134 Posts found for Source: The Conference Board Review

Most twenty-first-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players. Management still revolves largely around supervision, if-then rewards, and other forms of control. That’s true even of the kinder, gentler Motivation 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like empowerment and flexibility. Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates. It is little more than control in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Pink | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Most of us separate character and reputation. We define our character as “who we really are” and our reputation as “who other people think we really are.” In situations where their assessment differs from our own, we generally characterize the assessment of others as “wrong.” It takes courage to realize that, in some cases, other people’s view of us may be just as accurate—or even … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Character, Reputation

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard business executives explain how keen they are to “give back” to society. It’s a phrase that makes me wince. The problem is not the “giving”—it’s the giving “back.” What does that mean, exactly? The implication is that it’s fine to take whatever you want, for as long as you want, provided that at some … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Alison Maitland | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

The market functions just as it’s supposed to, except when it doesn’t.

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Economics

For the most part, CEOs accept the board as their boss and as a valuable sounding board and source of input. But they don’t always get what they’re looking for from their boards. A common complaint among chief executives is that directors get into the weeds, digging into operational details that have little strategic value.

The difference between micromanaging and appropriate questioning is not always a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ram Charan | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

Trying to predict the future with any precision is a fool’s game, but ignoring it is suicidal. The right approach lies somewhere between prediction and neglect. Recent research has revealed a positive correlation between a leader’s tolerance for ambiguity and the successful management of paradoxes: Troy University management professor Debra Hunter says that a high tolerance for ambiguity entails a tendency to perceive ambiguous situations … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo, Stephen H. Rhinesmith | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Strategy

Where reputation comes from—and how to change yours.

Content: Article | Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

How Cisco started to get things right after things weren’t right from the start.

Content: Case Study | Author: Inder Sidhu | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Operations | Company: Cisco Systems

Congratulations: You’ve made the high-potentials list. As a HiPo, you’re now a prominent blip on HR’s radar. More importantly, you are about to be sucked into the machinery of the company’s accelerated-development system, the centerpiece of which is probably some kind of rotation: a “better than random walk” through a series of assignments designed to test your mettle, provide you with a “macro view” of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jean-Louis Barsoux, Preston C. Bottger | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Career, Human Resources

Companies can craft strategies to effectively combat counterfeiting by using new technology, old-fashioned detective work, and a little psychology. The solution is to target both sellers and buyers of counterfeit goods with a strategy that mixes offensive and defensive measures: defend, detect, doubt, and discourage.

Content: Article | Authors: Christopher Donnelly, Paul F. Nunes | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Miscellaneous

As long as an organization is enjoying healthy growth, management can do no wrong. But when tectonics shift and growth begins to stall, internal rifts can become apparent. People choose sides, challenge each other, question long-held assumptions, and begin to doubt strategies and tactics that used to be sacrosanct. Such internal discord can paralyze efforts to mount an effective recovery.

We have examined the data from … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Steve McKee | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Few organizations, Tim Brown says, are set up to allow much creative collaboration, and even those are often afflicted by a culture that mishandles the results. “Too many ideas that get through to the market make it there because somebody senior is the one sponsoring them,” he says, “not because they’re necessarily the best ideas.”

Brown, president and CEO of Palo Alto-based IDEO, looks to “design … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Matthew Budman, Tim Brown | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Innovation | Company: IDEO

A clearer view of economics means looking beyond the invisible hand.

Content: Article | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Economics

Executives have to be in the job long enough, not only for their successes to visit them, but for their failures to visit them. We all have both.

Content: Quotation | Author: George Buckley | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Career, Human Resources, Personal Development

CEO compensation is never not a hot topic—among CEOs, anyway. For everyone else, it’s a subject that flares up periodically and sparks a heated debate that always concludes the same way: The system of CEO pay in U.S. companies is broken.

The criticisms are familiar: The system rewards the wrong things, ignores shareholder objections, relies on arcane financial machinations, focuses on short-term results, and insists on … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Edward E. Lawler III | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Corporate Governance

What is leadership? What must a person do to become a true leader or to turn others into true leaders?

Does knowing leadership personally, reflecting on it intellectually, and experiencing it intimately make leadership easy to understand? No.

Content: Article | Authors: Gen. Tony Zinni, Tony Koltz | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Leadership

Michael Doyle, [who] invented the practice of “meeting facilitation” in the 1970s…saw that human beings did their best work in groups of seven to fifteen. Most corporate boards fit in that sweet spot. Unfortunately, he believed that most group problems arise from misapplying power, content, and process. Executive groups, he found, focus overwhelmingly on content (such as PowerPoint presentations and board books) and rarely on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Doyle | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Teamwork

In most organizations, there’s an incredible amount of talent everywhere, and often that talent is more connected to the marketplace and the world. There’s a clear and real role for senior leadership, but it’s not to have the ideas—it’s to create the framework for the ideas to exist.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Brown | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

We’ve got to have both predictability and unpredictability in organizations, where we’re measuring and tracking but where experimentation is still possible. The great organizations learn how to do both those things.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Brown | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

There’s another thing that organizations often miss: They assume that the things you go out and study should be the things that are right in the middle of the market, so they talk to customers who are in the middle of the bell curve about the products that the company already makes. That’s usually the least useful form of observation. The most useful is to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Brown | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Innovation, Market Research