675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Why do bonuses sometimes backfire? It’s because each incentive design choice both signals information about your own beliefs and intentions as an employer and shapes the signaling value of employee behavior within the organization. If you don’t think through these signals carefully, you may end up approving a bonus scheme with results that are the opposite of what you intend. This article offers a way … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Dirk Sliwka, Timo Vogelsang | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

For organizations to truly innovate and grow, leaders in every role and at every organizational level must be attuned to how they are creating new value while simultaneously protecting existing value. Just as a soccer coach must simultaneously pursue both scoring and defending, leaders must constantly focus their attention on opportunities to create value — through innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation — and to protect value … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David A. Hofmann, John J. Sumanth | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

If you want to maximize someone’s satisfaction with a choice, don’t give them unlimited options. Instead, as my colleagues and I have shown, you should give them some choice but with clear constraints. This added structure is crucial for picking a desired option with confidence.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

While history would like you to believe breakthroughs are the result of genius inspiration, or divine intervention, the truth is far more prosaic. Whether it’s the invention of basketball or an organization-wide system for learning and innovation, our greatest minds have arrived at their Eureka! moments by way of clever choosing. That is, they identified their big problem, broke it down into several subproblems, searched … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Strategic concepts come in and out of fashion as the needs and dynamics of the marketplace change. Research and analysis of today’s landscape identifies six key strategic concepts that set outperforming companies apart: Borrow someone’s road, partner with a third party, reveal your strategy, be good, let the competition go, and adopt small scale attacks.

Content: Article | Author: Kaihan Krippendorff | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

The primary focus of a strategic plan is competitiveness. It is designed to respond to change and future opportunities in a way to find advantage. The primary focus of an operational plan is efficiency. Operational plans are designed to roll out strategy via internal department programs developed by, for instance, HR, IT, marketing, and manufacturing.

Content: Quotation | Author: Graham Kenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Operations, Strategy

All organizations have competitors — for customers, for staff, for funds, for resources.

Content: Quotation | Author: Graham Kenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Management

Strategy is about positioning an organization, whether it’s a business, a government, or a not-for-profit entity, relative to its competitors.

Content: Quotation | Author: Graham Kenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Capturing the full benefits of diversity is not about hiring people who can fit into the existing corporate culture; it is about ensuring that the culture itself is supportive and adaptable enough to embrace all kinds of talent. Only then will companies get the creativity, innovation, and different ways of thinking that diversity can bring. For that to happen, there needs to be data and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Katy George | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Private equity (PE) firms have a proven approach to identify areas for revenue growth, value creation, and cost reduction: due diligence. But companies rarely use this same approach in the execution of their own growth strategy. This is a missed opportunity. The same due diligence skills and tools can be found in most large companies, but they are usually siloed in the corporate development team … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Hoyoung Pak, Jason McDannold, Yale Kwon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Strategy

Even when interview questions are relevant, the interview is a poor predictor of future performance. It demonstrates someone’s competence to answer questions, know theory, and prioritize information – all of which may or may not correlate to what they need to do on the job.

The traditional interview also makes it more likely we hire someone in our image, the “mini me” cognitive error. We can’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Geoff Tuff, Jeff Johnson, Steve Goldbach | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Delayed and ineffective commercial integration can turn a good deal into a loser, because sales growth ultimately determines whether a merger achieves its value-creation goals. To create value, mergers need top-line gains: More sales to more customers, expansion into new territories or market adjacencies, new products and services to sell to existing customers. But compared to other areas of post-merger activity, the commercial engine starts … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Erik Siegler, Jason McDannold, Natsuki Sato, Yale Kwon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

Competing on capabilities provides a way for companies to gain the benefits of both focus and diversification. Put another way, a company that focuses on its strategic capabilities can compete in a remarkable diversity of regions, products, and businesses and do it far more coherently than the typical conglomerate can. Such a company is a “capabilities predator”—able to come out of nowhere and move rapidly … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Stalk Jr., Lawrence Shulman, Philip Evans | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three ideas.

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew MacLennan, Constantinos C. Markides | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

In an effort to minimize mishires, many companies have adopted extensive hiring processes … that we believe is as damaging a form of inefficiency as mishires themselves. […] And there’s no strong evidence that it’s actually even working.  The treatment has become worse than the disease.

[…]

In their review of their hiring processes, Google discovered that they could capture 86% of the value produced by … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alexandra Ham, Atta Tarki, Tyler Cowen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Too much performance feedback is of the “do good and avoid evil” variety. That may sound harmless, but overly general feedback increases feelings of defensiveness, rather than openness to behavior change, because it involves broad judgments and invites counterpunching rather than discussion.

Content: Quotation | Author: Frank V. Cespedes | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior

Effective reviews require a judgment about causes of a person’s performance. For example, are performance issues the consequence of deficiencies in motivation or ability? Some people may work hard, but lack certain capabilities: Can training and coaching enhance those capabilities? Others may have the abilities but lack motivation: Can different incentives or processes increase motivation? Still others may seemingly lack both motivation and relevant ability: … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Frank V. Cespedes | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

The author analyzed project teams across 257 firms to identify why only 60% of planned value is typically realized in change initiatives, focusing on four key factors: effective initial communication (“ACE the Memo”), ensuring resource accessibility and autonomy (“Master the Means”), employing mechanisms to align actions with goals (“Amplify with Mechanisms”), and account for the needs of each implementation stage (“Measure to Account”).

Content: Article | Author: Tom Hunsaker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Management

Managers spend 20% of their time on average managing team conflict. Over the past three decades, the authors have studied thousands of team conflicts around the world and have identified four common patterns of team conflict.

Content: Article | Authors: Amanda J. Ferguson, Priti Pradhan Shah, Randall S. Peterson, Stephen L. Jones | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Inflation-fatigued shoppers are witnessing prices fluctuate across categories with unprecedented scale and frequency — a trend often seen as yet another cunning commercial scheme. Is the extra profit companies see from dynamic pricing worth the risk of alienating customers? If done well, companies shouldn’t be making that trade-off — dynamic pricing.

Content: Article | Authors: Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing