682 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Executives should be thinking about four different types of competition to maintain relevance in a changing environment. These four competition types can be positioned along two dimensions, which reflect two distinct questions: (1) “Are there customers for which to compete?” and (2) “Are we being outcompeted?”

These questions will help you identify the type of competition that currently exposes you to the greatest existential threats. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Carsten Lund Pedersen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

We all complain about meetings. We have too many. They’re a waste of time. Nothing gets done. These complaints often have merit, but they are so broad that they’re difficult to argue with and harder to address.

There are specific complaints that can be tackled, however. When I ask people in the workshops I lead what they most want help with, five issues consistently come up. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Paul Axtell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity / Work Tips, Teamwork

When the funnel metaphor reigned, communication was one-way, and every interaction with consumers had a variable media cost that typically outweighed creative’s fixed costs. Management focused on “working media spend”—the portion of a marketing budget devoted to what are today known as paid media.

This no longer makes sense. Now marketers must also consider owned media (that is, the channels a brand controls, such as websites) … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David C. Edelman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

When we talk about bias, we often tie it to acts of discrimination or prejudice. But according to cognitive science, everybody, by virtue of having a brain that’s constantly seeking efficiency, is biased in some way — and not all biases make us actively malicious.

The key is how we manage our biases.

While biases can affect any of an organization’s talent decisions, they can be especially … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Beth Jones | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

We see a paradox in two important analytics trends. The percentage of marketing budgets companies plan to allocate to analytics over the next three years will increase from 5.8% to 17.3%—a whopping 198% increase. These increases are expected despite the fact that top marketers report that the effect of analytics on company-wide performance remains modest, with an average performance score of 4.1 on a seven-point … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Carl F. Mela | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

These findings echo one of the main concerns associated with monetary rewards that sometimes fail to accomplish their goals. Academics refer to this phenomenon as the crowding-out effect of explicit incentives on intrinsic motivation. In other words, associating an economic value with a certain activity changes the nature of the exchange. If health care workers sanitize their hands because it is in the best interest … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Susanna Gallani | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Life on a global team isn’t necessarily equitable. Employees far away from headquarters often have less access to the team leader. As a result, they may have a harder time getting their concerns noticed and attended to. Additionally, more peripheral members of global teams are often forced to speak in a language that’s not their own and communicate in a style that’s not necessarily second … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Andy Molinsky | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, International, Teamwork

When you join an organization, you have a short window of time to adapt to its culture. It’s the old 90-day rule. And we know too many talented individuals who have stumbled in their new company because they failed to read the cultural tea leaves. This happens because most organizations don’t explain the cultural rules to newcomers, and new hires are so focused on the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Allan H. Church | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Culture, Organizational Behavior

The flaw in so many policy statements, especially those of business, is that they contain no action commitment—to carry them out is no one’s specific work and responsibility. Small wonder then that the people in the organization tend to view such statements cynically, if not as declarations of what top management is really not going to do.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

It is a waste of time to worry about what will be acceptable and what the decision maker should or should not say so as not to evoke resistance. (The things one worries about seldom happen, while objections and difficulties no one thought about may suddenly turn out to be almost insurmountable obstacles.) In other words, the decision maker gains nothing by starting out with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Decision Making

It’s a common complaint. Companies keep trying to show the world that they are socially conscious and keep losing the battle. A major reason companies don’t get credit for their good works is they employ a one-size-fits-all strategy to communicating their efforts, while what’s needed are focused messages that matter to each of their four different audiences:

1. Corporate watchdogs such as social media activists, NGOs,

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mark R. Kramer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Public Relations, Social Responsibility (ESG)

What we see when we administer 360-degree feedback surveys on behalf of leaders is that the executives with really low scores in one or more areas are often completely unaware of their fatal flaws. They are shocked to find themselves scoring so low — even though approximately 30% of all the leaders we’ve studied have at least one fatal flaw.

Content: Article | Author: Jack Zenger | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development

A well-designed operating model involves far more than the lines and boxes or spans and layers in the organization chart. It includes accountabilities. Who has P&L authority? Who on that org chart has the authority to make which decisions? As companies move to more agile operating models, they must learn to balance accountability with autonomy. A new operating model also requires a governance structure and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric Garton | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Practically every organization today has a set of core values that ideally function as the “operating instructions” of the company. The goal of articulating the essential and enduring principles of your organization is to inform, inspire, and instruct the day-to-day behaviors of everyone who works at your company. But this rarely happens, because most core values statements don’t get at what’s unique about the firm. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Denise Lee Yohn | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Saying no is one of the greatest gifts an executive can give their organization. Too many leaders overestimate the capacity of their organizations under the ruse of “stretch goals” or “challenge assignments” to justify their denial of the organization’s true limitations.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Good customer service seems like common sense for businesses. But how valuable is it really?

Until now, this has not been rigorously quantified across different companies. Businesses are understandably reluctant to share their CRM and sales data, and most research in this field has been based on surveys. But as more Americans seek customer service online, social media offers a better platform for analyzing interactions between … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Wayne Huang | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

Closing the gap between strategy and execution may not be about better execution after all, but rather about better learning — about more dialogue between strategy and operations, a greater flow of information from customers to executives, and more experiments. In today’s fast-paced world, strategy as learning must go hand in hand with execution as learning — bypassing the idea that either a strategy or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Amy Edmondson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Effective executives know when a decision has to be based on principle and when it should be made pragmatically, on the merits of the case. They know the trickiest decision is that between the right and the wrong compromise, and they have learned to tell one from the other. They know that the most time-consuming step in the process is not making the decision but … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Decision Making

Our work suggests that culture can be managed. The first and most important step leaders can take to maximize its value and minimize its risks is to become fully aware of how it works. By integrating findings from more than 100 of the most commonly used social and behavioral models, we have identified eight styles that distinguish a culture and can be measured.

Content: Article | Authors: Boris Groysberg, J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

For more than a decade, leading human resource strategists have hit on a recurring theme: You want your star players working in the roles that matter most to the business. For example, in 2009 professors Brian Becker, Mark Huselid, and Richard Beatty estimated that in most companies less than 15% of jobs are what they call strategic positions and said management should focus “disproportionate investments” … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Lynn Cowart | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources