682 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

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

The talent problems of employers, employees, and the broader society are intertwined. Employers want the skills they need when they need them, delivered in a manner they can afford. Employees want prospects for advancement and control over their careers.

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

Whether you’re in an interview or rewriting your resume, here are some suggestions for managing your professional image in a job search. They’re organized by the reasons you may not have been working, but the advice can be catered to different situations.

Content: Career Information | Author: Priscilla Claman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Interviewing

In order to clear a path for greater advancement and parity, we need to address the difficult paradoxes that women leaders continue to face — these are the mixed messages and uncomfortable realities that complicate an arguably positive picture of progress.

Content: Article | Authors: Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, Mary Davis Holt | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Women in Business

Even the sanest of companies can unintentionally put themselves in a straitjacket that makes it hard for them to create high-potential new growth opportunities. Here’s how leaders unintentionally limit their innovation efforts.

Content: Article | Author: Scott Anthony | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Remembering new information is an under-appreciated skill. The fact that most of us have never evolved our technique beyond the rudimentary and ad hoc approaches we used as middle schoolers suggests this. It is required for any sort of professional growth, since the need to learn is high, and can separate the exceptional performances from the mediocre ones.

Fortunately for us, insights from cognitive psychology … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: H. James Wilson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Personal Development

Any consumer goods company trying to reduce its environmental impact faces this challenge: your footprint is largely determined by what customers do with your products, not what you do directly. Brands can be more powerful agents for change when we understand exactly how people use products, and what values, habits or motivations influence this use. We synthesized our own knowledge and experience as a marketing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Keith Weed | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

At one end of the budgeting spectrum is the struggling business unit that unveils the miraculous “hockey stick” trajectory their sales and profits are just about to take…again. (Don’t bet on it.) At the other end are high-performing business units that are starved of the resources they need in order to fund growth because they are subsidizing another business unit’s hockey stick.

Through hundreds of sessions … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jason Green | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Finance, Management

Simply asking “what job is the customer trying to get done?” can be a powerful way to enable innovation, because it forces you to go beyond superficial demographic markers that correlate with purchase and use to zero in on frustrations and desires that motivate purchase and use.

Seductive simplicity hides a rich, robust set of opportunity identification tools. Through our experience utilizing the “jobs-to-be-done” concept in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Scott Anthony | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

Four types of employees that can affect your organization’s culture: start, high potentials, zombies and vampires.

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

The increasingly international nature of business means leaders need new skills to get the full potential of teams and networks of people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Key among these skills is a thinking skill called cultural metacognition. Metacognition simply means thinking about thinking; in this context, thinking about your cultural assumptions. According to our research, if you can gain awareness of your assumptions, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael W. Morris | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: International, Organizational Behavior

Judging from the onslaught of books, articles, and blog posts extolling Steve Jobs’ virtues and condemning his vices, the question of whether leaders can replicate Jobs’ results by emulating his methods is an important one. Since most managers quantitatively analyze the factors that affect the performance of their firms, we find it surprising that this great debate has raged in a context largely uninformed by … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Darren Overfield, Rob Kaiser | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Leadership

There is a simple motivational incentive that is often overlooked: Moving beyond the ‘market contract’ with employees and forging a stronger ‘social contract’.

Content: Article | Author: Scott Keller | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Karen Sobel-Lojeski at Stony Brook University has studied more than 600 teams and developed a new concept — called “virtual distance” — that measures the perceived isolation of members in a team that relies on electronic communications. Three categories of different factors determine virtual distance.

Content: Article | Author: Keith Ferrazzi | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior