651 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Good one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports address the practical and personal needs of the employee, benefiting their performance, growth, and well-being, as well as the success of their team and the broader organization. However, since managers are typically the ones who run these meetings, the employee’s needs are often forgotten. Then it’s up to the employee to ask questions to get the … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Authors: Cydnei Meredith, Liana Kreamer, Steven G. Rogelberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development, Work

Organizations of all sizes and across industries pledged their support to DEI initiatives in 2020, including building more diverse and equitable companies, and to using their power for good. Now, with the spotlight no longer shining quite so brightly on corporate DEI, how much progress have organizations made against their promises? To understand the state of DEI efforts since 2020, the authors looked at aggregated, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Evelyn R. Carter, Natalie Johnson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Three kinds of bias often creep into the performance-review process, in ways that disproportionately affect women, especially when they choose to take advantage of the flexibility offered by hybrid and remote work. These biases are experience bias, which leads reviewers to overvalue tasks that are easy to define; proximity bias, which leads them to think that people in their immediate orbit do the most important … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Women in Business

Organizations are reexamining how they recruit, develop, and retain talent. They have to, because the pandemic has accelerated three already existing trends among employees: the search for meaning; the desire for flexibility; and the pace of technological transformation. Employees increasingly are bringing a new set of values, needs, and desires to the workplace, and the worker-employer contract is changing as a result, fundamentally and permanently. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Katy George | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources | Company: McKinsey & Company

Companies often have a hard time determining how motivated or committed their employees are, because employees know it goes against their own interests to declare themselves unmotivated or uncommitted. The solution to this problem is for companies to put incentives in place that encourage employees to reveal how they actually feel. In this article, the author, a behavioral economist, describes an incentive plan that has … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Uri Gneezy | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Shareholder cultivation in the age of stakeholder capitalism requires management to identify steward shareholders and then foster symbiotic relationships with them. The authors offer four sets of tools managers can use to cultivate steward shareholders. These tools are classified into four types based on two dimensions: time-to-efficacy, which refers to the time needed for the tactics to take effect, and implementation difficulty, which pertains to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Mark DesJardine, Wei Shi | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

Don’t take common interview questions lightly just because they’re predictable. Underpreparing for them can make the difference between moving ahead and moving on. One question that often comes up: What are your strengths and weaknesses? In this article, the author outlines clear steps for how to describe your strengths and weaknesses along with sample language to use as a guide.

Content: Career Information | Author: Joel Schwartzberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Interviewing

If you want your values to really matter, you must root them in all organizational decisions. For a company’s values to feel integral to the lifeblood of the organization, they must be visibly central to how the organization competes.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Governance design — which defines who gets to make decisions and allocate resources — is often too complicated or unclear to be effective. For a strategy to be successful, those closest to the most relevant information, budgets, and problems are the best equipped to make decisions. When leaders have proximity to an issue but no authority, authority without the needed resources, or control of the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Know what your current organization is and isn’t capable of and what capabilities you need to achieve [a] newly articulated strategy. Unlike competencies, which belong to individuals, capabilities are organizational.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The ways leading companies manage time—in production, in new product development and introduction, in sales and distribution—represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage.

Editor’s Note: This is a classic HBR article that was assigned reading when I was a student. It has held up pretty well 35 years on.

Content: Article | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Operations, Strategy

Complaining can have both positive and negative effects on organizational communication. Constructive complaining — or structured opportunities for employees to voice their concerns — offers valuable feedback to improve work processes, products, and services, and thus should be encouraged. Venting and chronic complaining have both advantages and disadvantages for the individual and the group and should be given the right space and time, rather than … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alyson Meister, Nele Dael | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

At most companies, strategic choices are limited to three options:

1. Seeking coexistence with competitors. This choice is seldom stable, since competitors refuse to cooperate and stay put.
2. Retreating in the face of competitors. Many companies choose this course; the business press fills its pages with accounts of companies retreating by consolidating plants, focusing their operations, out-sourcing, divesting businesses, pulling out of markets, or moving upscale.
3. Attacking, either

… [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

In manufacturing, costs fall into two categories: those that respond to volume or scale and those that are driven by variety. Scale-related costs decline as volume increases, usually falling 15% to 25% per unit each time volume doubles. Variety-related costs, on the other hand, reflect the costs of complexity in manufacturing: setup, materials handling, inventory, and many of the overhead costs of a factory. In … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Finance, Management, Operations

Today’s new-generation companies compete with flexible manufacturing and rapid-response systems, expanding variety and increasing innovation. A company that builds its strategy on this cycle is a more powerful competitor than one with a traditional strategy based on low wages, scale, or focus. These older, cost-based strategies require managers to do whatever is necessary to drive down costs: move production to or source from a low-wage … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Operations, Strategy

While time is a basic business performance variable, management seldom monitors its consumption explicitly—almost never with the same precision accorded sales and costs. Yet time is a more critical competitive yardstick than traditional financial measurements.

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Avoiding price competition by moving into higher margin products is called margin retreat—a common response to stepped-up competition that eventually leads to corporate suicide. As a company retreats, its costs rise as do its prices, thus “subsidizing” an aggressive competitor’s expansion into the vacated position. The retreating company’s revenue base stops growing and may eventually shrink to the point where it can no longer support … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: George Stalk Jr. | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

There are many interview questions that inspire dread in an interviewee — from “What’s your greatest weakness?” to “Tell me about yourself.” But one in particular is especially complicated: “What are your salary expectations?” If you go too low, you might end up making less than they’re willing to pay. But if you go too high, you could price yourself out of the job. In … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Author: Amy Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Benefits / Comp., Career, Interviewing

Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies explain their interest in diversity by making some form of a business case: justifying diversity in the workplace on the grounds that it benefits companies’ bottom line. And yet, in a recent study, the authors found that this approach actually makes underrepresented job candidates a lot less interested in working with an organization. This is because rhetoric that makes … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aneeta Rattan, Oriane Georgeac | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Three out of every five companies rate their organization as weak on strategy execution. When you dig into the potential barriers to implementation, there is a general lack of understanding of the various factors at play, resulting in the inevitable managerial justifications — “poor leadership,” “inadequate talent,” “lack of process excellence,” etc. This article suggests three key steps to build the right execution system: 1) … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Darko Lovric, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy