Charles Horngren

Decision-making is the ultimate reason why accountants and finance people exist. The way to judge the quality of an accounting or performance management system is to determine whether it is spurring quality decision-making.

Five Ways to Reverse the Downward Spiral of Distrust

The best time to invest in relationships, alignment, and trust is in the early stages. But what can you do when the team is already stuck in withdrawal or gridlock? The precise moment when trust is most needed is often when it is hardest to get people to the table. In my experience working with teams, the following five strategies can help.

Kevin Daley

We have a process we call “touch, turn, and talk.” You touch the visual where you want the eye of the viewer as you look at the visual. If you look toward the visual, they will too. So you touch that point, and then turn back to the audience and talk only when looking at a pair of eyes, because your job is to connect … [ Read more ]

Saj-nicole Joni, Theresa Wellbourne

Theresa Wellbourne […] has conducted extensive studies of the relationship between organizational tension and business unit performance. According to her research, the single biggest predictor of poor organizational performance is when employees are “complacent” or “happy.” The second biggest predictor of poor performance is when employees are “burnt out” or “overwhelmed.” Getting the balance right is essential. Not all tensions are productive—think internal politicking and … [ Read more ]

How to Be a Chief Culture Officer

Charles O’Reilly explains why companies that value adaptability perform better, and how managers can create this dynamic.

Clay Shirky

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

What Self-Made Billionaires Do Best

The experience of … entrepreneurs reflects an unfortunate reality: companies are set up to perform. They are not set up to produce. If they were more capable at producing, they would not have to worry about combating disruption from outside. They would already be skilled at redesigning, disrupting, and innovating from within.

As a rule, large organizations do a poor job of distinguishing between high-profile … [ Read more ]

Six Signs that Your Innovation Program is Broken

A successful innovation is a little like an iceberg: Look under or behind the innovation and you’ll see the smart practices, processes and structures that supported the success of the innovation. Herewith, six practices to avoid, and that are sure to compromise the chances of success.

Working Across Cultures and Knowing When to Shut Up

The Culture Map can help managers negotiate the complexity of cultural variation. It is made up of eight scales representing those behaviors where cultural gaps are most common. Through plotting out how two cultures fall on the 8 cultural dimensions, you can analyze the gaps and similarities and determine where the likely tensions and opportunities will arise with each collaboration.

Max Klein

People are afraid to compete because they prefer to pretend they could have won if they played, than to know that they played and lost.

An Empirical Investigation of the Existence of Organizational Typologies

This paper presents the findings of analyses of the database of twenty-one organizational value characteristics sampled through surveys from three professional organizations (direct marketing, information technology and finance). The objective was to determine if there is consistent evidence for the existence of the traditional organic and mechanistic organizational types. The authors further examined the data from one of the groups (Financial professionals), to determine if … [ Read more ]

How to Prevent Experts from Hoarding Knowledge

Lack of time or resources can, of course, constrain knowledge transfer. But one barrier to passing deep smarts along to the next generation that is often unaddressed is the expert’s inclination to hoard knowledge. Financial incentives, personal ego, and discontent or frustration with the company are three of the top reasons individuals choose to keep their expertise to themselves. But they’re also three issues that … [ Read more ]

Keith Yost

What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work.

Nir Halevy on Motivating Your Workforce

The Stanford professor explains how social distance (construal-level theory) affects how people respond to feedback.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, … [ Read more ]

Hugh MacLeod

What people say they want and what people are willing to work their ass off to get are two different things.

John Ruskin

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

We’re with Stupid

Non-rational or irrational decision-making in organizations has fascinated Nobel prizewinners for decades, from Herbert Simon’s theory of bounded rationality to Daniel Kahneman’s discovery that when we process information, our brains interchange between two different systems: deliberative processing and intuition, our default position in daily life. But Cass professors André Spicer and Mats Alvesson believe these works miss a set of deviations from smartness, which are … [ Read more ]

Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee

This is the sad reality in workplaces around the world: Women help more but benefit less from it. In keeping with deeply held gender stereotypes, we expect men to be ambitious and results-oriented, and women to be nurturing and communal. When a man offers to help, we shower him with praise and rewards. But when a woman helps, we feel less indebted. She’s communal, right? … [ Read more ]