678 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

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

Those who extol the liberating virtues of corporate creativity over the somnambulistic vices of corporate conformity may actually be giving advice that in the end will reduce the creative animation of business. This is because they tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation-that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation; not understand the operating executive’s day-to-day problems; and underestimate the … [ Read more ]

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

Advocacy of a “permissive environment” for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact: One of the collateral purposes of an organization is to be inhospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity.

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

the purpose of organization is to achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a particular job. The organization exists to restrict and channel the range of individual actions and behavior into a predictable and knowable routine. Without organization there would be chaos and decay. Organization exists in order to create that amount and kind of inflexibility that are necessary to … [ Read more ]

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

There’s only a fine line between entrepreneurship and insubordination.

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

Corporate budgeting systems favor established businesses because incremental dollars usually provide higher financial returns when invested in known markets rather than unknown ones. New businesses are therefore difficult to finance for long periods, and in times of austerity, they are the first to face funding cuts. In a similar spirit, companies design HR systems to develop executives whose operational skills match the needs of mature … [ Read more ]

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

The business firm is one of the few contemporary institutions in which the arbitrary and gratuitous cruelty of the powerful in dealing with the weak is tolerated, even encouraged.

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

I think practicing managers are sometimes less reflective than they might be. The rhetoric of management requires managers to pretend that things are clear, that everything is straightforward. Often they know that managerial life is more ambiguous and contradictory than that, but they can’t say it. They see their role as relieving people of ambiguities and uncertainties. They need some way of speaking the rhetoric … [ Read more ]

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

Most daring new ideas are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses. If we could identify which heretics would turn out to be geniuses, life would be easier than it is. There is plenty of evidence that we cannot.

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

For trust to be anything truly meaningful, you have to trust somebody who isn’t trustworthy. Otherwise, it’s just a standard rational transaction. The relationships among leaders and those between leaders and their followers certainly involve elements of simple exchange and reciprocity, but humans are capable of, and often exhibit, more arbitrary sentiments of commitment to one another.

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

Fundamental academic knowledge becomes more useful in new or changing environments, when managers are faced with the unexpected or the unknown. It provides alternative frames for looking at problems rather than solutions to them.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Knowledge, Learning

Economics has tended to become so tautological as to “explain” everything at the cost of abandoning predictive power. At times, economics as a theory threatens to become economics as a faith.

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

The hot-stove effect is a fundamental problem of learning. Learning reduces your likelihood of repeating things that got you in trouble, as you hope it will. But that means you know less about the domains where you’ve done poorly than about the domains where you’ve done well. It causes problems whenever your early experience with an alternative is, for whatever reason, not characteristic of what … [ Read more ]

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

One of the biggest challenges for A players is their inability to set boundaries for themselves. Ordinary people usually know how to step back from situations where vague requests make them uncomfortable; but insecure overachievers typically exceed expectations because they are prepared to operate outside their comfort zones in their efforts to win recognition.

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

People raised in an environment where praise was carefully meted out typically do not try to challenge the rules; they follow them. When presented with a request that he thinks is unreasonable or unclear, the A player is most likely just to back down and try to comply rather than to question authority. That makes your superstar particularly dependent on powerful figures in situations that … [ Read more ]

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

When we have an intention to learn, we step out of the need to be right. A learning orientation motivates us to seek to understand – rather than to judge – the other person.

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

Diagnosing motivation accurately is one of the easiest management tasks to do poorly and one of the most difficult to do well. Most managers have lots of experience at diagnosing another’s wants, but though the admission comes hard, most are just not very accurate when trying to figure out what another person wants and will do.

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