Where Busy Bees and Business Converge

The striking similarities between ecological and organizational networks. Based on the Research of Serguei Saavedra, Brian Uzzi And Felix Reed-Tsochas

Why Nice Guys Don’t Always Make It to the Top

Nice guys may not finish first, according to research coauthored by Nir Halevy of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In fact, taking care of others in your group and even taking care of outsiders may reduce a nice guy’s chance of becoming a leader.

James Krohe Jr.

Organizations may be ever striving to streamline and boost operational efficiency, but corporate English grows increasingly less effective as an everyday medium for doing what people need it to do, which is to inform, motivate, explain. What should be clear, concrete, and concise is vague, abstract, and wordy. The English that has evolved in the American management corps shares family traits with the mumbling of … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.

Power Corrupts, Especially When It Lacks Status

Individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others, according to new research from Stanford Graduate School of Business, USC, and the Kellogg School.

Doug Riddle

Humans are conclusion-drawing animals, and we will never leave dots unconnected.

Richard Harkness

A committee is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.

Morten T. Hansen

Collaboration rarely occurs naturally, because leaders, often unintentionally, erect barriers that block people from collaborating. Many people, though not all, of course, have a natural tendency to collaborate, but they are not left to their own devices. And the culprit is modern management.

Managers and management thinkers celebrate decentralization, which works like this: You delegate responsibilities for products, business areas, and geographies to a group of … [ Read more ]

Making Onboarding Work

With fresh faces in organizations and new interns flooding offices, it’s time to really think about what the first steps are for bringing a new employee onto your team.

Bill Jensen

Before the Industrial Revolution, individuals owned the processes, tools, and procedures, and suddenly they were taken over by the corporation. That went on for 150 or 200 years, and as we shifted into the knowledge- and service-work economy, we put more and more back on the shoulders of the individual worker. The corporate infrastructure has not kept up with the changes in the design of … [ Read more ]

Nine Ways to Identify Natural Leaders

The need to empower natural leaders isn’t an HR pipe dream, it’s a competitive imperative. But before you can empower them, you have to find them.

Stan Slap

If managers were allowed to live their value of Family, maybe they wouldn’t work fifty hours a week, regularly stay away from home, or constantly take the job home with them. If managers were allowed to live their value of Integrity, maybe they wouldn’t represent a product to customers as performing the best and at the lowest cost when it doesn’t, it isn’t—or it doesn’t … [ Read more ]

How CFOs can Keep Strategic Decisions on Track

The finance chief is often well placed to guard against common decision-making biases.

Drive Profits By Sharing Financial Data

Apply open-book management to boost employee ownership.

Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika

Managing for effectiveness in what economists call tacit interactions—the searching, coordinating, and monitoring activities required to exchange goods, services, and information—is about fostering change, learning, collaboration, shared values, and innovation. Workers engage in a larger number of higher-quality tacit interactions when organizational barriers (such as hierarchies and silos) don’t get in the way, when people trust each other and have the confidence to organize themselves, … [ Read more ]

Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika

We found that the performance of companies in relatively tacit-interactive sectors varied far more than that of other companies. The level of performance variability (defined as the standard deviation of performance divided by the mean level of performance) was 0.9 for companies in sectors with a low level of tacit interactions. Among companies in sectors with a middling number of tacit interactions it was 5.5, … [ Read more ]

Recovering from the Need to Achieve

In his new book, Flying without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success, HBS professor Thomas J. DeLong explores the world of “high-need-for-achievement professionals” or HNAPs—those for whom the constant, insatiable need to achieve can lead to anxiety and dysfunction. Plus: book excerpt.

Saj-nicole Joni

But the fact is that content employees don’t drive a company to achieve big wins. It takes employee conviction, desire and ambition, and those traits don’t create a naturally “aligned” workforce. Show me an organization where employees are universally content, and I’ll show you a failure about to happen. The bottom line is this: If you want your company to innovate and to deliver sustainable … [ Read more ]