3605 Posts Found

Meetings can be the bane of corporate life. Yet meetings are essential to effective decision making and execution and thus to business results. The companies that are best at decisions have learned to manage meetings as carefully as they manage any other part of their businesses. It’s a three-step program.

Content: Article | Authors: Marcia Blenko, Michael C. Mankins, Paul Rogers | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

A question John McCallum’s MBA students inevitably explore with the CEOs who visit his class is the personal characteristics that are most likely to get in the way of a successful executive career. Over many visiting CEOs and over many years, there is remarkable commonality in the responses: denial, fear, greed and pride, a kind of four horsemen of the executive apocalypse.

Content: Article | Author: John McCallum | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

The potential for innovation in your company increases when you have employees who demonstrate unrestrained thinking and the ability to connect seemingly disparate ideas. Is it possible to identify the people with these capabilities during a first interview? Absolutely—if you know what to look for and if you’re armed with the right questions.

Content: Article | Author: Lisa Bodell | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

If you want the imagination to see the future, then you better have the wisdom to appreciate the past. An obsession with the present—with what’s “hot”, and what’s “in”—may be dazzling, but all that does is blind everyone to the reality. Show me a chief executive who ignores yesterday, who favors the new outsider over the experienced insider, the quick fix over steady progress, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Henry Mintzberg | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Decision Making, Experience, Future, History, Management

In a world where a junior staffer can tweet to the CEO, the lines that traditionally delineated power and influence have been blurred. So much so, in fact, that when Jeffrey Pfeffer teaches about corporate America’s hierarchical power structure, his students often push back. That model of power isn’t relevant anymore, they insist. Such 20th-century thinking. They’re wrong.

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Organizational Behavior

A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Subjects: Change Management, Decision Making, Management

If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,
Five things observe with care,
To whom you speak,
Of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Communication, Wisdom

What you are trying to develop in a manager is a kind of inductive skill in reading the terrain; of knowing intuitively when the paradigms are about to change or bust up—or endure.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Future, Management, Trends / Analysis

Stanford’s Chip Heath and McKinsey’s Olivier Sibony discuss new research, fresh frameworks, and practical tools for decision makers.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Chip Heath, Olivier Sibony | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

Research by Christopher Marquis shows that a company’s degree of social responsibility is affected by a surprising factor—the language it uses to communicate.

Content: Article | Author: Michael Blanding | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: International, Organizational Behavior, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Many famous, successful people are at either of two extremes: Either they give nothing of themselves and they just want to know your thinking, or they want to do nothing except talk about themselves and they don’t listen.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jared Diamond | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Personality / Behavior

In a highly unified system, if you have a Bill Gates—or a receptive emperor—at the top, the system, the output, is fine, and you’re not getting the latent disadvantage of the system. From the moment, though, where at the top is not Bill Gates or an outward-looking emperor but a closed-minded emperor, then things can go downhill immediately. Because one person making a wrong decision … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jared Diamond | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

It’s not the case that you can look for the natural size of a business. Instead, what managers can profitably do is to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of big units, and then to be aware of a different set of advantages and disadvantages of small units, and to recognize that, at any moment, the challenge for the industry is to find what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jared Diamond | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

People tend to be as good or bad as their neighbors. Most people are not saintly, and neither are they great villains. It’s very hard to be good when you look around and see your neighbors acting very badly. It’s hard to drive at 65 mph when everyone else is driving at 100 mph.

Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subject: Ethics

I don’t think business writing is necessarily getting worse. I think it’s always been terrible. But I do think tools like PowerPoint and e-mail, coupled with the organizational downsizing of secretaries, has given illiterate businesspeople the ability to send babble out unedited, and this has increased visibility of the problem.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Hill | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subject: Communication

In response to society’s demand for a stronger emphasis on business ethics, in light of recent publicity concerning unethical business practices, and in trying to be in compliance with new federal and state regulatory laws, many businesses have created or strengthened ethics programs. These programs are most effective when they flow out of a culture that values practicing business legally and ethically. However, there are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jere E. Yates | Source: Graziadio Business Report | Subject: Ethics

I like people who are alive. People who are alive are hard to control. They have ideas, aspirations, and feelings, including anger. Nice people have the bad habit of letting me down. Nice people don’t offer me anything I have not thought of before. Nice people don’t save me from my mistakes. Nice people end up acting on feelings they have always had but never … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: CEO Refresher | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Few things provide greater satisfaction or joy than to learn that another feels that something you have said or done has been of help to them. This is especially true when it occurred with no thought of something in return.

Content: Quotation | Author: John Wooden | Source: CEO Refresher | Subjects: Communication, Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

In a specific culture, people usually respond well to receiving very detailed and segmented information about what is expected of each of them. If you need to give instructions to a team member from this kind of culture, focus on what that person needs to accomplish and when. Conversely, if you need to motivate, manage, or persuade someone from a holistic culture, spend time explaining … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: International, Management, Organizational Behavior

People make decisions—often in very different ways. Learn more about five distinct styles and the preferences that shape them.

Content: Article | Authors: Dan P. Lovallo, Olivier Sibony | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips