675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

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

Better management is not a secret and is not out of reach. It is a matter of: 1) setting performance targets; 2) having clear incentives that reward high performance; and 3) collecting data to monitor performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

In this HBR webinar, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom shares the critical insights from this research and from his co-authored November 2012 HBR article. He … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Jason Sylva | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

How predictable are competitive conditions in your industry? How much power does your company have to shape its underlying competitive environment? These questions are critical to strategists, since clearly the kinds of strategies that work in predictable industries are likely to be worlds apart from those geared to shaping highly volatile environments.

Content: Article | Author: Martin Reeves | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Leadership is about change, but what is a leader to do when faced with ubiquitous resistance? Resistance to change manifests itself in many ways, from foot-dragging and inertia to petty sabotage to outright rebellions. The best tool for leaders of change is to understand the predictable, universal sources of resistance in each situation and then strategize around them. Here are the ten I’ve found to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

How do you find out how much your customers will pay? It’s simple: Ask them. Of course, you can’t ask customers directly how much they are willing to pay — they’ll likely shade the truth (by giving a lower price) to their benefit. That said, there are a variety of ways to better understand how your customers think about your price. In my work, I … [ Read more ]

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

There is one thing that profoundly and consistently changes lives — what’s generally referred to as the 360-degree feedback process. Here’s what they do that makes the difference.

Content: Article | Authors: Jack Zenger, Joseph Folkman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Business leaders face a challenge to keep their firms competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption. Companies such as Borders and RIM have recognized the need for strategic change, but couldn’t drive the organizational change needed to sustain business success.

It often plays out the same: an organization, facing a real threat or eyeing a new opportunity, tries–and fails–to cram through a major transformation using a change … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: John P. Kotter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Really smart people have the hardest time learning. They are so very smart that they are also very “brittle.” When something goes wrong, rather than reflect on what they might have done to contribute to the error, they look entirely outside themselves for the causes and blame outside forces — irrational clients, impossible time pressure, lack of adequate resources, shifts beyond their control. Rather than … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chris Argyris, Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Learning, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior