134 Posts found for Source: The Conference Board Review

Organizations may be ever striving to streamline and boost operational efficiency, but corporate English grows increasingly less effective as an everyday medium for doing what people need it to do, which is to inform, motivate, explain. What should be clear, concrete, and concise is vague, abstract, and wordy. The English that has evolved in the American management corps shares family traits with the mumbling of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Communication

The typical U.S. company spends nearly fifty times more to recruit a $100,000 executive than it will invest in his annual training.

Content: Quotation | Author: Vadim Liberman | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Training & Development

Experience is hardly unimportant, but it’s the type of experience that counts. There’s experience performing tasks, and then there’s experience performing skills. Sometimes, the two are identical—like, say, having the ability to work with a specific database. But even that capability—like any technical skill—can be learned and is secondary to having superior learning agility. Companies ought to spend less time hunting for people who can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Vadim Liberman | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Human Resources

Neither inside nor outside directors can adequately represent shareholder interests.

Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

Humans are conclusion-drawing animals, and we will never leave dots unconnected.

Content: Quotation | Author: Doug Riddle | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

A committee is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.

Content: Quotation | Author: Richard Harkness | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Collaboration rarely occurs naturally, because leaders, often unintentionally, erect barriers that block people from collaborating. Many people, though not all, of course, have a natural tendency to collaborate, but they are not left to their own devices. And the culprit is modern management.

Managers and management thinkers celebrate decentralization, which works like this: You delegate responsibilities for products, business areas, and geographies to a group of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Morten T. Hansen | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Before the Industrial Revolution, individuals owned the processes, tools, and procedures, and suddenly they were taken over by the corporation. That went on for 150 or 200 years, and as we shifted into the knowledge- and service-work economy, we put more and more back on the shoulders of the individual worker. The corporate infrastructure has not kept up with the changes in the design of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Jensen | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Economics, Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

If managers were allowed to live their value of Family, maybe they wouldn’t work fifty hours a week, regularly stay away from home, or constantly take the job home with them. If managers were allowed to live their value of Integrity, maybe they wouldn’t represent a product to customers as performing the best and at the lowest cost when it doesn’t, it isn’t—or it doesn’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Stan Slap | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

How capitalism killed the soul of Motorola.

Content: Article | Author: Barry C. Lynn | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Economics, History | Company: Motorola

You would think that operational performance measurement is so fundamental to basic management that an efficient and effective system would have been devised long ago. But you would be wrong. Despite repeated efforts to make them better, the fact remains that performance metrics are terrible and companies seem incapable of doing much about it. Here are seven sins of corporate measurement.

Content: Article | Authors: Lisa Hershman, Michael Hammer | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Management

Let’s begin with what you already know, at least intuitively: Employee engagement is good for your company.

Now let’s turn to what you may not know about employee engagement: everything else.

Content: Article | Author: Richard H. Axelrod | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Why do companies mistakenly believe the path to success lies in emulating venture capitalists?

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

Winning back disengaged employees will require changing the nature of work itself.

Content: Article | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

How to get your board back on track.

Content: Article | Author: Beverly Behan | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

Charting a new course for B-schools and MBAs.

Content: Prospective MBA Content | Authors: David Garvin, Matthew Budman, Srikant Datar | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: About the MBA Degree

We must remember that theories claiming to be improvements because they explain what other theories failed to foresee are committing the worst kind of bait and switch, promising insight into the future when all they really have to offer is a prediction of the past.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Thought

Not everyone can—or should—get a seat at the table.

Content: Article | Author: Vadim Liberman | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

Richard S. Wellins, Paul Bernthal, and Mark Phelps of Development Dimensions International wrote in a 2005 article, “for the past two decades we have been trying to realize the benefits of empowerment, teamwork, recognition, people development, performance management, and new leadership styles.“

If you want to know why efforts to engage the workforce have failed so dismally, look again at that list. It contains not a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Motivation, Work

What makes knowledge workers is not what they know but how well they are able to use what they know.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Knowledge