1297 Posts found for Source: strategy+business

How a capabilities-driven information technology strategy can help differentiate your company.

Content: Article | Authors: Eduardo Alvarez, Srini Raghavan | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Strategy

In the early 1900s, a thoughtful organizational thinker named Mary Parker Follett called out the critical difference between compromise and integration. A team that compromises has settled for the lowest common denominator: a solution, no matter how incomplete, to which all can easily agree, just to move things forward. Compromised solutions made in this way are more likely to break down.

A team that integrates, by … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jon R. Katzenbach | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

A real team, in my view, is something very specific. It differs from the more common “single-leader unit” in three important ways. First, all members of a real team have an equal level of emotional commitment to the team’s purpose and goals. Second, the leadership role shifts easily among the members based on the skills and experience they have and the challenges of the moment, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jon R. Katzenbach | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Teamwork

Use a combination of three measures — revenue growth, economic profit, and free cash flow — to set business targets, track strategy execution, and evaluate management performance. These three measures capture virtually all the high-level financial information that is important for an operating unit. As long as internal management reporting processes are designed to report these measures accurately, they provide excellent feedback on whether the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Greg Rotz, Ken Favaro | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Finance, Management

A common pitfall is tying incentive compensation, such as annual bonuses, to performance against a predetermined plan or budget. This inevitably leads people to restrain their aspirations for the business in order to make it easier to “beat plan.” In turn, this is interpreted as sandbagging by corporate headquarters or investors. The end result is a time-consuming, soul-destroying, and ultimately unproductive gaming of the planning … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Greg Rotz, Ken Favaro | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Planning

A good way to think about systems thinking was articulated in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization [Doubleday/Currency, 1990]. When things get complicated, you can learn through analysis — breaking down the problem into digestible components. But, as things get faster and more complex still, you have to learn from dynamics — seeing how the patterns evolve over … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charlie Feld | Source: strategy+business | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

Placing a new research, design, or engineering center in emerging markets demands more than just “location, location, location.”

Content: Article | Authors: Ajay Chamania, Heral Mehta, Vikas Sehgal | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Operations

If you’re going to do something new, you have to overlap fields. God didn’t make disciplines; man did.

Content: Quotation | Author: Stan Ovshinsky | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

Most brain activities don’t systematically distinguish between an activity and the avoidance of that activity. When someone repeatedly thinks, “I should not break this rule,” they are activating and strengthening neural patterns related to breaking the rule.

Therefore, to engender change among people in an organization, it’s important to keep attention focused on the desired end state, not on avoiding problems. This goal-directed positive reinforcement must … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Doug Lennick, Jeffrey Schwartz, Pablo Gaito | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

People may have only limited free will, but they have powerful “free won’t.” In organizations, when a strong impulse reflects “the way we do things around here,” there is always the option to veto the action, especially if people have practiced this ability.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Doug Lennick, Jeffrey Schwartz, Pablo Gaito | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

How one of the world’s most innovative companies discovered the value of focusing its R&D attention on its own business practices.

Content: Case Study | Author: Inder Sidhu | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Management | Company: Cisco Systems

How CEOs can turn conflict, dissent, and disagreement into a powerful tool for driving performance.

Content: Article | Authors: Ken Favaro, Saj-nicole Joni | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management

The ability to diagnose the beneficial attributes of a culture, and then use them to motivate strategically important behavior, is one of the key factors that differentiate peak-performing organizations from the also-rans in their field.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Ashley Harshak, Jon R. Katzenbach | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Culture

A corporate culture takes some of its attributes from the professional and educational background of participants. An electronics engineering–driven company has a very different cultural ambiance from a pharmaceutical firm, a bank, or a “metal-bending” manufacturer. Culture is also influenced by the attitudes of the founders, the location of the headquarters, the types of customers that the company serves, and the experiences people have together. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Ashley Harshak, Jon R. Katzenbach | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Culture is multifaceted, and every company has many subcultures. At the top, there might be an executive subculture, trained in finance, which wants good numbers above all else. There’s also probably an engineering subculture, which assumes that crises can be prevented only with fail-safe, redundant systems that kick in automatically. There are other subcultures for middle management, supervisors, the union, and marketing. Every company combines … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Edgar H. Schein | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Culture, Organizational Behavior

How a new view of consumers changed the way we think about products, companies, and economies.

Content: Article | Author: Theodore Kinni | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Customer Related

I characterize [organizational] responses in three zones. In Zone 1, we had transformers and go-getters. The people in Zone 2 were lost souls, taking energy away from the organization. They tended to project the idea that things would not work or that I was just trying to get rid of people. Zone 3 had fence sitters, who took no risks or positions. In any transformation … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Vineet Nayar | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Organizational Behavior

Technology development needs intellect more than it needs investment in dollars. But marketing needs dollars more than intellect.

Content: Quotation | Author: Vineet Nayar | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Marketing / Sales

How do you maximize the experience that customers have in the value zone where they meet your company’s work? We think the answer is for management to see itself as an enabler, and for employees to see themselves as “doers” with a great deal of accountability and autonomy: the ability to choose much of what they do. In this way, we create organizations in which … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Vineet Nayar | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Organizational Behavior

The yin and yang of strategic fad and fashion — the movement of business leadership from one trend to another over the past 50 years — has often led companies to make incoherent and ineffective moves. The answer is not to keep adopting new theories in hopes of finding the right answer, but to develop your own capabilities-driven strategy: your own theory of coherence for … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Art Kleiner, Cesare R. Mainardi | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Strategy