417 Posts found for Source: Ivey Business Journal

Look around and you’ll see that many companies are wasting their human capital by not matching work assignments to each employee’s level of capability. Whether they are stifled by too many layers in the chain of command or not being allowed to solve problems themselves, employees feel disconnected from the organization. This author has concrete suggestions for creating the right work environment that challenges people … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Stephen M. Ferris | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

Practitioners and academics have argued that an engaged workforce can create competitive advantage. These authors say that it is imperative for leaders to identify the level of engagement in their organization and implement behavioural strategies that will facilitate full engagement. In clear terms, they describe how leaders can do that.

Content: Article | Authors: Dan Crim, Gerard H. Seijts | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

An effective advisory board, properly composed and structured, can provide non-binding but informed guidance and serve as a tremendous ally in the quest for superior corporate governance. This author, a lawyer with significant experience on boards of directors, offers a helpful blueprint for establishing an effective advisory board.

Content: Article | Author: Barry J. Reiter | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

Leadership is not a matter of position but of relationships, and one-on-one, personal encounters are vital in building those relationships. In the end, people follow you because they believe it is in their interests to do so, not because you claim to be a leader, because others have designated you as leader, or because you have the resources and position of leadership. There’s no better … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeswald W. Salacuse | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

When marketing abdicates strategic responsibilities it naturally becomes the simultaneous serf of sales and finance departments, pulled one way to increase sales and another to build profits. There is little more dangerous to the future of a company than marketing enmeshed completely in day-to-day challenges. Marketing needs to build creative and strategic tension into the usual tug-of-war between sales and finance departments. Where there is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Marketing / Sales

The right strategy and preparation are important elements in successful negotiation, but unless we use the right verbal and nonverbal communication we may never get what we want. Knowing the rules that that can set the tone or “code” of a negotiation, and how we can successfully switch that code, is vitally important. Without that knowledge, this author points out, we may never get what … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: William A. Donohue | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Negotiation

Atrophy, entropy and apathy are holding back many organizations and managers today. How, then, to nullify those negative forces and create a culture that enables and rewards managers for taking bold, decisive action? Answering this question effectively is a leader’s greatest challenge today, these co-authors write. In this article, they offer suggestions for creating an organizational culture defined by energy, imagination and the exercise of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Heike Bruch, Sumantra Ghoshal | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

Much of the information needed to diagnose the cause of a problem invariably comes from the people associated with the problem. To get the needed information requires asking the right questions of the right people and then having the discipline to be quiet and listen closely. Determining the right questions to ask too often gets short shrift, with predictable consequences for results.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Problems / Solutions

Commitment is the emotional attachment one has to the organisation within which one works and the pride one has in its achievements. Engagement, on the other hand, is more – the demonstration of discretionary effort to ensure the organisation achieves its goals.

Two insights influence how we think through the role and development of effective leaders and managers. First, there is likely to be a … [ Read more ]

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

According to research by the authors, the majority of us look for and admire leaders who are honest, forward-looking, inspiring and competent. This article examines those traits and offers prescriptions for eliminating cynicism and becoming a credible leader.

Content: Article | Authors: Barry Posner, James M. Kouzes | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Leadership

Getting smart about distribution means looking at channel partners relative to their impact on profitability, not just revenues; their ability to drive and convert traffic to actual sales; and their prospects for future growth. Suppliers who arm themselves with this kind of information can make informed choices about which resources to devote to which channel partners, and so drive meaningful profit improvements within the year. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David Campbell | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Marketing / Sales

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 | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

James O’Toole is research professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California and the Mortimer J. Adler Senior fellow of the Aspen Institute. According to O’Toole, a leader’s first responsibility is to create an organization that enables people to fulfill their psychic, social and material needs.

Content: Thought Leader | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Management

The goal fallacy, then, is that though the periodic process of goal setting is well entrenched in the management practices of a growth enterprise, the process of goal attainment-monitoring, then taking the day-to-day actions that lead to attainment-is not. In fact, by defining a specific goal, management often fools itself into thinking it has implemented an element of company strategy.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Goals, Management

Economic arguments assume the existence of perfectly competitive markets in which consumers and producers behave rationally in order to maximize utility and profits. In a perfect market, goods and services flow openly, there are no transaction costs, entry and exit is free, and producers and consumers possess complete information about the price, physical characteristics, and availability of each commodity.

But the perfect market is an abstraction. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Economics, Social Responsibility (ESG)

There is an ethical argument that says that firms are morally obliged to give back to the societies in which they exist. This responsibility arises for at least two reasons. First, firms are obliged to make a payment in kind for using society’s infrastructure, land, air, water, plants, and animals to generate profit. Second, they have a duty to reimburse society for the negative externalities … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Even though ethical arguments [for social responsibility] are morally appealing, they do not apply well to the practical realities of modern western social and economic systems. First, the ethical argument lacks clear measures for evaluating the success or otherwise of socially valuable activities. It is difficult to compare one activity with another without a baseline measure of value.

Second, firms have many stakeholders. Is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Communication, Personality / Behavior

Potentially, boards have three resources to use: power, information, and knowledge. When these three resources are present and effectively directed at, first, handling emergencies; second, making sure an effective strategy is in place; and, third, truly influencing the decisions of the chief executive officer (and who succeeds the CEO), then we can say that the board is acting in a high-performance way. But there’s another … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

In the second of this two-part interview with Ivey Business Journal, one of the world’s leading management thinkers outlines his radical idea of the model corporation (one in which power is held by others than just shareholders and financiers, employees, for example) and his unorthodox views on business leadership today. One of the founders of the London Business School also discusses why organizations fail, both … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Management