417 Posts found for Source: Ivey Business Journal

This article attempts to debunk the myths of unethical behavior created by business ethicists and to use the work of criminologists, who have been studying immoral behaviors for generations, and researchers in social psychology, to argue that unethical corporate behavior is most often a result of situational and contextual factors, job dependence and cognitive factors, which is perhaps an even more disturbing conclusion than the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Overall | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

When it comes to brainstorming, project planning and setting goals, SHRM research suggests that virtual teams can be more effective than in-person teams. Virtual teams, however, are still considered inferior in some key areas. Traditional teams, for example, receive higher marks when it comes to developing trust, maintaining morale, monitoring performance and managing conflict. Furthermore, as the SHRM survey illustrated, virtual managers have a harder … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Darleen DeRosa, Richard Lepsinger | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Teamwork

Despite the gains made by women in the job market in recent decades, the access of women to the upper levels of the business hierarchy remains limited. A vast literature seeks to explain the barrier to female advancement widely known as the “glass ceiling,” which is regarded as “an egregious denial of social justice,” at least by the U.S. Department of Labor. But the two … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Eva Marikova Leeds, Michael A. Leeds | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Women in Business

In May 2013, Ivey Business Journal published “Leadership Character and Corporate Governance,” which proposed that being an effective board member requires competencies, character and commitment. In that paper, which was also published by the Institute of Corporate Directors, we further noted that qualitative research indicates that character is the one fundamental requirement that poses the biggest challenge in terms of recruiting and selecting both directors … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alyson Byrne, Gerard H. Seijts, Jeffrey Gandz, Mary Crossan | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

Junk science has overwhelmed the thoughtful process of clarifying the role and processes of a successful board. And it has spawned more than a cottage industry. Governance has become a major sector supported by investment funds, consultants, university training programs, provincial and federal governments and institutions. Unfortunately, most of this activity is driven by a fad in management theory, which will eventually fade away like … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Knud B. Jensen | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

Globalization has created new opportunities and new threats. As sourcing from around the world made supply chains longer and more complex, the volatility inherent in production significantly increased. The number of supply chain members and the interactions among them has grown, exacerbating the lack of transparency in the operating environment. Company executives have increased profitability through ever-shorter times-to-market and product life-cycles, business processes improvement, just-in-sequence … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Bublu Thakur-Weigold, Kamil J. Mizgier, Stephan M. Wagner | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Risk Management

Jack Welch famously called lack of candour “the biggest dirty little secret in business.” It’s an important observation, one that sits at the heart of too many public accounts of corporate scandals and tragic accidents, not to mention not-so-public failures of decision-making. In this article, we describe the critical connection between leadership and candour. Then to understand its application, we turn to General (Ret.) Rick … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alyson Byrne, Mary Crossan | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Leadership

Life is replete with dilemmas that force choosing one thing over another, which is rarely easy. These challenges create paradoxes. And managing paradoxes effectively is one of the challenges of leadership. It is about balancing contending strains that pull apart our available resources, time and energy.

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

No consumer can absorb, interpret, store, recall and use all of the information available, not even all the relevant bits. This imbalance between available information and available mental processing and storage capacity gives rise to a necessary principle of scarcity. Without it, there would be no need for firms to compete for awareness and privileged positions in the consumer’s mind.

A direct corollary of limited capacity … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Niraj Dawar | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

When customers … come across a new product, their cognitively economical approach is to try to classify it, to sort it into a familiar bin or category, so they can make sense of it in familiar terms. If they can do this, they can efficiently apply existing knowledge. For example, coming across a bean bag for the first time, a customer might be confused. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Niraj Dawar | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

There are three legs to the leadership stool: experience, training and education. The seat of the stool is mentoring, which holds everything together. If you develop leaders with that process in mind and a base of articulated values, you start to build the right culture, remove the impediments and begin to have an organization with leaders that are focused on people who are inclusive and … [ Read more ]

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

Strategic behavior is the process of formulating and expressing strategic choices. Systemic strategic behavior is behavior that expresses strategic choices that are congruent with structural business conditions. It rests on two fundamental, turbulence-prone forces: the capital resource base, and the competency profile of the organization. Capital resource base is a configuration of corporate capital resources, i.e., tangible … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: M.S.S. el Namaki | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Strategy

Our frustration with most success studies is not that any particular directive is wrong. Rather, somewhat ironically, it is that all too often many researchers offer prescriptions that could never be wrong; that is, their claims cannot be proven to be false.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

We define character as an amalgam of traits, values and virtues. Traits, such as open-mindedness or extroversion, may be either inherited or acquired; they predispose people to behave in certain ways, if not overridden by other forces such as values, or situational variables such as organizational culture and rewards. Values, such as loyalty and honesty, are deep-seated beliefs that people hold about what is morally … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Gerard H. Seijts, Jeffrey Gandz, Mark Reno, Mary Crossan | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Character, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

Analytics is to management as a light bulb is to darkness: it is illuminating and helpful in revealing both future opportunities and pitfalls. Descriptive analytics seeks to understand past data and is widely used. Predictive analytics seeks to understand the future. This is a challenge for many firms, since it brings in risk (the future is uncertain) and the need to manage risk. Prescriptive … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Bell | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Information, IT / Technology / E-Business, Trends / Analysis

Management largely deals with activities that aim to improve performance in the short term. On the other hand, leadership (hopefully) concerns itself with inspiring, motivating and aligning people to achieve ends that they never before had considered possible, over the longer term.

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

With the corporate governance crisis at the turn of the century that shattered firms like Enron and WorldCom, academics and consultants turned their attention to enhancing corporate governance. What the 2008 financial crisis revealed is that the post-Enron governance advice has been insufficient in helping develop successful boards of directors: more work is needed to help us understand what makes a board effective or not. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Chris Bart, Mark Fuller | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Corporate Governance

Moving at the speed of the crowd has become mandatory for any company that is on the Web (which is just about every company). These companies must understand how influence gets peddled in the marketplace today (and constantly refresh their understanding) – and they must constantly reevaluate how customers are influenced and what the appropriate response should be. Readers will learn what the responses should … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joshua B. Bellin, Paul F. Nunes | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

A successful innovation is a little like an iceberg: Look under or behind the innovation and you’ll see the smart practices, processes and structures that supported the success of the innovation. Herewith, six practices to avoid, and that are sure to compromise the chances of success.

Content: Article | Author: Rita Gunther McGrath | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Very soon after the crash of 2008, most of the conventional conceptual and operational frameworks for strategy formulation and strategy choice ran out of steam. Five years later, as this author notes, the search is still on for more compatible models for strategy analysis, formulation, choice and implementation. In this article he offers a model and four options for applying it that he believes is … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: M.S.S. el Namaki | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Strategy