675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Boards only see what they’re presented with and can easily become passive recipients of agendas created by powerful CEOs and senior executives. And corporate failure raises questions as to what the board knew and what more it could have done. Board members can play a transformational role in a company by asking questions that create a space for deep reflection and strategic change — not … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew White, Eric Wilkinson, Tazim Essani | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

The right is starry eyed about the market but coldly realistic about the limitations of government. The left is starry eyed about government but coldly realistic about the limitations of the market. As Churchill once said about democracy, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others. Both the market and the government are deeply flawed tools. But they are all we have.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Joan C. Williams, Ro Khanna | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

We don’t need to reinvent capitalism. We just need to practice it. That means that corporations that embrace market mechanisms and decry government intervention in the good times should not change the rules when times turn tough. Privatizing profits while socializing risks isn’t capitalism: It’s rigged roulette. Equally important, practicing capitalism does not mean insisting on special treatment from government that benefits shareholders at the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Joan C. Williams, Ro Khanna | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Clawback provisions are a common feature in executive compensation packages. They are intended to deter executives from boosting their incentive compensation entitlements by taking decisions that could impose legal or reputational costs on the company. But if executives cash in their compensation and then leave the company clawbacks can be almost impossible to enforce. Requiring incentive compensation for executives to be made in restricted stock … [ Read more ]

Authors: Charles M. Elson, Sanjai Bhagat | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

We live in an age of polarization. Many of us may be asking ourselves how, when people disagree with or discount us, we can persuade them to rethink their positions. The author, an organizational psychologist, has spent time with a number of people who succeeded in motivating the notoriously self-confident Steve Jobs to change his mind and has analyzed the science behind their techniques. Some … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Adam Grant | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

CEOs have to be particularly careful about setting ambitious targets and using powerful language to motivate employees. Audacious goals can create fear (what happens if I don’t deliver?), and they may be interpreted as giving implicit permission for bad behavior.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert Chesnut | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

As governments craft policies to “build back better” following an economic crisis, they need indicators that reflect a meaningful conception of “better.” This doesn’t mean governments need to abandon the standard GDP. Rather they should transform it into a series of indicators — much like existing US statistics for unemployment are reported as “U1” through “U6,” with each number reflecting different aspects of unemployment. Other … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Ben Beachy, Justin Talbot Zorn | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

In the current model of corporate capitalism, each company is treated as an economic island to be optimized individually. While this simplifies management and accountability, it masks the extent of economic and social interdependence between different stakeholders. In contrast, resilience is a property of systems: an individual company’s resilience means little if its supply base, customer base, or the social systems upon which it depends … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Kevin Whitaker, Martin Reeves | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, Management, Operations

Companies and shareholders often focus on maximizing short-term returns. In contrast, resilience requires a multi-timescale perspective: forgoing a certain amount of efficiency or performance today for the sake of more-sustained performance in the future.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Kevin Whitaker, Martin Reeves | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management

This content is restricted to site members. Please log in or register

Stock options are both widely used and widely questioned. Research demonstrates that, contrary to stock option boosters, this form of CEO compensation is not a panacea, and there exist situations where issuing them is damaging. Indeed, now that the accounting profession has established that stock options are a real cost to business, either these expenditures should lead to real returns to shareholders or they should … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Michael Greiner, Scott Julian | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

Effective leaders learn early to target only important issues — and ones they have a fair shot of winning. That requires two skills. The first is the ability to accurately estimate the level of conflict a particular course of action will elicit. (This is where EQ can support OQ.) The second is the maturity to not engage in unimportant issues. In many ways the second skill is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Yip, Nelson Phillips | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management

ESG measurement is an increasingly popular way of holding companies accountable when it comes to sustainability efforts, and of giving companies an incentive to improve them. But measurement, no matter how sophisticated, is much better at capturing easily quantifiable inputs than complex and messy outcomes and impacts. Companies need to do everything they can to understand those outcomes and impacts — and that requires doing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer Howard-Grenville | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Many employers still use these [behavioral interview] questions simply because they’ve heard them before. The standard interview is a tradition of sorts that has been passed down from one generation to another. But, as we discovered through our own missteps, it is unreliable. Behavioral questions might be useful for testing someone’s ability to relay biographical information. However, unless storytelling or some equivalent skill is a requirement of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Alex Haimann | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Which candidate should we hire? Who should be promoted? How should we choose which people get which shifts? In the hope of making better and fairer decisions about personnel matters such as these, companies have increasingly adopted AI tools only to discover that they may have biases as well. How can we decide whether to keep human managers or go with AI? This article offers … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, IT / Technology / E-Business

Culture determines how work gets done, but values show how companies prioritize, make decisions, and reconcile conflict. A culture may celebrate innovation, but values determine what gets sacrificed in the pursuit of it.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kristi Hedges | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

More must be done to reach young people of color earlier in their academic careers to help them tap into job exploration, skills building, and professional development. One of the most effective and proactive steps employers can take is to expand quality internships. Just as companies are increasingly sharing the diversity numbers of their full-time employees, they need to examine the demographics of their internship … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Angela Jackson, Joiselle Cunningham | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Companies who say they care about inclusion and belonging can start by paying employees fairly. To start, initiate a pay equity audit in which you compare the pay of employees doing “like for like” work (accounting for reasonable differentials, such as work experience, credentials and job performance) and investigate the causes of any pay differences that cannot be justified. Next, determine how you’ll remediate … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Amii Barnard-Bahn | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Diversity, Human Resources

One of the stated reasons for trying to get workers back into the office is the chorus of concern around the difficulties of sharing knowledge and experience amongst remote co-workers. New research, however, suggests a method that could improve this process both in the office and remotely: guided meetings between coworkers, which can easily happen in person or remotely. Compared to monetary incentives (without guidance … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Christopher Stanton, Jason Sandvik, Nathan Seegert, Richard Saouma | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Organizational Behavior

Can an algorithm outperform the average angel investor? And if it can, does that also mean it will make less biased investments? Researchers put these questions to the test: They built an investing algorithm and put it head to head with 255 angel investors in a simulation, asking it to select the most promising investment opportunities among 623 deals from one of the largest European … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Charlotta Siren, Dietmar Grichnik, Ivo Blohm, Joakim Wincent, Malin Malmstrom, Torben Antretter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Finance, Venture Capital