How Learning Leads to Results

Matthew E. May introduces a passage on the critical role of a learning focus in innovation from The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

Paul F. Nunes, Tim Breene

When the business is successfully chugging along but has not yet peaked, executives feel that operations can be leaner—they’ve moved far down the learning curve by then—and meaner, since they are under pressure to boost margins. They will then reduce both headcount and investments in talent, and will increasingly focus on talent that can best execute the existing business model. This has the perverse effect … [ Read more ]

Kishore S. Swaminathan, Gary Loveman

Business proposals and decisions—big or small—have to provide satisfactory answers to this question: “Do we think this is true or do we know?”

Kishore S. Swaminathan

There are three very distinct ways that organizations can fall into the analysis-paralysis trap. One is a managerial tendency to “over-fit the curve”—a statistical term that refers to the diminishing value of additional data once a pattern (or curve, in the graphic sense) has been found. Data collection has a price, inaction has a price and an analytically literate organization will clearly understand the cost … [ Read more ]

An Excerpt from The Network Is Your Customer

Speaking about what motivates a network of people to collaborate with companies, the excerpt comes from Chapter 7, “Collaborate: Involve Your Customers at Every Stage of Your Enterprise,” in Part II of the book, “Five Strategies to Thrive with Customer Networks.”

Cleaning the Crystal Ball

How intelligent forecasting can lead to better decision making.

The Value of Bicultural Individuals to Organisations

How do companies improve operationally with diverse and talented workforces? By taking advantage of individuals who feel at home in multiple cultures, says INSEAD visiting professor Mary Yoko Brannen.

The New Infocracies: Implications for Leadership

Because an infocracy is based on power created by access to widely available information, it demands a different type of leadership than a bureaucracy.

Managing the Support Staff Identity Crisis

Employees not connected directly to profit and loss can suffer from a collective “I-am-not-strategic” identity crisis. Professor Ranjay Gulati suggests that business managers allow so-called support function employees to become catalysts for change.

Gross Domestic Happiness: What Is the Relationship between Money and Well-being?

What exactly is the relationship between money and happiness? It’s a difficult question to pin down, experts say. While more money may make us happier, other considerations — such as whether you live in an economically advanced country and how you think about your time — also play into the equation. An increasing number of economists, sociologists and psychologists are now working in the field, … [ Read more ]

Thomas A. Stewart

Capabilities are the things we do well; culture is all the things we do, including those we do badly.

Thomas A. Stewart

In a conflict between strategy and culture, culture eventually wins. Always.

Creating Change in Mindset and Behavior

Most leaders don’t realize that mindset and behavior are the twin drivers of change.

10 Ways to Manage Employees that Are Older Than You

There are always awkward moments when a company’s new hire is younger than the team he or she is managing.

Older employees who thought they were in the running for the same position may feel slighted, others may assume youth amounts to inexperience, or they may not be bothered. Often though, the experience tends to be just as uncomfortable for the new boss who … [ Read more ]

How to Build a Beautiful Company

Employing open-book management and leadership by consensus, the Sky Factory’s Bill Witherspoon has set out to create the perfect business.

Reaching productive engagement: The Four Pillar Approach to Managing Investment in Human Capital

Organizations that want to capitalize on their competitive position or improve their performance must consider the best way to take full advantage of the potential inherent in their people. These authors describe the Four Pillar Model™, which provides an innovative, well-grounded process for measuring and managing worker performance and involvement.

The 3 Core Needs: Satisfy Them and You’ll Be Happy

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester have created an aspirational framework known as self-determination theory. Deci and Ryan found that at the root of human aspiration, there are three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (the need for social connection and intimacy).

It’s the Situation, Stupid

Dan Heath explains how the environment has a tremendous influence on the way that we act and asks, “at work can you find ways to make your people better simply by changing their situation?”

Cutting Your Losses: How to Avoid the Sunk Cost Trap

“If at first you don’t succeed, give up,” is the road less traveled for leaders who continue to spend money on an acquisition they made – even though the acquisition is clearly not working out. But why, as this author asks, don’t we actually strive to create an organizational climate that makes admitting and learning from mistakes as valued as persistence and perseverance? Below, he … [ Read more ]

The Gender Gap

INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra, co-author of a World Economic Forum report, sheds light on where different countries stand on the issue of gender equality in the corporate world and why women are still facing barriers to attain both the highest echelons and “mission critical” roles.