675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Subsidiarity… means that power belongs to the lowest possible point in the organization. …Subsidiarity, therefore, is the reverse of empowerment. It is not the center giving away or delegating power. Instead, power is assumed to lie at the lowest point in the organization and it can be taken away only by agreement.

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Handy | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Power / Authority

Competitive innovation works on the premise that a successful competitor is likely to be wedded to a recipe for success. That’s why the most effective weapon new competitors possess is probably a clean sheet of paper. And why an incumbent’s greatest vulnerability is its belief in accepted practice.

Content: Quotation | Authors: C.K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Competition, Strategy

In many companies, business unit managers are rewarded solely on the basis of their performance against return on investment targets. Unfortunately, that often leads to denominator management because executives soon discover that reductions in investment and head count—the denominator—“improve” the financial ratios by which they are measured more easily than growth in the numerator: revenues. It also fosters a hair-trigger sensitivity to industry downturns that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: C.K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Unfortunately, a threat that everyone perceives but no one talks about creates more anxiety than a threat that has been clearly identified and made the focal point for the problem-solving efforts of the entire company. That is one reason honesty and humility on the part of top management may be the first prerequisite of revitalization. Another reason is the need to make “participation” more than … [ Read more ]

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

An organization’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn new ones is the most defensible competitive advantage of all.

Content: Quotation | Authors: C.K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Competition, Management, Strategy

There is an important distinction between barriers to entry and barriers to imitation.

Content: Quotation | Authors: C.K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Competition, Strategy

Today the management, monitoring, and governance of a business are increasingly seen as separate functions to be done by separate bodies, even if some of the membership of those bodies overlaps. This is the corporate equivalent of the separation of powers. Management is the executive function, responsible for delivering the goods. Monitoring is the judicial function, responsible for seeing that the goods are delivered according … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Handy | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management

Dividing qualities into “strengths” and “weaknesses” implicitly ignores strengths overdone. Given this incomplete mental model, it is no surprise that most leadership 360s employ five-point rating scales in which high scores are the best. Such tools overlook a key lesson from decades of research on derailment: More is not always better, and executives lose their jobs when their strengths become weaknesses through overuse.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Robert B. Kaiser, Robert E. Kaplan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Personal Development

Most companies strive to maximize shareholder wealth—a goal that is inadequate in many respects. As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies. It’s an insufficient defense when people question the legitimacy of corporate power. And it’s not specific or compelling enough to spur renewal.

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Goals, Miscellaneous, Mission

While hierarchy will always be a feature of human organization, there’s a pressing need to limit the fallout from top-down authority structures. Typical problems include overweighting experience at the expense of new thinking, giving followers little or no influence in choosing their leaders, perpetuating disparities in power that can’t be justified by differences in competence, creating incentives for managers to hoard authority when it should … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Management processes often contain subtle biases that favor continuity over change. Planning processes reinforce out-of-date views of customers and competitors, for instance; budgeting processes make it difficult for speculative ideas to get seed funding; incentive systems provide larger rewards for caretaker managers than for internal entrepreneurs; measurement systems understate the value of creating new strategic options; and recruitment processes overvalue analytical skills and undervalue conceptual … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Process

Sitting monarchs don’t usually lead revolutions. Yet most management systems give a disproportionate share of influence over strategy and policy to a small number of senior executives. Ironically, these are the people most vested in the status quo and most likely to defend it. That’s why incumbents often surrender the future to upstarts. The only solution is to develop management systems that redistribute power to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

We know a lot about how to engender human creativity: Equip people with innovation tools, allow them to set aside time for thinking, destigmatize failure, create opportunities for serendipitous learning, and so on. However, little of this knowledge has infiltrated management systems. Worse, many companies institutionalize a sort of creative apartheid. They give a few individuals creative roles and the time to pursue their interests … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Transparency is often just as effective as a rigidly applied rule book and is usually more flexible and less expensive to administer.

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management, Organizational Behavior

Our education systems and workplaces plunge us into deep mental ruts. They reward competencies that are self-reinforcing, not diversifying, and they encourage people to acquire domain expertise rather than to ask stupid questions and learn new things. We need to find our way out of these ruts and rekindle the creativity that many of us left behind in childhood.

Content: Quotation | Author: Steve Jurvetson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Education

HBR interviews Clayton Christensen about how disruptive innovation and business model reinvention are linked.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Clayton M. Christensen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Almost all companies grossly underutilize their data assets. Even firms that mine their data for strategic insights barely scratch the surface. Yet, the marketplace value of data is huge and growing. In my work with and research on hundreds of companies across multiple industries, I’ve identified nine distinct strategies that organizations can employ to put their data to work in their marketplaces.

Content: Article | Author: Thomas C. Redman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. The problem, we believe, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Adam M. Kleinbaum, Michael L. Tushman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

As a neuropsychiatrist who studies the differences between male and female brains, I’m often asked whether such differences play a role in professional achievement—and particularly, in men’s dominance of the highest ranks of many fields. Male and female brains are more alike than not, and business’s famous glass ceiling has nothing to do with raw intellect. Yet the distinct demands that are put on men’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Louann Brizendine MD | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Women in Business

One way to generate a precise customer value proposition is to think about the four most common barriers keeping people from getting particular jobs done: insufficient wealth, access, skill, or time.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Henning Kagermann, Mark Johnson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales