678 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Should you join the millions of people every year who take the plunge and start their first ventures? Developed by Babson College professor Daniel Isenberg, this 20-question quiz on HBR.org takes just a few minutes to complete and might help you decide.

Content: Article | Author: Daniel Isenberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Our prehistoric ancestors spent much of their waking hours foraging for and consuming food, an instinct that obviously paid off. Today this instinct is no less powerful, but for billions of us it’s satisfied in the minutes it takes to swing by the store and pop a meal in the microwave. With our physical needs sated and time on our hands, increasingly we’re finding psychological … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Dan Ariely, Michael I. Norton | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

A big reason every generation thinks that its solutions are new is because it thinks its challenges are brand new. People can’t quite bring themselves to believe that managers of the past faced remarkably similar problems, found frustration and satisfaction in similar sources, and came up with similar solutions.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert I. Sutton | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

David Garvin, Harvard Business School professor, explains why business education is at a crossroads. He is the coauthor of Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: David Garvin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: MBA Related

This essay appears in “The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2010,” which is compiled by this journal in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. The ten problems and the innovative solutions are discussed in each essay. This particular essay describes research demonstrating the importance of daily work progress, even incremental progress, for motivating workers. Additional research showed that managers underestimate the importance of facilitating progress … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Steven J. Kramer, Teresa M. Amabile | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Companies that execute on their strategies quickly and effectively tend to construct solid organizational hardware: information systems, corporate priorities, hydraulics, incentives, and so forth. But they also program in software—that is, the right culture, people, and leadership for execution. Indeed, the most agile organizations I have studied share a core set of values: achievement that recognizes and rewards employees for setting and achieving ambitious goals; … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Donald Sull | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Execution requires four distinct types of conversations: making sense of volatile situations; deciding what to do, not do, or stop doing; soliciting and monitoring commitments to deliver; and making corrections midcourse.

Content: Quotation | Author: Donald Sull | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Execution

Most companies use customer relationship management and other technologies to get a handle on customers, but no amount of technology can really improve the situation as long as companies are set up to market products rather than cultivate customers.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Christine Moorman, Gaurav Bhalla, Roland T. Rust | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Focus is not about doing more with less; it’s about doing more on less. Making choices about what not to do so that resources will go to the most important initiatives is not easy, but it must be done to release this brake on your firm’s transformation.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert H. Miles | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Be concerned about due process. People seek fairness—not favors. They want to be heard. They often don’t even mind if decisions don’t go their way as long as the process is fair and transparent.

Content: Quotation | Author: C.K. Prahalad | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management

Assume responsibility for outcomes as well as for the processes and people you work with. How you achieve results will shape the kind of person you become.

Content: Quotation | Author: C.K. Prahalad | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management

A successful reverse innovation effort can result in cannibalization of a company’s existing lines of business. that is certainly true, but it is not a justification for remaining inert. If a business can be destroyed, then it eventually will be destroyed. It is only a matter of whether you do it to yourself or a rival does it to you.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chris Trimble, Jeff Immelt, Vijay Govindarajan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Competition, Management, Strategy

The great 19th-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught us that quantitative changes ultimately become qualitative changes. The more risk we take because we believe the environment is low-risk in character, the less the environment continues to be low-risk in character.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter L. Bernstein | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Risk Management

The economist Hyman Minsky has reminded us, “Each state nurtures forces that lead to its own destruction.” All of history testifies to the truth of this observation. Greater liquidity leads firms to borrow more than before. But higher levels of debt mean increasing vulnerability to adversity and negative shocks in an ever-changing world. For these reasons, as Minsky put it, stability leads inevitably to instability. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter L. Bernstein | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Economics, Finance

Markets can and do allocate resources efficiently, of course. But only under appropriate conditions—when there is lots of competition and information, for instance, and when people can make individually rational choices. Many market-solutions-for-everything advocates seem to have overlooked the point that such conditions don’t always exist.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

We tend to equate [lack of trust and distrust], but social scientists such as Sim B. Sitkin and Nancy L. Roth argue that there’s an important difference. A lack of trust results when your expectations about how a person should behave aren’t met. As Sitkin and Roth point out, laws and regulations help address those situations by acting as effective deterrents. In contrast, distrust arises … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Joel M. Podolny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Trust

An occupation earns the right to be a profession only when some ideals, such as being an impartial counsel, doing no harm, or serving the greater good, are infused into the conduct of people in that occupation. In like vein, a school becomes a professional school only when it infuses those ideals into its graduates. A business school does that effectively when it forces its … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Joel M. Podolny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: MBA Related

I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary, a collective creation of previously unimagined quality or beauty. But don’t count on it. Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration. And even … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: J. Richard Hackman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Teamwork

People generally think that teams that work together harmoniously are better and more productive than teams that don’t. But in a study we conducted on symphonies, we actually found that grumpy orchestras played together slightly better than orchestras in which all the musicians were really quite happy.

That’s because the cause-and-effect is the reverse of what most people believe: When we’re productive and we’ve done something … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: J. Richard Hackman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Teamwork

…the things that happen the first time a group meets strongly affect how the group operates throughout its entire life. Indeed, the first few minutes of the start of any social system are the most important because they establish not only where the group is going but also what the relationship will be between the team leader and the group, and what basic norms of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: J. Richard Hackman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Teamwork