674 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

We benchmarked 15 companies that had grown organically for a decade at three times the GDP. We looked at who their people were and what they did. By the end of 2004, we came up with five growth traits. The first is external focus. Then there’s imagination and creativity. And a growth leader must be especially decisive and capable of clear thinking. Inclusiveness is also … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Best Practices

One of the things I’ve learned by experience is that you can run a productivity company and not have to give a lot of straight yes or no answers. You can make your base costs by cutting everybody by 10%, and you can do OK for a long time that way. But you can’t drive a growth company by cutting everybody by 10%-or by adding … [ Read more ]

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

When the right strategy is unknown and unknowable–as it so often is with novel growth initiatives–senior managers need to be problem solvers, not dictators.

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

The value of most frameworks lies not in changing a manager’s initial intuition but in clarifying the issues that arise when managers with different instincts try to debate the right course of action. A structured framework can transform the debate from a battle of guts, ultimately resolved on the basis of reputation, power, and eloquence (often in that order), into a comparison of the assumptions … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Strategy

No one can lead who does not first acquire power, and no leader can be great who does not know how to use power. The trouble is that the combination of the two skills is rare. The temperament and behavior of the ambitious, cynical player adept at amassing power is often at odds with those of the daring and imaginative visionary able to achieve great … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Power / Authority

We’re all taught the Lord Acton saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the more time I spend looking into power, the less I feel that is always true. What I do feel is invariably correct-what power always does-is reveal. Power reveals. When a leader gets enough power, when he doesn’t need anybody anymore-when he’s president of the United States or CEO … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Power / Authority

Creativity involves evolving something new from the present ideas and perspectives. It requires seeing and conceptualizing things from newer, unexplored perspectives. Fostering an atmosphere of creativity at the workplace requires implementation of unconventional rules and practices. Creativity is ubiquitous but hidden. In such a scenario, application of uncommon practices helps uncover cutting edge ideas and perspectives. The paper examines these issues and discusses the management … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Robert I. Sutton | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Many of today’s midcareer workers are well educated and have retained their love of learning. They know that increasing their skills will raise their chances for personal and professional advancement. However, many find themselves too busy for extensive education and training; personal development time comes at the sacrifice of other responsibilities, both on the job and off. And some people, especially those who have reached … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Learning, Training & Development

The clash between principles and pragmatism is one of the hardest tests of a leader’s character. Of course we want our leaders to be both principled and pragmatic. Principles alone qualify men and women to be preachers or saints. Pure pragmatists can open their tool kits and get down to work, but their amorality makes them dangerous. As many leaders know, sometimes the worst conflict … [ Read more ]

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

People tend to overvalue advice when the problem they’re addressing is hard and to undervalue it when the problem is easy.

Another advice-related bias I’ve found compels people to overvalue advice that they pay for.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

What is the manager’s job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite–and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to “problems” rather than to … [ Read more ]

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

While the job to be done may look different in every individual company, one basic truth will always be present: every product and every activity of a business begins to obsolesce as soon as it is started. Every product, every operation, and every activity in a business should, therefore, be put on trial for its life every two or three years. Each should be considered … [ Read more ]

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

The modern organization is a destabilizer. It must be organized for innovation and innovation, as the great Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter said, is “creative destruction.” And it must be organized for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, familiar, and comfortable, whether that is a product, service, or process; a set of skills; human and social relationships; or the organization itself. In short, it … [ Read more ]

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

For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?

Like one’s strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality. Whether personality be a matter of nature or nurture, it surely is formed long before a person goes to work. And how a person performs is a given, just as what a person … [ Read more ]

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

Most organizations have management development programs in place, and some have multitiered programs. But generally, the tiers are differentiated by the amount of training given, without reference to any fundamental shift in the way managers must think and lead. Such programs fail to take into account the different behavioral demands that accompany different levels of responsibility.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Training & Development

The experience of using a product changes the equation underlying consumers’ preferences. People initially choose products that do not maximize their long-term satisfaction because different considerations are salient in expected and experienced utility. Put simply, what looks attractive in prospect does not necessarily look good in practice.

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

In understanding the distinction between socially intelligent and politically intelligent leaders, it’s important to realize that they share certain skills. Both types of leaders are adept at sizing up other people. Both possess keen, discriminating eyes–but they notice different things. For instance, socially intelligent leaders assess people’s strengths and figure out how to leverage them, while politically intelligent leaders focus on people’s weaknesses and insecurities.

Not … [ Read more ]

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

Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those who are led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.

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

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann once said to me that he thought the most valued personal trait in the twenty-first century would be a facility for synthesizing information. Increasingly, I am convinced he was correct. The ability to decide what information to heed, what to ignore, and how to organize and communicate that which we judge to be important is becoming a core competence … [ Read more ]

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

Confronting doubt involves coming to terms with differences in values. How does one choose between two valued objectives: safety versus liberty, scientific discovery versus the sanctity of human life, individuals versus groups? Sometimes we overcome doubt with faith, sometimes we privilege one set of values over another. And sometimes we just live with the burden of making choices when there are no easy answers.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Values