682 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

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

In our combined 50-plus years of working to improve organizations, we’ve observed that many managers struggle to make employees feel that their talents and contributions are noticed and valued. To explore this problem, we recently took a deep dive within an organization to see how organizational efforts to show appreciation and gratitude were perceived. In that project we engaged with both employees and managers through … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joseph R. Weintraub, Kate O’Leary, Kerry Roberts Gibson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Motivation

Four of the most common irritants I’ve seen arise as a result of ineffective organization design are: competing priorities, unwanted turnover, inaccessible bosses, and cross-functional rivalry. If you find yourself struggling with one or more of these issues, consider if the design challenges I discuss below may be the deeper cause. Doing so may help you pinpoint, and resolve, the real problem.

Content: Article | Author: Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

When it comes to hiring, democratic decisions lead to better outcomes. There is wisdom in crowds when it comes to spotting talent. When Google tracked the performance of recent hires against their interview ratings, the company found that averaging the ratings of a group of interviewers was by far a more accurate predictor of success than the rating of a single interviewer, even if that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Atta Tarki | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

If your company is like most, you’re likely struggling with workplace discrimination, even if you don’t know it. Equity gaps remain a pernicious problem in the U.S., particularly for women and people of color, who, on average, earn less and are under-promoted compared to their white or male counterparts. And though federal law has prohibited workplace discrimination for more than fifty years, those gaps don’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Elizabeth C. Tippett | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Women in Business

Since its introduction in Harvard Business Review, 16 years ago, the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, has become a foundational business metric. Based on a single question—On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company?—it’s a simple way to get a quick read on consumer sentiment, and it’s been widely embraced in the marketplace. Many leading companies have embedded … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Christina Stahlkopf | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

With critical thinking ranking among the most in-demand skills for job candidates, you would think that educational institutions would prepare candidates well to be exceptional thinkers, and employers would be adept at developing such skills in existing employees. Unfortunately, both are largely untrue.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

To demystify what critical thinking is and how it is developed, our team at Zarvana turned … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Matt Plummer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Personal Development, Training & Development

Companies have long valued the customer insights that online communities can provide, and some, such as Harley-Davidson, have even turned them into a revenue source by charging membership fees. But ensuring the success of online membership communities can be a challenge. You have to attract enough participants to create a dynamic community and, far more challenging, create a high-quality user experience that keeps your participants … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dorie Clark | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

Companies understand that their suppliers are critical partners in lowering costs, increasing quality, and driving innovation, and leaders routinely talk about the need for strategic relationships with shared goals and risks. But when contract negotiations begin, they default to an adversarial mindset and a transactional contracting approach. They agonize over every conceivable scenario and then try to put everything in black-and-white. A variety of contractual … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David Frydlinger, Kate Vitasek, Oliver Hart | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Legal

Business publications are filled with articles about feedback: how important it is for leaders, how leaders can both give and receive it, what happens when leaders don’t get it, and even what to do if someone is not open to feedback they have been given. The focus tends to be on the transfer of data.

What is less explored is how leaders should respond once they … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer Porter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Leadership, Personal Development

When we asked over 300 marketing leaders in the U.S. to identify the activities they find most challenging, the number one thing they reported, by a wide margin, was “demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes.”

This is a longstanding challenge for marketers. They want to demonstrate financial impact so that they can show accountability for business results, gain the respect of other business … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Christine Moorman, Nikita Avdiushko, Paul Magill | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Algorithms have taken a lot of heat recently for producing biased decisions. Should we be outraged by bias reflected in algorithmic output? Yes. But the way organizations respond to their algorithms determines whether they make strides in debiasing their decisions or further perpetuate their biased decision making.

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer M. Logg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, IT / Technology / E-Business

Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is perhaps the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge in the knowledge economy — an age where ideas matter more than ever.

More than 2,000 years ago Aristotle outlined a formula on how to master the art of persuasion in his work Rhetoric. Many great … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Carmine Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Personal Development

Interviews have an outsize influence on whether you land the job you want. Even though your application materials reflect your lifetime of experience, a few hours of interaction with a recruiting team often ends up being the determining factor in whether you actually get hired. So, clearly you need to stand out.

To do that, it helps to be mindful of what recruiters and hiring managers … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Author: Art Markman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Interviewing