682 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Incremental innovations (small, safe changes to your firm’s offerings) make up 85%-90% of companies’ development portfolios. But “little i” projects rarely produce competitive advantage. For that, you need “Big I” innovations–offerings new to your organization or the world. Yes, they’re risky. But avoid them, and you may strangle your company’s growth.

Professor George S. Day recommends a solution: Increase the proportion of major innovations in your … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: George S. Day | Sources: BNET, Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management

I got the [leading from behind] idea from reading Nelson Mandela. I was reading his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom…and I came across a passage in which Mandela recalls how a leader of his tribe talked about leadership:

“A leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Linda A. Hill | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Leadership

Strategy is not just a plan, not just an idea; it is a way of life for a company. Strategy doesn’t just position a firm in its external landscape; it defines what a firm will be. Watching over strategy day in and day out is not only a CEO’s greatest opportunity to outwit the competition; it is also his or her greatest opportunity to shape … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Cynthia A. Montgomery | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

If you ask young men what they want to accomplish by the time they are 40, the answers you get fall into two distinct categories. There are those—the great majority—who will respond in terms of what they want to have. This is especially true of graduate students of business administration. There are some men, however, who will answer in terms of the kind of men … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Seymour Tilles | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Goals, Mission, Planning

It sounds simple, but in fact you could capture all of my research findings with the metaphor of a saltshaker. Instead of filling it with salt, fill it with all the ways you can say yes, and that’s what a good relationship is. “Yes,” you say, “that is a good idea.” “Yes, that’s a great point, I never thought of that.” “Yes, let’s do that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: John M. Gottman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

Unfortunately, most leadership “recipes” arise from examples of good crisis management. This is a mistake, and not only because chaotic situations are mercifully rare…Indeed, a specific danger for leaders following a crisis is that some of them become less successful when the context shifts because they are not able to switch styles to match it.

Moreover, leaders who are highly successful in chaotic contexts can develop … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: David Snowden, Mary E. Boone | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Crisis Management, Leadership

Ambitious people don’t like failing or looking stupid. As the social scientist Chris Argyris (one of the fathers of organizational-learning theory) put it, smart people have trouble learning because it involves so much floundering and failure.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clint Kilts, Roderick Gilkey | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Ambition, Learning, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

For executives trying to make sense of a rapidly changing business environment, superiority in pattern recognition is perhaps the greatest competitive advantage that can be developed.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clint Kilts, Roderick Gilkey | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Personal Development, Skills, Strategy

If you are really serious about creating innovative options, you couldn’t do better than to turn to Buddhist thinking. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki describes the Zen mind as one that is open, allowing for both doubt and possibility, and one that has the ability to see things as fresh and new. As he observed, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clint Kilts, Roderick Gilkey | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Personal Development, Thought

Most of a leader’s important calls reside in one of three domains: people, strategy, or crisis. People judgments—getting the right people on your team and developing up-and-comers who themselves demonstrate good judgment—are foundational. The people around you help you make good strategy judgment calls and the best decisions during the occasional but inevitable crisis. It’s sometimes possible to repair the damage—to a company or a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Noel M. Tichy, Warren G. Bennis | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Judgement, Leadership

It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change. When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?” At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Bezos | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

A lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build these customer-focused strategies. And actually I do think they work better in fast-changing environments, for two reasons. First, customer needs change more slowly—assuming you pick the right ones—than a lot of other things. Second, close following doesn’t work as well in a fast-changing environment. The strategic value … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Bezos | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Strategy | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

I think most big errors are errors of omission rather than errors of commission. They are the ones that companies never get held to account for—the times when they were in a position to notice something and act on it, had the skills and competencies or could have acquired them, and yet failed to do so. It’s the opposite of sticking to your knitting: It’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Bezos | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Judgement, Management, Strategy, Success / Failure | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

The most effective way people can change a story is to view it through any of three new lenses, which are all alternatives to seeing the world from the victim perspective. With the reverse lens, for example, people ask themselves, “What would the other person in this conflict say and in what ways might that be true?” With the long lens they ask, “How will … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Catherine McCarthy, Tony Schwartz | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Storytelling, Thought

To access the energy of the human spirit, people need to clarify priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their daily behaviors.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Catherine McCarthy, Tony Schwartz | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips, Time Management, Work

Companies quickly realize that reporting can’t happen without strategy development. As firms start the process of putting a report together—talking to stakeholders, examining core businesses—they’ll have to back up and ask, What is our strategy on climate change anyway? What is our approach to managing this risk? The discipline of sorting out which activities are material to report on and in what depth, and what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Alyson Slater | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Corporate alliances account for nearly 33% of many companies’ revenue and value. Yet these alliances’ failure rate hovers at 60%-70%. To bolster success rates, companies need to apply five counterintuitive practices.

Content: Article | Authors: Jeff Weiss, Jonathan Hughes | Sources: BNET, Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

Beware conventional wisdom about how to boost your innovation capacity. Another firm’s best innovation practice could become your worst nightmare. Think of innovation as a value chain comprising three phases: idea generation, conversion, and diffusion. Then tailor your practices to your company’s needs.

Content: Article | Authors: Julian Birkinshaw, Morten T. Hansen | Sources: BNET, Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

Senior managers give voice to a company’s future by articulating metaphors, symbols, and concepts that orient the knowledge-creating activities of employees. They do this by asking the questions, What are we trying to learn? What do we need to know? Where should we be going? Who are we? If the job of frontline employees is to know “what is,” then the job of senior executives … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Sources: Harvard Business Review, The Knowledge-Creating Company | Subjects: Leadership, Management

In the past 20 years, American companies have perhaps learned too well a lesson they had long been inclined to ignore: Businesses should be customer oriented rather than product oriented.

…At last, however, the dangers of too much reliance on this philosophy are becoming apparent.

…The argument that no new product ought to be introduced without managers undertaking a market analysis is common sense. But the argument … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Sources: Harvard Business Review, Managing Our Way to Economic Decline | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales