Choosing to grow: The leader’s blueprint

Driving sustainable, inclusive growth requires the right mindset, strategy, and capabilities. Here are some steps that could help foster successful growth.

Global flows: The ties that bind in an interconnected world

Economic and political turbulence have prompted speculation that the world is already deglobalizing. But the evidence suggests that global integration is here to stay, albeit with nuance.

A better way to drive your business

Integrated business planning is a well-known process, particularly among supply chain leaders. But in most companies, P&L owners are missing out.

Deidre Paknad

Where there’s a culture of compliance, where everybody gets paid for coming in on 100 percent of their numbers, there you have a deeply ingrained mindset that aims for safety, not for great. In this case it’s optimizing for personal income, as opposed to optimizing for the acceleration of the organization. There’s real work to overcome the mindset of everybody optimizing for their paycheck, instead … [ Read more ]

Deidre Paknad

In transformation, every organization looks like a start-up, learning each quarter as it drives a new business model in new sectors, and operates in new ways. The conditions in large enterprise look very much like the conditions have always looked in a young company trying to create a segment or a category or launch a new product.

Deidre Paknad

A way to think about KPIs is that they’re operating metrics. There are dashboards of them, millions of them in big companies. They tell us where we are.

The big difference with OKRs is, of the million things we could measure this quarter, on a certain five or ten measures, we want to move the needle, and this is how far we want the needle to … [ Read more ]

Web3 beyond the hype

While buffeted by the recent market downturn and bankruptcies, digital assets and the technologies underlying them still have the potential to transform business models across sectors.

Performance through people: Transforming human capital into competitive advantage

A dual focus on developing people and managing them well gives a select group of companies a long-term performance edge.

Stop Losing Sales to Customer Indecision

For decades, salespeople have been taught that there is only one possible reason for lost sales: that salespeople have failed to defeat the customer’s status quo. Perhaps the customer doesn’t fully appreciate the problem that their solution is designed to solve. Or maybe they don’t yet see enough daylight between their company’s solution and that of the competition. So, salespeople break out their arsenal of … [ Read more ]

Post-close excellence in large-deal M&A

The most successful large-deal transactions follow four key practices during integration execution.

Author Talks: Turn your work enemies into allies

Whether you’re being interrupted in meetings or challenged at every turn, Amy Gallo shares tactics for getting value out of difficult work relationships.

Michael Birshan

We live in the era of ESG [environmental, social, and corporate governance issues] and we talk a lot about the “E,” but the “S” will also be crucial. This research shines a spotlight on some of the fundamental forces driving the phenomena we see today. One suggestion to business leaders is, know your numbers. What does your company’s value look like by pathway? What does … [ Read more ]

Michael Birshan

Value flows from corporations to households through eight different pathways. If you take a dollar of revenue that the average corporation generates, 25 cents of that flows through as labor income: wages, salaries, and other benefits to employees. Seven cents of that dollar goes to capital income, meaning dividends, share buybacks, and interest payments to debtholders. Six cents goes to investment—earnings that are retained to … [ Read more ]

How effective boards approach technology governance

As technology’s strategic importance to the business expands, management needs stronger board guidance. Four engagement models have proven useful.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So what happens when we automate our most impactful and superior cognitive capacity—thinking—and we don’t think for ourselves? I think we end up not acting in very smart ways, and then the algorithms are trained by behaviors that have very little to do with intelligence. Most of the stuff we spend doing on a habitual basis is quite predictable and monotonous and has very little … [ Read more ]

Aaron De Smet

What we found is teams with psychological safety and a supportive work environment actually benefit from being edgy and pushing to do better. But you put that same edge, that same kind of push, on a team that doesn’t have psychological safety or an open and supportive work environment, and it has the opposite effect. It actually makes the team go into a sort of … [ Read more ]

Bill Schaninger

When people claim they have survey fatigue, they’re not tired of you asking them. They’re upset about you not doing anything with it.

Bill Schaninger

Through most of the last three and a half, four decades, we’ve changed our approach to developmental experiences throughout childhood. In large part, it was to reward kids for their participation in order to avoid the disappointment of perceived failure. My point is we’ve raised two generations of folks who believe that participation and the collective is the end result. I think we’re seeing things … [ Read more ]