Henry Ford
Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit… then the business must die as well, for it no longer has a reason for existence.
Content: Quotation | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Business Rules, Mission
Miguel Angel Ariño
Saying that a company’s purpose is to maximize profits is like saying that man exists in order to breathe. The fact that a man cannot live without breathing is one thing, but the ultimate purpose to which all man’s energies must be directed is quite another. Similarly, it is one thing to say that a company cannot survive without a certain minimum of profits, and … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Miguel Ángel Ariño | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Business Rules, Mission
Put Your Dreams To Work
As the years go by, we resign ourselves to the pessimistic view that “dreams are just dreams”. And yet, for IESE Professor Luis Huete, dreams are essential to a full life, which consists essentially of developing and mobilizing personal resources to attain inner and outer abundance. In the book “Construye tu sueño” (“Build your Dream”), Huete invites us to identify the factors that determine how … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Luis Huete | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Career, Personal Development
CSR Should Stand for Company Stakeholder Responsibility
While more and more businesses embrace Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) principles, R. Edward Freeman of The Darden School, University of Virginia, and S. Ramakrishna Velamuri of IESE Business School claim that the CSR concept as it is understood today is just superfluous. Their paper “A New Approach to CSR: Company Stakeholder Responsibility” proposes to replace “Corporate Social Responsibility” with an idea called “Company Stakeholder Responsibility”, … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: R. Edward Freeman, S. Ramakrishna Velamuri | Source: IESE Insight | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)
Competent to Lead
Results and talent. In people management, competencies should be given equal consideration to objectives, say Pablo Cardona and Pilar García-Lombardía in their book “Cómo desarrollar las competencias de liderazgo” (“How to Develop Leadership Competencies”). In the authors’ view, organizations that adapt tasks to fit their employees’ competency profile have a better chance of success, especially if they take steps to develop the desired competencies. Cardona … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Birth of New Firms: Knowledge is Key
Ever since Ronald Coase posed the question in 1937 -“Why do firms exist?”-, all the answers given have explained the genesis of firms oÂnly in terms of the need to economize oÂn costs, such as transaction costs, agency costs, and supervision and monitoring costs. In their paper “Dispersed Knowledge and an Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm”, Nicholas Dew of the Naval Postgraduate School, S. Ramakrishna … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Nicholas Dew, S. Ramakrishna Velamuri, Sankaran Venkataraman | Source: IESE Insight | Subject: Entrepreneurship
Knowledge Integration Across Organizations: How Different Types of Knowledge Suggest Different Practices and Different ‘Integration Trajectories’
This paper establishes a framework for analyzing knowledge integration across organizations from a corporate standpoint, pinpointing the challenges of a firm wishing to effectively integrate knowledge among its business units to improve its efficiency as a unique firm and its effectiveness through a better competitive positioning. Typical examples are those of a firm whose divisions benefit from better knowledge sharing in specific areas, or of … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Rafael Andreu, Sandra Sieber | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior