675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

The resume: there are so many conflicting recommendations out there. Should you keep it to one page? Do you put a summary up top? Do you include personal interests and volunteer gigs? This may be your best chance to make a good first impression, so you’ve got to get it right.

Content: Career Information | Author: Amy Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Resumes

Nearly a quarter century ago, at a gathering in Phoenix, Arizona, John W. Gardner delivered a speech that may be one of the most quietly influential speeches in the history of American business — a text that has been photocopied, passed along, underlined, and linked to by senior executives in some of the most important companies and organizations in the world. I wonder, though, how … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bill Taylor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Segmenting, at its most basic, is the separation of a group of customers with different needs into subgroups of customers with similar needs and preferences. By doing this, a company can better tailor and target its products and services to meet each segment’s needs. It sounds straightforward but often it isn’t. Here are a few pitfalls that many companies fall into when they start thinking … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Gretchen Gavett | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Even as old ideas remain in use (and are still taught), management as it is practiced by the most thoughtful executives evolves. Building on ideas from my colleague Ian MacMillan, I’d propose that we’ve seen three “ages” of management since the industrial revolution, with each putting the emphasis on a different theme: execution, expertise, and empathy.

Content: Article | Author: Rita Gunther McGrath | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: History, Management

Researchers have confronted us in recent years with example after example of how we humans get things wrong when it comes to making decisions. We misunderstand probability, we’re myopic, we pay attention to the wrong things, and we just generally mess up. This popular triumph of the “heuristics and biases” literature pioneered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has made us aware of flaws … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Gerd Gigerenzer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips, Risk Management

Business books, magazines, and blogs are chock full of advice about how to give feedback to individuals, but how do you do the same for your entire team? What type of constructive criticism is appropriate in a group setting? How much is too much? And how should your colleagues help?

Content: Article | Author: Rebecca Knight | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Sarah Cliffe spoke with contributor Don Sull, who teaches strategy at MIT and the London Business School, about the tension between scholars who put sustainable competitive advantage at the center of strategy and those who argue that some industries are changing too quickly to allow for sustained performance. Here’s the edited conversation.

Content: Article | Authors: Donald Sull, Sarah Cliffe | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

In 1970, in his famous essay, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Milton Friedman railed against any corporate attempt to promote “desirable social ends” which he argued were “highly subversive to the capitalist system.”

Ever since, folks have argued that Friedman is wrong to make the trade-off between shareholders and the rest of society so wholly in favor of shareholders and that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Not long ago my colleagues and I studied the cost of adding a manager or executive, and we found a kind of multiplier effect. When you hire a manager, he or she typically generates enough work to keep somebody else busy as well. Senior executives — SVPs and EVPs — are even more costly. These high-priced folks typically require support from a caravan of assistants … [ Read more ]

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

Most people tend to emphasize just one or two, at most three, dimensions of cultural difference when it comes to parsing and predicting foreigners’ behavior. But cultures differ along many more than three dimensions, so the more dimensions you consider, the less likely you are to trip up on a cultural paradox. The trouble, of course, is that it’s cognitively difficult for us to keep … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David Champion, Erin Meyer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: International, Management, Organizational Behavior

[What] Aristotle called phronesis […] is prudence, the context-dependent, practical common sense needed when we have to make judgments about what is right and wrong – “what is good or bad for man,” as Aristotle put it. From this perspective a “phronetic” discipline like management can never be “values-free”; all management decisions have ethical implications because they deal with people. And people can be passionate … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David K. Hurst | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

At least once a month an ambitious and hard-working person in their 20s asks me, “Should I get an MBA?” Here’s how I respond to those inquiries. First, it’s critical to determine whether your expectations for an MBA are aligned with what the degree will likely do for you. MBA programs offer three different types of benefits, all of which vary tremendously from one school … [ Read more ]

Content: Prospective MBA Content | Author: Ed Batista | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: About the MBA Degree

I’ve been studying decision-making at the top for many years, and what I’ve found is that good decisions nearly always result from robust decision processes. Similarly, decisions that go wrong nearly always stem from procedural or organizational failures. In fact, when I and my colleagues at Bain & Co. conduct postmortems into decisions, we find that just five mistakes account for the vast majority of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael C. Mankins | Sources: Harvard Business Review, The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In a specific culture, people usually respond well to receiving very detailed and segmented information about what is expected of each of them. If you need to give instructions to a team member from this kind of culture, focus on what that person needs to accomplish and when. Conversely, if you need to motivate, manage, or persuade someone from a holistic culture, spend time explaining … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: International, Management, Organizational Behavior

It was only published in English a few weeks ago, but French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already become inescapable. Over the past few weeks it has become one of those things that everybody’s talking about just because everybody’s talking about it. That, and it really is important. Still, chances are you won’t get to the end of the book, so … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Justin Fox | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

How can a company raise its skill level—and in particular, how can it increase its proportion of top talent? Our research and experience at Bain suggests three keys.

Content: Article | Author: Michael C. Mankins | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

We all know networking has the potential to dramatically enhance our careers; making new connections can introduce us to valuable new information, job opportunities, and more. But despite that fact, many of us are doing it wrong.

Content: Article | Author: Dorie Clark | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development

Perhaps the most challenging part of the job hunting process is writing an effective cover letter. There’s so much conflicting advice out there, it’s hard to know where to start. Indeed, in an age of digital communication, many might question whether you even need a cover letter anymore. Here’s how to give hiring managers what they’re looking for.

Content: Career Information | Author: Amy Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Cover Letters

No single number has become more central to society in the past 50 years than GDP — Gross Domestic Product. Throughout the world, it has become a proxy for success and for failure. It is a profoundly important indicator. It is also a profoundly flawed one.

Content: Article | Author: Zachary Karabell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao spent seven years investigating what they term “the problem of more,” the idea that while it may be somewhat hard to come up with a good, new solution, the really hard thing is to get it to spread. There is always some excellence but the difficulty is spreading that excellence to more people and more places. Some call this the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Robert I. Sutton | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior