675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on what is important. They try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding. They try to find the constants in a situation, to think through what is strategic and generic rather than to “solve problems.” They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision making; rather, they … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

When you find yourself saying things like “I wish my people took more ownership,” “I wish we operated more like a startup,” or “I wish we were more nimble,” remember that most organizations have created so much emphasis on tactical performance that their people cannot adapt. Maintaining great performance over the long term will require organizations to also emphasize adaptive performance.

Content: Quotation | Author: Lindsay McGregor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Experts have opined for decades on the reasons behind the spectacular failure rates of strategy execution. In 2016, it was estimated that 67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution. There are many explanations for this abysmal failure rate, but a 10-year longitudinal study on executive leadership conducted by my firm showed one clear reason. A full 61% of executives told us they were … [ Read more ]

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

Given how important mentoring is, there’s surprisingly limited guidance about how to become a good mentor. We offer here an informal set of guidelines for good mentorship — a playbook, if you will, for a game that is very much a team sport. While we draw many of our examples from academic medicine, the lessons are pertinent across disciplines.

Content: Article | Authors: Sanjay Saint, Vineet Chopra | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

In various contexts, such as entrepreneurship and hiring, people often exhibit a preference for men over women when information about an individual’s quality (for example, their expected performance) is unavailable or unclear. Even when performance information is available, lab-based research has shown that women still tend to be disadvantaged, compared with men of equal quality. This double standard means women must outperform men to be … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tristan L. Botelho | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Women in Business

Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite, receive lower salaries, and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men. Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to differences in men and women’s behavior.

Which raises the question: Do women and men act all that differently? We realized that there’s little to no concrete … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Ben Waber, Laura Freeman, Stephen Turban | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Women in Business

A look at 7 types of customer service representatives and which are preferred by organizations hiring reps vs which are preferred by customers.

Content: Multimedia Content | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

As a professor teaching strategy, most recently at Harvard Business School and Northeastern University, I have tried to offer the minimum essential explanation of an integrated view of strategy, to combine the best of the many frameworks that exist, show how they relate to one another, and distill the field to the essentials that entrepreneurs need to know to get started.

I’ve published my notes … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kevin J. Boudreau | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

Data science is becoming a reality for change management, and although it may not have arrived yet, it is time for organizations to get ready. The companies best positioned to change in the next decade will be the ones that set themselves up well now, by collecting the right kind of data and investing in their analytics capacity.

The key to building predictive models is knowing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael L. Tushman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Change Management

How do you get a job these days? The answer often involves networking — it isn’t what you know, it’s whom, we’re told. But what does that mean? After all, we’re connected to many people, in countless ways. So who can actually help? What kinds of relationships should we try to use when we are looking for a job?

Content: Career Information | Author: Ilana Gershon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Job Search, Networking

There are two types of performance that are important for success. Tactical performance is how effectively your organization sticks to its strategy. Adaptive performance is how effectively your organization diverges from its strategy. Every high performer needs both. A great salesperson will operate much more efficiently with a defined process for reaching out to prospects. They will represent the products more consistently. But they must … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Lindsay McGregor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Innovation, like marketing and sales, is a pipeline. In one end go raw concepts and notions. Out the other end come actionable ideas that can move the business forward. With the right technology, could you manage this pipeline the way you manage a sales pipeline?

Our research shows that you can.

One of us, Dylan, has analyzed five years of data from 154 public companies covering over … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dylan Minor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

In most organizations the costs of bureaucracy are largely hidden. Our accounting systems don’t measure the costs of inertia, insularity, disempowerment, and all the other forms of bureaucratic drag. Nowhere do we capture the costs of a management model that perpetuates a caste system of thinkers (managers) and doers (everyone else), that regards human beings as mere “resources,” that values conformance above all else, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Bureaucracy, Management, Organizational Behavior

If organizations are ‘systems for getting work done,’ processes provide a fine-grained description of the means.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Garvin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

As your startup grows, what your customers expect from you will change and the volume of their requests will change. You’ll shift from the reactive mode of supporting requests as they happen to the proactive mode of fixing issues before they ever become a problem.

I’ve spent the last seven years building the customer success function at HubSpot. I grew with the team, and played a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Redbord | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

If paying excessive CEO salaries is the most maligned use of corporate funds, stock buybacks may well take second place. Conventional wisdom is that CEOs buy back stock to manipulate the short-term stock price. They fund the buyback by cutting investment, and so firm value suffers in the long-term. As Senator Elizabeth Warren argued, “stock buybacks create a sugar high for the corporations. It boosts … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Alex Edmans | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Finance, Management, Strategy

Leaders too often express what they want in terms not of outcomes, but of tasks.

Content: Quotation | Author: Elsbeth Johnson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Leadership

Companies and government agencies often make the mistake of viewing innovation as a set of unconstrained activities with no discipline. In reality, for innovation to contribute to a company or government agency, it needs to be designed as a process from start to deployment.

When organizations lack a formal innovation pipeline process, project approvals tend to be based on who has the best demo or slides, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Steve Blank | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

Scalable efficiency doesn’t just demand conformity among the individuals within the institution. It also seeks conformity among those it serves – that’s the path to scalable efficiency. Scalable learning on the other hand is driven by the desire to learn more about those who are being served by the institutions and then to provide ever more value to those constituencies by tailoring products and services … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: John Hagel III | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Learning, Management

Our informal survey of where employees are spending their time in major departments across large companies suggests that 60-70% of their time is consumed in “exception handling” – addressing unexpected events that the existing processes can’t handle. These exceptions are a great opportunity to create new knowledge – how to handle something never anticipated. Yet, today this work is generally done inefficiently – workers struggle … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: John Hagel III | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Management