675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

If you’re a manager working with the analysts in your organization to make more data-driven business decisions, asking good questions should be one of your top priorities. Many managers fear that asking questions will make them appear unintelligent about quantitative matters. However, if you ask the right kinds of questions, you can both appear knowledgeable and advance the likelihood of a good decision outcome.

Content: Article | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Statistics

A survey evaluating a team’s performance can be a powerful tool for making that team more effective. And the first message that consultants and HR professionals often communicate on these surveys is: “To ensure that the team gets the best data and feels protected, we will make sure responses are confidential.” The widespread assumption is that if team members know their answers are confidential, they … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Roger Schwarz | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In this time of hope and decorative mortarboards, we reached out to some of our favorite writers, asking them: What do graduates really need to know about the world of work?

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

Who wouldn’t want a higher level of emotional intelligence? Studies have shown that a high emotional quotient (or EQ) boosts career success, entrepreneurial potential, leadership talent, health, relationship satisfaction, humor, and happiness. It is also the best antidote to work stress and it matters in every job — because all jobs involve dealing with people, and people with higher EQ are more rewarding to deal … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

The business model canvas — as opposed to the traditional, intricate business plan — helps organizations conduct structured, tangible, and strategic conversations around new businesses or existing ones. It lets you look at all nine building blocks of your business on one page. Each of these nine components contains a series of hypotheses about your business model that you need to test.

Content: Article | Author: Alexander Osterwalder | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

The benefits of a strong corporate culture are both intuitive and supported by social science. But what makes a culture? Each culture is unique and myriad factors go into creating one, but I’ve observed at least six common components of great cultures. Isolating those elements can be the first step to building a differentiated culture and a lasting organization.

Content: Article | Author: John Coleman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

The real enemy of salespeople today isn’t their archrivals; it’s no decision. What is it that prevents a prospective customer from making a purchase even after they have conducted a lengthy evaluation process? The reasons may surprise you.

Regardless of the prospective customers’ confident demeanor, on the inside they are experiencing fear, uncertainty, and doubt while making their selection. The stress this creates serves as the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Steve W. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

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Most organizations have almost no idea of their turnover costs, their hiring costs, or the costs of keeping a job vacant. They do know what it costs when someone is in the job—the amount they’re paying that person—so they know how much they’ll save if they get rid of him or her. That’s one of the big problems in talent management: CFOs can give us … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

Most managers underestimate how much disruption layoffs create; they consume everyone in the organization for at least a year. Managers also typically overestimate the savings they will achieve and fail to understand that even bad recessions usually end more quickly than people expect. …furloughs [are] one way of positioning us for any outcome. To understand that reasoning, look at what really happens when you do … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Cote | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can’t just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In a world of layoffs, outsourcing, and industry disruption, the only “career insurance” you can get is through figuring out the answer to one particular question: how can you make yourself truly valuable professionally? Most recent grads assume they’ll do OK if they work hard. But doing the assigned job is table stakes, and not enough to matter very much when other, cheaper options become … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Dorie Clark | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Career

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people, but they behave in patterns. In fact, my firm’s research shows that most serial entrepreneurs display persuasion, leadership, personal accountability, goal orientation, and interpersonal skills. But we also discovered a set of skills they do not possess.

Content: Article | Author: Bill J. Bonnstetter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

To invite genuine buy-in and engagement, we need to listen with a strong personal motive to learn and understand. But we have a “blind spot” in our brains that gets in the way. What we hear is easily distorted with our own needs, biases, experiences and agenda, even when our intentions are good. We often hear what others say without understanding what they mean. We … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: John Ullmen, Mark Goulston | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

We all want to choose a career that will make us happy, but how can we know what that will be? Research suggests that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how they will feel when doing something in the future. It’s not hard to find someone who started out thinking that they would love their chosen profession, only to wind up hating it. In … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Author: Heidi Grant | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Career Info

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Defining a managerial approach to innovation starts with developing a better understanding of the problem we need to solve. I’ve found asking two basic questions can be enormously helpful.

How well is the problem defined?
Who is best-placed to solve it?

Content: Article | Author: Greg Satell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

Thomas H. Davenport, coauthor of Keeping Up with the Quants, describes the three major stages of analytical thinking.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Management

When most managers think about pricing, they harken back to their days of Economics 101: a rote downward sloping demand curve and an asterisked point labeled “perfect price.” At this optimal price, elasticity is such that it does not make sense to raise price (because the extra per unit profit is overshadowed by lost sales) nor discount (because increased sales don’t compensate for lower profit … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Rafi Mohammed | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Pricing

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Clayton M. Christensen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Life, Wisdom