Ron Williams, Jose Almeida

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 ]

Jonathan Golden

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.

Finding the Right Performance Incentives to Motivate Employees

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

Jay Van Bavel

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 ]

Aaron De Smet

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 ]

Aaron De Smet

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 ]

Aaron De Smet

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 ]

10 Principles of Organization Design

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 ]

James A. Runde

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 ]

Joseph Grenny

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.

Is Your Team Coordinating Too Much, or Not Enough?

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.

Michael Lewis

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 ]

Michael Lewis

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.

Being Engaged at Work Is Not the Same as Being Productive

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 ]

Ahead of the Curve: The Future of Performance Management

What happens after companies jettison traditional year-end evaluations?

Breaking Down the Gender Challenge

To make meaningful progress on gender diversity, companies must move beyond the averages and focus on the biggest pain points.

IQ plus EQ: How Technology Will Unlock the Emotional Intelligence of the Workforce of the Future

Companies have perfected collecting data on consumers to boost sales and customer loyalty. But to date, they have had little insight into how employees interact with each other and what makes them happy or successful at work. A new generation of emerging technologies promises to change that. Boosting EQ as well as IQ. Resulting in a much more engaged, more productive workplace.

Your Company’s Culture is Who You Hire, Fire, and Promote

Instead of letting your company become a corporate version of “The Hunger Games,” leadership should do the responsible thing: actively prioritize behavior that’s congruent with company values.