417 Posts found for Source: Ivey Business Journal

The belief that governance best practices lead to superior firm performance is widespread. But as academic research and this article demonstrate, most studies prove that there is no link between governance and performance. Nor is there proof that the highly desirable director independence has a positive impact on firm performance.

Content: Related Content | Author: Beth Young | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

Debate about the utility of knowledge management continues today. This author, a recognized authority on the discipline, suggests that as long as we adopt a good model for managing knowledge, in this case, a doughnut, its practice can give a company a decided advantage.

Content: Article | Author: Etienne Wenger | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Knowledge Management

Why apparently good decisions prove to be bad ones is often blamed on internal and external factors – unexpected economic hiccups or flawed market research, for example. Only rarely are bad decisions seen as the result of bad decision making, the process that governs the way managers make decisions. But as this author explains, examining and improving how decisions are made can often make the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: J. Frank Yates | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

When a company faces an adaptive challenge, the locus of responsibility for problem solving must shift to its people. Innovative and well-adapted solutions reside in the collective intelligence of employees at all levels, who need to use one another as resources, often across boundaries, and learn their way towards solutions.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Problems / Solutions

The source, modification and directional flow of knowledge are the three things around which today’s firms have to organize.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Toxic managers are a fact of life. Some managers are toxic most of the time; most managers are toxic some of the time. Knowing how to deal with people who are rigid, aggressive, self-centered or exhibit other types of dysfunctional behavior can improve your own health and that of others in the workplace. This author describes the mechanisms for coping.

Content: Article | Author: Roy Lubit | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Career, Human Resources

A well designed pay program must attract and retain high caliber executives. Meeting this challenge has become more intense and complex since stock options began to fall out of favor. These authors, specialists in executive compensation, put forward alternative programs that can complement, or possibly replace, options. If adopted, they can force organizations and their boards to understand different measures of performance.

Content: Article | Authors: Claude Boulanger, Jeff Kozan | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

While there is an innovator’s dilemma, there is also an innovator’s purpose. Less well known, an innovator’s purpose drives innovators to see beyond current convention, counters the natural risk aversion that large companies have to innovation, and mobilizes employees to accomplish their goal. As this author writes, purpose-driven innovation is the only way to change the rules of the game for lasting advantage.

Content: Article | Author: Nikos Mourkogiannis | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Innovation

It’s rarely discussed, at least as not as much as the habits of successful CEOs, but the truth is that it takes some special personal qualities to be spectacularly unsuccessful. This author has written a best seller on the subject, and in this article he discusses how leaders can be not only instruments of success, but sometimes also architects of failure.

Content: Article | Author: Sydney Finkelstein | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Career, Leadership

The balanced scorecard is one of the most successful, endurable management concepts in recent years, but it is also frequently misunderstood. In this article, the co-authors of Making Scorecards Actionable suggest ways in which managers can make the balanced scorecard their most valuable tool.

Content: Article | Authors: Carl-Johan Petri, Jan Roy, Nils-Göran Olve, Sofie Roy | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Management

There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation… The other way to persuade people – and ultimately a much more powerful way – is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Persuasion, Storytelling

True, strategic change is something that’s played out over a longer time period.

This means that folks who are responsible for shorter time periods actually don’t need to worry much about “strategic uncertainty” and in fact should not worry much about strategic uncertainty. Why? Because somebody needs to actually deliver on the strategy that’s in place.

The problem I think in a lot of organizations is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Risk Management, Strategy

Adaptation has limits. A highly adaptive organization will survive better than one that cannot adapt at all; but it won’t create as much wealth as one that has simply guessed right. And since there is a large number of companies out there and all of whom are attempting to guess right, somebody who focuses on adaptation as a source of coping with the uncertainty of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The big issue is the collision between uncertainty and commitment. The [strategy] paradox is a function of that underlying tension. So the strategies that succeed biggest are the strategies that are based on the boldest and the most difficult to imitate, and hence hard-to-reverse commitments. The problem is…it takes time for these things to unfold; and so as a consequence you are necessarily required to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Strategy

Listing all the options for solving a problem benefits decision making in a number of ways beyond merely encouraging proper problem definition. It focuses the decision making process on rigorous analysis and away from ideology, assertion and who can yell the loudest. In the face of a comprehensive list of options, even the most passionate advocate has trouble with the simple question “What is good … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Decision Making

The court of public opinion says that CEOs are overpaid. This author does not have an argument with that per se, but he does argue, compellingly, that CEOs are overpaid not necessarily because their company under-performs, but because they are being paid for work that is, literally, beneath them. Too many CEOs, he points out are paid for operational, not strategic work. In this important … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mark Van Clieaf | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

A divergence of interests between a company’s shareholders and executives is at the root of the “agency problem.” No issue illuminates just how acute the problem is than executive compensation. Who’s right and what’s fair compensation. Managers with CalPERS, one of the vocal and visible institutional shareholders, have developed a model that will reveal if a certain executive compensation is warranted or not.

Editor’s Note: my … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Bridgette Butler, Mark Anson, R. Theodore White, William McGrew | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

Michael Raynor is an Adjunct Professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business. He is also a Distinguished Fellow with Deloitte Research in Boston, and the coauthor, with Clayton Christensen, of The Innovator’s Solution. His latest book, published earlier this year, is The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing To Success Leads to Failure (And What To Do About It). This interview is based on The Strategy … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Stephen Bernhut | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Management

Organizations undertaking change initiatives must engage employees. Paying the person instead of the job and using variable pay and stock are perhaps the most powerful changes an organization can make in moving its reward system toward one that supports performance and change. These authors describe the reward systems and motivational tools that will move employees to support the organization’s change initiatives.

Content: Article | Authors: Christopher G. Worley, Edward E. Lawler III | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Change Management, Human Resources

Incorporating corporate social responsibility into all strategic decisions is, arguably, one of the most difficult challenges a manager faces. Professor Tima Bansal discusses a research project that investigated how Canadian businesses manage that challenge.

Content: Article | Author: Tima Bansal | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Social Responsibility (ESG)