134 Posts found for Source: The Conference Board Review

Public relations has two roles: advocacy and counsel. Counsel usually takes a backseat to advocacy, which always seems more urgent at the moment. But effective counsel can make advocacy less critical. Many CEOs look for good writing from their PR counselors because that’s the stuff of advocacy. What they should be looking for is good thinking, which is the foundation of effective counsel.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dick Martin | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Public Relations

As a marketer, the key is to figure out where people’s interests and your competencies overlap.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dick Martin | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

When I was doing the hiring for AT&T’s PR department, I came to the conclusion that professional writing skills were a leading indicator of basic intelligence.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dick Martin | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Intelligence, Skills

Compliance is not the same as ethics. Compliance is concerned with the letter of the law, ethics with its spirit. Compliance is rooted in statutes; ethics flows from a company’s character. Compliance and ethics overlap somewhat, but not completely.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dick Martin | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Ethics

PR is an applied social science focused on two things: behavior and communications. The big problem these days is that we spend too much time on communication and not enough on behavior, and that’s why the public distrusts our institutions so much.

Content: Quotation | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Public Relations

Almost everyone thinks successful innovation starts with a great idea. Almost everyone is wrong. The great idea comes second. You must begin with the killer insight, a deep truth significant enough that it helps you make a meaningful number of sales or allows you to forge relationships with a large number of people.

Why is developing the insight the place to begin? That’s simple. Insights … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Innovation

How to increase the total quantity of power in the organization so that the power given to some does not comes at the expense of the power of others.

Content: Article | Authors: Peter Tollman, Yves Morieux | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Our curiosity can usefully be seen as inquiries into two sorts of questions: Why/how did that happen? and, What will happen next? The former captures our desire to explain events; the latter addresses our need to predict them. Where does management science fall in this explanation/prediction space? I’m increasingly of a mind that providers of theories of management are often unwittingly in the explanation game … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Identifying the drivers of superior long-term performance is a sufficiently fundamental question to have spawned a genre of business books. These “success studies” seek to uncover the causes of success by studying companies that have succeeded.

What do we have to show for the collective efforts of the researchers in this space? Rather less than one might hope, I fear. The reason lies not in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Many managers have as their primary occupation to make something else: numbers. To make the right numbers—that is, turning in a specified financial performance over a specified period of time—they give directions to hire and fire people, expand or contract capacity, raise or lower prices. At one level, the desire to make the numbers is entirely rational. If we look deeper, however, it might not … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: M Stulz, Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Finance, Management

How do you define your people? Through the economic expansions and contractions of the past twenty years, executives have struggled to define and redefine the employer-employee relationship, using various analogies, metaphors, and sound bites to explain the complex, shifting connection.

Employees are no longer personnel, costs, or workers—they’re associates, assets, thinkers. They’re certainly not cogs in the industrial machine—today, they’re key links in the customer value … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: John M. Bremen, Thomas O. Davenport | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Even with good systems, you still need good people.

Content: Article | Author: Zeynep Ton | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Human Resources, Management, Operations

I’ve been studying decision-making at the top for many years, and what I’ve found is that good decisions nearly always result from robust decision processes. Similarly, decisions that go wrong nearly always stem from procedural or organizational failures. In fact, when I and my colleagues at Bain & Co. conduct postmortems into decisions, we find that just five mistakes account for the vast majority of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael C. Mankins | Sources: Harvard Business Review, The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In a room full of smart and accomplished corporate board directors and CEOs from leading companies around the world, one topic resonated above all the usual items on the table. It wasn’t strategy, risk management, or compensation that stood out among the group I spent a couple of days with last week.

It was courage.

Of course, that wasn’t the word they used to describe their dilemma. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sydney Finkelstein | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

The business case is not gospel—it’s one way we make decisions. It’s a tool, not a commandment.

Content: Quotation | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Management

Effective hiring practices are more important than ever, but interviewing gets little or no attention. Many questions are utterly useless, and some put the questioner in legal jeopardy.

Content: Article | Author: Mark Murphy | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Human Resources

We design service jobs for superheroes. No wonder service is terrible.

Content: Article | Authors: Anne Morriss, Frances Frei | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Organizational Behavior

Recent shifts in the global economy dictate changes in employee skills and employer investment. The nature of the international corporation has also transformed, requiring cultural adaptability—not of just a few senior leaders but of many emerging leaders in its ranks. These factors, and others, have converged to require a complete reengineering of the concept of international assignment. It needs to be viewed as an intense … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Stanley S. Litow | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Human Resources, International

Too often, organizations promote the wrong people and then set them up for failure. The result: Both employees and managers find their relationship frustrating and unfulfilling.

Content: Article | Author: Thomas O. Davenport | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Without nurses and doctors from Asia and Africa, British hospitals could barely function. But is it fair for rich countries to poach talent from poor ones? Poor countries have far too few skilled workers to begin with, yet they are precisely the people whom rich countries are most likely to lure away.

It seems obvious that this “brain drain” hurts the poor. If all the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Robert Guest | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Economics, International