682 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

It’s safe to say that CEOs are, overall, a talented bunch, but that’s not what separates them from other professionals, nor is it the main reason their firms succeed or fail. Certainly it doesn’t come close to explaining why they’re so well paid. Put another way, CEOs matter, just less than many people think. Instead, luck, and yes, bias, play a far larger role in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Walter Frick | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

After a long and successful run, the theory of disruptive innovation has come under attack of late. Disruptive innovation is a parsimonious theory that explains many business failures. But not all. And that is the critical insight getting lost in the cross-fire between the theory’s disciples and its critics.

Content: Article | Author: Donald Sull | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

For decades, leadership development has focused on “competencies,” a psychometric-based method of assessing and developing leader behavior. Organizations figure out the competencies that leaders need to be successful, help them develop those competencies, and then measure those competencies in the organization.

The problem is that this logic is inconsistent with how work actually gets done. Leadership does not happen in a vacuum; leaders are always acting … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Todd Warner | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Leadership

A business model is a description of how your business runs, but a competitive strategy explains how you will do better than your rivals. That could be by offering a better business model — but it can also be by offering the same business model to a different market.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Andrea Ovans, Joan Magretta | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

If you’ve ever received any cross-cultural training … chances are… it has focused on differences: differences in communication styles (like how Japanese workers are less direct than Germans) or differences in values (like how Americans have more individualistic values than those in China). It may have even focused on differences in etiquette — like how in the United States you can write on the back … [ Read more ]

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

The business world is rightly obsessed with net promoter score and other measures of peer recommendation. What other customers say is incredibly influential on our buying behavior. But there is a touchpoint that is even more influential, which marketers rarely think about and almost never measure: observing what other customers actually do. So what can marketers do about it?

Content: Article | Author: Hugh Wilson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

An ever-growing number of companies continue to discover that de-emphasizing ratings in favor of ongoing quality conversations that support employee development is showing itself to be a viable option. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we’ve conducted in-depth research with 33 of these 52 companies to find out what really happens when companies remove performance ratings. Here are some of our high-level findings.

Content: Article | Author: David Rock | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Operations

You probably know by now that whenever possible you should be making data-driven decisions at work. But do you know how to parse through all of the data available to you? The good news is that you likely don’t have to do the number crunching yourself (hallelujah!) but you do need to correctly understand and interpret the analysis created by your colleagues. One of the … [ Read more ]

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

While there has been a rapid growth in experiments, especially within tech companies, we’ve seen too many run incorrectly. Even when they’re set up properly, avoidable mistakes often happen during implementation. As a result, many organizations fail to receive the real benefits of the scientific method. This article lays out seven steps to ensure that your experiment delivers.

Content: Article | Author: Oliver Hauser | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Miscellaneous

Knowing how to develop and deliver a data-driven presentation is now a crucial skill for many professionals, since we often have to tell our colleagues a story about the success of a new initiative, the promise of a new business opportunity, or the imperative of a change in strategy — stories that are much more compelling when they’re backed by numbers.

In the past four years, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Alexandra Samuel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

In the past, new managers often had the luxury of cutting their teeth on traditional collocated teams: groups of people, sitting down the hall from one another, who met up in conference rooms to hash out what they were trying to achieve and how to get there. Unfortunately, today’s increasingly global work environment does not always afford that luxury. Many first-time managers find themselves assigned … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mark Mortensen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Say you are competing in a fast-growing industry. How much do you care about profits versus market share? It’s a common rule of thumb that businesses should go for market share in fast-growing in­dustries. It’s conventional wisdom, though, not a law of physics; you don’t have to go for share.

Content: Article | Author: Mark Chussil | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

A strategic orientation must be balanced by ruthless operational efficiency; a sense of collectiveness must be balanced by the need for individuals to build their careers; a global perspective must be balanced by local relevance; enduring commitments must leave room for regeneration and renewal. Mastering all four of these tensions together will help your organization achieve and maintain high performance.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Douglas A. Ready, Linda A. Hill, Robert J. Thomas | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

For better goal-setting, it will help to understand where financial targets typically come from. Often, they’re based on past performance. But a company’s recent track record says nothing about how much its performance could or should improve; what’s needed is a useful assessment of a company’s probability of future success. One way to think about the likelihood of hitting a given performance increase is to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Finance, Management

The idea that an enterprise should carefully construct a portfolio of innovation initiatives holds great appeal strategically, but in practice it has the downside of centralizing decision-making power, and therefore slowing down innovation.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

Traditionally, the discipline of strategy has emphasized a deep understanding of market economics and potential disruptors, the evolution of demand and value expectations, the competencies of the organization, and the role of talent and performance management. Long-dominant frameworks like the Five Forces or SWOT analysis have been based, accordingly, on a fundamental, often static or relatively long-duration, set of market and firm characteristics.

Today, though, many … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Boston Consulting Group has created a change management tool called the DICE assessment, which they have been refining since they first wrote about it in HBR a decade ago, and a version of which is now available for online use.

With the aid of the DICE tool, companies can assess the probability of success of change initiatives early in their lives. By evaluating projects with a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Perry Keenan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Change Management

This concise, handy guide is packed with quick tips on a broad range of topics, organized into three major skills every manager must master:

– Managing yourself
– Managing your team
– Managing your business

Drawing from HBR’s popular Management Tip of the Day, the book puts the best management practices and insights, from top thinkers in the field, right at your fingertips. Pick it up any time you … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

It isn’t enough just to hire the best. If you want to boost the productivity of your organization’s human capital, you also have to deploy those high performers effectively — put them to work so they can deliver the results they’re capable of. One of the most effective methods of deployment I’ve seen is to create all-star teams. Teams like these are a kind of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael C. Mankins | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

If you are in charge of an organization, force yourself to have regular and long stretches of uninterrupted time just to think things through. When you do so – and you should – here are five guiding questions that could help you reflect on the big picture.

Content: Article | Author: Freek Vermeulen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy