675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Individuals can make a difference in an organization, but a social system — particularly in large organizations — is always stronger. Fundamentally, organizations domesticate people—they condition people to work in certain ways, and they inadvertently perpetuate the status quo. People get tagged as “talented” when they fit in (or pretend to). This ends up exacerbating conformity and fear, and perpetuating the very problems that the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Todd Warner | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Even small decisions can have a big impact.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Scott Berinato | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

The functional model of organizations is an important reason why so many companies struggle with the gap between strategy and execution. It makes a company good at many things, but great at nothing. When functional boundaries prevail, there is no construct for managing capabilities. It isn’t clear who owns the capabilities, how to track spending on them, or how to connect them to the strategy … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Cesare R. Mainardi, Paul Leinwand | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Why have we lost touch with W. Edwards Deming. Through his red bead experiment he showed that we often get a false read on workers because we judge them too narrowly. Deming believed that we can improve worker performance only when we improve the entire system they work within. And he believed that managers wrongly apply incentive pay plans, forced rankings, and all sorts of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Joshua Macht | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, People

The system that’s changing the way we work.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Darrell K. Rigby | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Chris Zook of Bain explains the predictable crises of growth and how to overcome them.

Content: Article | Author: Chris Zook | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Writing and delivering performance reviews can be one of the most challenging tasks for any manager. Asking the following five questions can help.

Content: Article | Author: Benjamin Dattner | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

The strength of cross-cultural teams is their diversity of experience, perspective, and insight. But to capture those riches, colleagues must commit to open communication; they must dare to share. Unfortunately, this is rarely easy. In the 25 years we’ve spent researching global work groups, we’ve found that challenges typically arise in three areas.

Content: Article | Author: Ginka Toegel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Culture, International, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Most internal organizational barriers result from complexity and bureaucracy that has accumulated as leaders scaled up their businesses. We call this dynamic the “Growth Paradox:” Growth creates complexity and yet complexity is the number one killer of profitable growth. You cannot win on the outside, in the marketplace, if you are losing on the inside, with an organization stifled by its own growth. But what … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Chris Zook | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

What makes a great leader? Although the core ingredients of leadership are universal (good judgment, integrity, and people skills), the full recipe for successful leadership requires culture-specific condiments. The main reason for this is that cultures differ in their implicit theories of leadership, the lay beliefs about the qualities that individuals need to display to be considered leaders. Research has shown that leaders’ decision making, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: International, Leadership

There are several ratios you can look at that will help you evaluate whether your company can generate sales and control its expenses. I talked with Joe Knight, author of the HBR TOOLS: Return on Investment and co-founder and owner of Content: Article | Author: Amy Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Finance

Keep in mind the distinction between a threshold competence and a distinguishing one. A threshold skill means everyone must meet this criterion just to be considered for a job. […] After that, though, are distinguishing competencies, the skills or abilities that you find in star performers in an organization but not in those who are mediocre – those just good enough to keep their job. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Goleman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

The U.S. venture-capital industry is envied throughout the world as an engine of economic growth. Although the collective imagination romanticizes the industry, separating the popular myths from the current realities is crucial to understanding how this important piece of the U.S. economy operates. For entrepreneurs (and would-be entrepreneurs), such an analysis may prove especially beneficial.

Content: Article | Author: Bob Zider | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Venture Capital

There are five ways in which social distance gets created and you have to manage each differently. To begin with, team structure—the physical configuration of the global team, how many people are in what location, not to mention where the leader is. Then there are the processes that you use for managing team interactions—without carefully managing communication, team interactions can end up as a dialogue … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Any time you propose a capital expenditure, you can be sure senior leaders will want to know what the return on investment (ROI) is. There are a variety of methods you can use to calculate ROI — net present value, payback, breakeven — and internal rate of return, or IRR.

For help in deciphering this I talked with Joe Knight, author of HBR TOOLS: Return on … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Amy Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Finance

For functional purposes, networks have two salient characteristics: clustering and path length. Clustering refers to the degree to which a network is made up of tightly knit groups while path lengths is a measure of distance—the average number of links separating any two nodes in the network.

We often hear about the need to “break down silos” to create a networked organization, but this too … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Greg Satell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

When setting priorities it is helpful to distinguish between absolute and relative performance. Absolute performance sets the minimum requirements — are you in the red or black, are you growing or contracting? Relative performance, expressed in percentile rankings, tells you where you have the most room for improvement and sets an upper bound on what is reasonable for you, given how well you’re already performing … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Achievement, Management, Measurement

The problem with hierarchy is not the role definition that comes with it, the problem is that bosses use hierarchy to tell those below them what to do. We believe that clear role definitions (with people filling various roles that may change from time to time) allows the team to focus on getting the job done rather than worrying about the uncertainly of the limits … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Marquet | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

One of the problems with the word empowerment is that it is vague. “Empowerment” does not inherently contain the ability to measure and affect it: two necessary components for improving it. What do we say, “Be somewhat more empowered than you used to be?” That’s like saying “Get stronger” and then going to the gym and never knowing how much weight you are pushing.

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

Founders face a wide range of decisions when building their startups: market decisions, product decisions, financing decisions, and many more. The temptation is to prioritize these choices over decisions about how to structure their own founding teams. That’s understandable, but perilous. Our research, forthcoming in Management Science, identifies one of those important pitfalls: founder equity splits, i.e., the way founders allocate the ownership amongst themselves … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Noam Wasserman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship