Six Styles of Leadership

ManyWorlds takes a look at the work of Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee on emotional intelligence, including a look at the four dimensions (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management) and six leadership styles: Commanding (or Coercive), Authoritative (or Visionary), Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, and Coaching.

Don’t do SWOT: A Note on Marketing Planning

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a popular framework for developing a marketing strategy. Although SWOT is promoted as a useful technique in numerous marketing texts, it is not universally praised: One expert said that he preferred to think of SWOT as a “Significant Waste of Time.”

The problem with SWOT is more serious than just wasting time. Because it mixes idea generation with evaluation, it … [ Read more ]

Outside Looking In: Maximize Project Success Rates with Premortem Strategy

Why do highly intelligent and capable business leaders, backed by an army of talent and a flood of information, make so many extremely expensive mistakes? This article looks at the role of mental models in decision making and forecasting and suggests effective and efficient methods for improving.

Art Kleiner

Art Kleiner discusses his new book ‘Who Really Matters – The Core Group Theory of Power, Priviledge and Success’. In his book, Kleiner postulates that every organization is driven by a desire to satisfy a Core Group of influential individuals and explains why understanding this group’s expectations is the key to success. Exploring facets of corporate culture development and leadership, this interview led by ManyWorlds.com’s … [ Read more ]

Frontiers of Business Innovation

The market data is unequivocal – innovation, and only innovation, drives value creation on a sustained basis. This report goes further and defines the levels of innovation that actually drive value in today’s economy. It is less often at the product level, and more often at the process and/or business model levels. The report also addresses the contrasting governance models for enterprise innovation processes, example … [ Read more ]

From Market Research to Customer Insight

Mohanbir Sawhney’s thought leadership in the marketing arena continues with this ManyWorlds’ exclusive presentation. The basis for this 52 slide presentation is in exploring how a corporation can transform its research organization from “producing research” to “generating insights”. By asking some fundamental questions about the nature of insights and the process that produce them, we are taken on an exploration through the definition, creation and … [ Read more ]

Debugging Executive Decision Making

Being able to make decisions rapidly, wisely, and accurately is getting harder every day. Many of the traditional complications and confusions of business decision making are intensifying while new factors are adding to the cognitive challenge. Given that psychologists and decision experts have uncovered numerous biases and distortions in our normal thinking and deciding processes, we have cause for great concern.

In this wide-ranging survey … [ Read more ]

Effective Meetings

In work days filled up by highly demanding, multitasked schedules, meetings often feel like a drain on valuable time, yet they keep multiplying. It surely makes sense to manage meeting so that each one pays back more than it costs. How to do ensure that this happens?

One of the most thorough and promising answers to that question has been provided by Patrick Lencioni in his … [ Read more ]

A Framework and Toolkit for Strategy Under Uncertainty

Traditional strategic-planning, decision-making, and financial planning approaches can work well in stable, predictable environments. These approaches assume that a good analysis will allow the future to be forecast with enough accuracy to point to the best strategy.

In 1994, a group of McKinsey partners met to discuss the prevailing strategy development approaches then taught and used. They concluded that those methods had fallen behind the … [ Read more ]

What Is Strategy?

We all see business strategy through our own particular lens. Hundreds of books are written every year on business strategy, and the diversity of perspectives can be mind numbing. This often leaves executives who wish to develop a strategy for their business more than a little confused on what exactly their strategy should address, and what tools and techniques should be applied in developing the … [ Read more ]

360-Degree Feedback

The 360-degree feedback tool was originally used to determine professional development needs, but quickly gained popularity as a performance appraisal tool. The 360-degree review aims to provide employees with feedback on their performance from those above, below, and at the same level in the company. With managerial support, employees are expected to analyze the feedback to identify their strengths and weaknesses and then develop a … [ Read more ]

The Value of Vision

If executives are to create and use a vision effectively, they must develop a precise understanding of what this involves. In other words, they need a clear vision of vision. This Models & Methods article conveys a few of the major definitions and models of corporate visions. These agree on the basics, according to which a good vision defines what we stand for (values) and … [ Read more ]

Seven Habits for High Effectiveness

The higher up the corporate ladder an executive climbs, the more important it becomes for that individual to operate effectively and to do so reliably. Organizational effectiveness involves more than the sum of the effectiveness of individuals, but must be built on top of this foundation. Self-improvement books have been an American tradition for decades, but one of the most popular and enduring is Stephen … [ Read more ]

Strategic Programming or Strategic Thinking?

In 1994, Henry Mintzberg’s book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, was published. In this scathing yet scholarly work, Mintzberg tore into both the theory and practice of strategic planning-in the form it had taken especially during the 1970s. He suggested that this kind of approach could more accurately be labeled “strategic programming,” since it was more about management control than strategy.

Mintzberg put … [ Read more ]

How Industries Evolve

Business strategy will not be effective unless it takes into account the current state of an industry as well as how that state is changing. Professor Anita McGahan of the Boston University School of Management argues that industries follow one of four evolutionary trajectories: progressive, creative, intermediating, and radical. If companies are to profit from strategic moves and investments in innovation, they must follow the … [ Read more ]

First Mover Advantage

This article considers the sources of first-mover advantage, how often first-movers win, how this advantage relates to other factors such as learning and innovation, and why the first-mover advantage must-if it is to work at all-be only a small part of a more sophisticated strategy.

Stephen Covey

Integrity is the measure of the degree to which we have developed our independent will in our daily lives-how well we have implemented the goals chosen through personal leadership. Integrity is our ability to make and keep commitments to ourselves.