675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

There are upsides and downsides to making decisions in a group. The main risks include falling into groupthink or other biases that will distort the process and the ultimate outcome. But bringing more minds together to solve a problem has its advantages. To make use of those upsides and increase the chances your team will land on a successful solution, the authors recommend using seven … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Duncan Rooders, Torben Emmerling | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Companies have always caused “externalities” — benefits for society for which they are not fully compensated and costs on society which they don’t have to fully pay for. A major change in global business in recent years is that these externalities are becoming increasingly rare — what was once extraneous to a business is increasingly affecting corporate revenues, costs, and risk profiles. This is a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: George Serafeim, Ronald Cohen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Economics, Social Responsibility (ESG)

For teams to run effectively, the number of layers within a hierarchy and the number of direct reports on a leader’s team must be carefully determined based on two factors: the type of work people are doing and the amount of coordination that work requires. Highly complex or high-risk work […] often requires extensive coordination to execute effectively. Therefore, it makes sense to keep a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Quality roles are designed around desired outcomes, and not around people. When companies build roles around people, they are unintentionally defining their value by the sum total of whatever the person in that role is capable of doing. As a result, a role is seen as important only when a superstar is in it — regardless of how vital it is to the company’s performance. … [ Read more ]

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

Only 8% of crisis-driven reorganizations deliver as planned. Based on an extensive Quartz/HBR database as well as their personal consulting experience, the authors offer seven strategies for companies looking to reorganize in response to a crisis. They suggest that the most successful reorgs move quickly, but with a plan; they benchmark internally; they set different targets for different departments; they involve the full leadership team … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Matthias Qian, Peter Buchas, Stephen Heidari-Robinson, Suzanne Heywood | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.

Content: Quotation | Author: John Maxwell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

Many traditional decision-making tools fall short when it comes to the complex, subjective decisions that today’s leaders face every day. In this piece, the author provides a simple framework to help guide leaders through these difficult decisions. By interrogating the ethics (what is viewed as acceptable in your organization or society), morals (your internal sense of right and wrong), and responsibilities associated with your specific … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Eric Pliner | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Ethics, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

This conceit that markets exists outside of government and that government intrudes on the marketplace is fundamentally wrong. Markets exist in the context of a well-regulated society, they are creatures of that well-regulated society. They have rules, either implicitly or explicitly. And if you’re not writing those rules and just defaulting to the principle that companies can do what they want, you’re going to get … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Binyamin Appelbaum | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Much attention has been paid to measuring companies’ impact on the environment. But when it comes to impacts on people, there has been far less scrutiny, standardization, and innovation in the data used to evaluate which businesses are ‘getting it right’ than we see in the environmental field. The current state-of-the-art involves just scanning for words in corporate-issued documents. This is inadequate. Instead, we should … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Caroline Rees, Robert G. Eccles | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Past research points to two main reasons why people leave their jobs: turnover shocks and low job embeddedness. Turnover shocks are events that prompt people to reconsider whether they should stay with the organization. Some shocks are organizational (e.g., change in leadership, M&A announcement) and others are personal (e.g., receiving an outside job offer, birth of a child). Job embeddedness is when people are deeply … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Brooks Holtom, David Allen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Canned codes of ethics that ask employees to check a box to certify that they’ve read the material and third-party online ethics training courses might be all that is required to comply with the law, but they don’t move the needle. Employees see them mostly as a nuisance they have to suffer through.

Business leaders need to do more. Here are six practices to help leaders … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Robert Chesnut | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Ethics

If you want to develop an environment where contributors thrive, your workforce must be able to count on some basic things — such as role clarity, timely feedback, adequate resource allocation, and attention to how our work is structured.

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

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 the position being filled, they often fail to reveal sufficient information about … [ Read more ]

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

Any business can — and should — classify their customers’ value chain into value-creating, value-charging (monetizing) and value-eroding activities.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Renato Mendes, Thales S. Teixeira | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Finance, Management, Marketing / Sales

Nearly every organization is grappling with huge strategic challenges, often with a need to reimagine its very purpose, identity, strategy, business model, and structure. Most of these efforts to transform will fail. And, in most cases, they will miss the mark not because the new strategy is flawed, but because the organization can’t carry it out.

My experience in working and studying corporate transformations points to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Beer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Two worldviews — market positioning and the resource-based view — have dominated how we think about competitive advantage for 40 years.

But the rapid growth of business ecosystems in recent years challenges this thinking. Most of these ecosystem orchestrators, like Google, Alibaba, and Uber, don’t make the things they sell; they exist to link others together, and this makes the old positioning-based logic less relevant. And, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Julian Birkinshaw | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy

To executives used to managing their businesses through the scrutiny of numbers, marketing’s uncertainties can be frustrating. As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets managed.” If marketing is hard to measure precisely, how can we manage it? The answer: Marketing does have valid metrics through which its activities can be assessed and managed. A/B testing and test markets can confirm or refute hypotheses to … [ Read more ]

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

Most leaders say they’re customer-centric, but if everything they measure is company-centric, how could that be true? Revenue, growth, and similar Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure how customers are performing for the company. But organizations that wish to be customer-centric (and maximize growth) must also measure how the company is performing for its customers.

Content: Article | Author: Gene Cornfield | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

We all think we’re geniuses at selecting people and, you know, frankly, one of the problems in hiring is we’ve gotten rid of recruiters in a lot of organizations, we’ve really trimmed them out. So, we let hiring managers do everything by themselves. Hiring managers don’t hire enough people to ever get good at this. We don’t train them, we don’t give them feedback on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Each year, around 185,000 MBA students graduate in the U.S. alone. A significant portion of these students spend more than 100 hours each preparing for so-called case interviews — the favored evaluation method of elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, in which candidates are presented with a business problem and asked to talk through how they would solve the problem. This is a colossal waste … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Atta Tarki, Tino Sanandaji | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Industry: Consulting