675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Resilience is one of the key qualities desired in business leaders today, but many people confuse it with toughness. Toughness is an aspect of resilience, certainly, as it enables people to separate emotion from the negative consequences of difficult choices. It can be an advantage in business, but only to a point. That’s because it can create an armor that deflects emotion, and it can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Leadership

Business is not-nor has it ever been-a profession. Professions develop over long periods of time and gradually establish a set of control mechanisms and sanctions for those who violate the code. True professionals, from doctors and lawyers to engineers and architects, undergo extensive training and earn a license. If they do not act according to recognized standards, they can be expelled from their professional guild…But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Miscellaneous

Ideally, business leaders ought to have three types of counselors who are prepared to speak truth to their power. First, they need a trusted adviser within the organization. Second, they need the counsel of someone completely outside the organization, preferably an old friend who is a peer. Third, they need a genuinely independent board.

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

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible but for what we do not do.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Accountability, Leadership

If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Values

A winning formula is each person’s distinctive way of making a difference. Winning formulas have two essential components: what you pay attention to and what you do about it. Some people focus on the unexpressed needs of key players and become the “go-to guy” for solving problems. Others concentrate on what’s missing or flawed in an endeavor and act as the watchdogs for errors or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Personal Development

In thinking of the mind as a set of cognitive capacities, it helps to distinguish the ethical mind from the other four minds that we particularly need to cultivate if we are to thrive as individuals, as a community, and as the human race. The first of these, the disciplined mind, is what we gain through applying ourselves in a disciplined way in school. Over … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Ethics, Personality / Behavior

It’s important to clarify the distinction between the respectful and the ethical mind, because we assume that one who is respectful is ethical and vice versa. I think you can be respectful without understanding why. But ethical conceptions and behaviors demand a certain capacity to go beyond your own experience as an individual person.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Ethics

When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Almost always, requests for resources require making two decisions: Should we support this business idea? and Is this proposal the right way to go about it? Most capital budgeting processes are set up to vet projects (in other words, they’re aimed at the second question, not the first). It is usually possible to carry out fairly rigorous quantitative analysis comparing the plan of action in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Business Development, Management

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There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, “Here is our company’s biggest challenge, and here is what we need to do to prosper.” And you build your case by … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Storytelling

Motivational speeches are about making people feel good about themselves and enthusiastic about where they can go. But in my experience, it doesn’t work to paint a rosy picture and say “Doesn’t it look great over there?” and expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and go in that direction. What I do is, instead of trying to make people feel good about where they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Russell Hochschild shows that for many professionals, “home” and “work” have reversed roles. Home is the source of stress and guilt, while work has become the “haven in a heartless world”–the place where successful professionals get strokes, admiration, and respect.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior

A firm can adopt one of two mind-sets: It can apply an operational mind-set, approaching work as a routinized endeavor amenable to a standardized set of procedures and supported by detailed budgets and schedules. Alternatively, an organization can adopt an experimental mind-set-approaching work much like a research and development effort in which testing, learning, and adaptation take precedence over standardization. In such an environment, much … [ Read more ]

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

One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship is the absence of complaints from the customer. Nobody is ever that satisfied, especially not over an extended period of time. The customer is either not being candid or not being contacted-probably both. The absence of candor reflects the decline of trust and the deterioration of the relationship. Bad things accumulate. Impaired communication is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

What matters is not whom you know but how you are known to them.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Reputation

As a rule, the more a seller expands the market by teaching and helping customers to use his or her product, the more vulnerable that seller becomes to losing them. A customer who no longer needs help gains the flexibility to shop for things he or she values more-such as price.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

In the higher-status service occupations, such as in the church and the army, one customarily behaves ritualistically, not rationally. In the lower-status service occupations, one simply obeys. In neither is independent thinking presumed to be a requisite of holding a job. The most that can therefore be expected from service improvements is that, like Avis, a person will try harder. He will just exert more … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

The global competitor will seek constantly to standardize its offering everywhere. It will digress from this standardization only after exhausting all possibilities to retain it, and will push for reinstatement of standardization whenever digression and divergence have occurred. It will never assume that the customer is a king who knows his own wishes.

…The global corporation accepts for better or for worse that technology drives consumers … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: International, Marketing / Sales