

A lot of people, when they think of how they design the organization, immediately gravitate toward the management hierarchy—the lines and boxes. But that’s just one small element of how you set up the organization. Structure also includes governance and how you set up which committees can approve things and make which decisions and which authorities get delegated and what is contained in a role … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey & Company Inc. | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Agility is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment. Agility is not incompatible with stability—quite the contrary. Agility requires stability for most companies.

Agility needs two things. One is a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness. And agility requires stability, a stable foundation—a platform, if you will—of things that don’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey & Company Inc. | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

A 2014 Strategy& survey found that 42 percent of executives felt that their organization was not aligned with the strategy, and that parts of the organization resisted it or didn’t understand it. If that’s a familiar problem in your company, the principles in this article can help you develop an organization design that supports your most distinctive capabilities and supports your strategy more effectively.

These 10 … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Bhushan Sethi, Gary L. Neilson, Jaime Estupiñán | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

There are two different kinds of listeners. When you are working with clients, there are the people who listen to respond, and there are people who listen to listen. The person who listens to respond is basically the kind of person who can’t wait to get the microphone, and their sentence with the client or customer starts out, “Yes, but.” They’re basically an intellectual show … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James A. Runde | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

The ability to recognize, own, and shape your own emotions is the master skill for deepening intimacy with loved ones, magnifying influence in the workplace, and amplifying our ability to turn ideas into results. My successes and failures have turned on this master skill more than any other.

Content: Quotation | Author: Joseph Grenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

Effective teams don’t just happen — you design them. And two of the most important elements of that design are a) the degree to which team members are interdependent — where they need to rely on each other to accomplish the team task, and b) how you’ll actually coordinate that interdependence.

Content: Article | Author: Roger Schwarz | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

The question is why, having identified these cognitive illusions or whatever you want to call them, they persist. We don’t pay more attention to them. […] It’s very hard for a person to self correct. What you can do, Amos [Tversky] would say, is change your environment in which you make decisions, so people are more likely to point out to you if you’re making … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Lewis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

Although life constantly puts you in these probabilistic situations, these situations that might lend themselves to statistical analysis, we don’t do that. People aren’t natural statisticians. They do something else. What they do is tell stories. They find patterns. Danny [Kahneman ] and Amos [Tversky] were showing the way the mind, when it’s telling stories to resolve uncertainty, makes mistakes.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Lewis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

The holy grail of today’s workplace is high employee engagement. Many companies are investing heavily to identify what leads to high engagement in order to motivate employees, thereby increasing their happiness and productivity.We think this is important. But based on our research with several large companies, we want to offer a word of caution: senior leadership needs to invest more into creating a culture of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ryan Fuller | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior