Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Conversation with Paul Krugman
- Predictability
- Rebuilding Trust…by James O’Tole and Warren Bennis
- The Buck Stops (and starts) at Business School by Joel M Polodny
- Rethinking Trust by Roderick M Kramer
- Why You Didn’t Get That Promotion by John Beeson
- Innovation In Turbulent Times
| Too big to fail by Duncan Watts – should really be too big to exist – i.e. nothing should be too big to fail. Government intervention is required to prevent markets from destroying themselves, and the relevant question is what kind of intervention is effective. Firms should not be allowed to grow too big to fail.
Conversation with Paul Krugman…The idea that you need to give executives a stake in company profits – in order to give them the right incentives – has been very influential, and arguably it has caused a lot of damage. How to be a good boss in a bad economy…by Robert I Sutton…. When operations are going haywire and people are rattled, it is especially hard to get new ideas to take root or to teach new behaviours of any complexity. Your job as a boss is to design messages that will get through to people who are distracted, upset, and apt to think negatively given any ambiguity. When it comes to internal communications, your mantra should be “Simple, concrete, and repetitive.” If you aren’t saying the same things over and over again, and aren’t a bit bored with yourself, it may be that you aren’t relating yourself enough or your messages are overly complex. Provide predictability, increase understanding, afford control and show compassion.
Win or lose, if your people believe you are always on their side, it will come back to help you – but if they believe you are willing to sell them out at the drop of a hat, it can haunt you down the road. Rebuilding Trust…by James O’Tole and Warren Bennis The new metric of corporate leadership will be closer to the extent to which executives create organizations that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable. Tell the truth/ Encourage people to tell the truth / Reward contrarians / Practice having unpleasant conversations / Diversify your sources of information / Admit your mistakes / Build organizational support for transparency / Set information free.
This article argues that the old adage of focusing on monetary maximization and returns is not good enough for any academic institution, which many of us have sensed for a long time. The goals need to be aligned with ethics and environment and contribution to society. I am angry at the inattention to ethics and values-based leadership in business schools. We didn’t need the current meltdown to tell us things weren’t right; the Enron and WorldCom scandals proved it more than seven years ago. I am angry at the disciplinary silos in which business schools teach management. I am angry that many academics aren’t curious about what really goes on inside companies. They prefer to develop theoretical models that obscure rather than clarify the way organizations work. The time has also come for business schools to develop codes of conduct for MBAs and to withdraw the degrees of those who break the manager’s code. A lack of trust results when your expectations about how a person should behave aren’t met. Laws and regulations help address those situations by acting as effective deterrents. In contrast, distrust arises when you believe that another person’s value system is different from your own. N those situations, legal remedies, which are impersonal and binding, only exacerbate the problem. In order to reduce people’s distrust, business schools need to show that they value what society values. They need to teach that principles, ethics, and attention to detail are essential components of leadership, and they need to place a greater emphasis on leadership’s responsibilities – not just its rewards. Academics capable of teaching soft skills such as leadership, values and ethics are in distinct minority at most business schools. Goals need to be formulated in non-numerical terms including expectations of post business school incomes and life. Schools must be able to say that they promote behaviour that is consistent with society’s values. To this end, business schools need to reinvent themselves. Rethinking Trust by Roderick M Kramer Despite deceit, greed and incompetence on a previously unimaginable scale, people are still trusting too much. To survive as individuals we need to learn to temper our trust. To trust wisely we need to re-adjust our mindset and behavioural habits following these basic rules: Know yourself; Start Small; Write an escape clause; Send strong signals; Recognize the other person’s dilemma; Look at roles as well as people; Remain vigilant and always question. Why You Didn’t Get That Promotion by John Beeson This is a great article about how those who do seemingly well don’t get promoted. How often subtle factors hold people back, perhaps the most important of which is not picking up the cues and wanting to learn and change. “Colleagues complained that he tended to get locked into his own opinions, that he lacked openness to other perspectives and shut down creative alternatives. Some considered him arrogant” – all very common. The article talks about Key Factors in Executive Advancement as being 1) Nonnegotiables – factors absolutely necessary to be a contender; 2) De-selection Factors - characteristics that prevent you from being considered as a serious candidate; and 3) Core Selection Factors – capabilities that breed others’ confidence in your ability to succeed at the senior level. Also two interesting articles on Innovation In Turbulent Times (pair left and right brain thinker for success) and Audit Committee’s New Agenda (not just ensuring viability but also restoring public confidence). frank@olsson.co.nz Harvard Business Review May 2009 What Only the CEO Can Do. By A G Lafley, CEO of Procter and Gamble The CEO is the link between the Inside that is ‘the organization,’ and the outside of society, economy, technology, markets and customers. Inside there are only costs. Results are only on the outside (Peter Drucker). We won’t succeed without a deep understanding of external stakeholders and their competing interests, and how those interests correspond with the capabilities and limitations of the organization. Linking the outside with the inside comes down to four fundamental tasks.
So many employees are glued to their computers and spend so many hours in internal meetings thereby losing touch with the consumers. You need to be out there in the competitive pressure cooker called the market place. Too often time is spent on initiatives consumers don’t want, incurring cost that consumers should not have to pay for. The consumer is the boss. We must win the consumer value equation every day in making the customer chose our product and then be delighted in using it. Need Cash – Look inside the Company by Kevin Kaiser and David Young
In the right environment performance indicators are not blindly and unquestionably followed. There needs to be a participative culture in which all employees feel responsible for creating value. This will help ensure your capital is working efficiently. The Definitive Guide to Recruiting by Caludio Fernandez-Araoz, Boris Groysberg and Nitin Nohira With a proactive hiring process companies can not only acquire the best talent but retain their stars longer than less prepared competitors. Is Your Growth Strategy Flying Blind by Mehrdad Baghai, Sven Smit and Patrick Viguerie Companies can get much more out of their growth strategies by digging deeply into micro markets – typically ranging from $50 – 200 million in value, than from looking at the overall picture. Many companies look at themselves on the basis of too aggregated data. Look out for where the growth markets will be – not where they are right now. Why Teams Don’t Work by Diane Coutu interviewing Richard Hackman, professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University. Teams often underperform due to problems with co-ordination and motivation. Often the CEO is responsible for the fuzziness of team boundaries. Fearful of seeming exclusionary – or, on the other end of the spectrum, determined to put people on the team for purely political reasons – the CEO frequently creates a dysfunctional team. In truth, putting together a team involves some ruthless decisions about membership; not everyone who wants to be on the team should be included, and some individuals should be forced off. Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning. In many cases deviant thinking is the source of great innovation. For a team to work well the team needs coaching as a group. Many people act as if being a team player is the ultimate measure of one’s worth, which clearly it is not. (My comment: Self serving and self aggrandizement is always negative and the concept ‘team player’ is often used to differentiate against such corrosive behaviour – someone who refuses to pass the ball lets the team down). There are many cases where collaboration, particularly in truly creative endeavours, is a hindrance rather than a help. The challenge for a leader then is to find a balance between individual autonomy and collective action.
Harvard Business Review April 2009 After missing out on last month’s edition of HBR I found this one quite interesting. Perhaps key messages are listen to your adversaries and see their comments as feed-back and you have to have the guts to accept opposition and sincere (contrary) opinion from your team if you want strong leadership. One person’s ideas, strategy, and execution will never be as good as that of a competent team. Another pointer is that much of success is quite random and trying to extract learning from it is often futile. Copies will never be as unique as the original. Several articles also remind me of Bertrand Russell’s line that ‘excess virtue is a vice.’ Things like teamwork, cooperation and alliances and even happy staff can all be overdone such as to bring negative effects on viability and progress. Please find below a few notes from the issue. Are great companies just lucky? By Michael Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed and Andrew Henderson Many of the great companies are in fact nothing special; consequently the researchers are simply imposing patterns on random data. That’s not science – its astrology. It is easy to succumb to the temptation to ‘explain seemingly significant outcomes that are entirely random. Success stories should be treated not as how-to manuals but as sources for inspiration and fuel for introspection. What do customers really want by Erik Almquist and Jason Lee points out that it is quite complex to find out and trade-offs need to be understood. Some of the greatest marketing success stories relate to giving customers something they didn’t know the needed or wanted. How Toxic Colleagues Corrode Performance by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson. Common and generally tolerated antisocial behaviour at work is far more toxic than managers imagine. Berating bosses; employees who take credit for others’ work, assign blame, or spread rumours; and co-workers who exclude teammates from networks – all of these can cut a swath of destruction that’s often visible only to the immediate victims. Targets of bad behaviour become angry, frustrated, and even vengeful. Job satisfaction falls, and performance plummets. Some employees leave. But those who stay take a bigger toll on the organization. They can and do sit in the boat without pulling the oars and that can be worse than leaving (presenteeism is a greater problem than absenteeism). The effects of incivility on those on the receiving end were… 48% decreased their work effort; 47 % decreased their time at work; 38% decreased their work quality; 66% said their performance declined; 80% lost time worrying about it; 63% lost time avoiding the offender, and 78% said their commitment to the organization declined.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards (Soren Kirkegaard) Use regret to improve decision making and clarify values. Don’t worry alone, especially if you are drowning in regret. If misery loves company, it is because perspective helps. Leadership Lessons from Abraham Lincoln Doris Kearns Goodwin Lincoln surrounded himself with people, including his rivals, who had strong egos and high ambitions; who felt free to question his authority; and who were unafraid to argue with him. One success factor for great leadership is the ability to relax so that you can replenish your energies for the struggles facing you tomorrow. Everyone remarked on Abraham Lincoln’s extraordinary sense of humour, and he was widely admired as a storyteller. How to Market in a Downturn by John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. Understand recession psychology. Divide customers into 4 groups based on their emotional response to the recession: a hard-hit slam-on-the-brakes segment, which curtails all spending; a pained-but-patient segment, which selectively economizes; a comfortably-well-off segment, whose high-end purchasing continues, if less conspicuously; and a live-for-today segment, whose spending remains largely unchanged. Next, assess how each segment allocates its purchases among the following categories: essentials, treats, postponables, and expendables. Reassuring messages that reinforce an emotional connection with the brand and demonstrate empathy are vital. Marketers should prepare now for a possible long-term shift in consumers’ values and attitudes.
Too often a business leader asks: How can we get people to collaborate more? That’s the wrong question. It should be, Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value? To collaborate well is to know when not to do it. Collaboration costs are those arising from the challenges involved in working across organizational boundaries – across business units, functional groups, sales offices, country subsidiaries, manufacturing sites. Cross company collaboration typically means traveling more, coordinating work, and haggling over objectives and the sharing of information. The resulting tension that can develop between parties often creates significant costs: delays in getting to market, budget overruns, lower quality, limited cost savings, lost sales, damaged customer relationships. Whether because of enthusiasm for collaboration or the natural optimism of managers, many companies place a mistakenly high value on collaboration. Decoding Resistance to Change by Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford. Resistance is a resource. Ask yourself two questions: “Why am I seeing this behaviour as resistance?” and “If I viewed the resistance as feed-back, what would I learn about how to refine the change effort?” Once you have honestly answered those questions you can begin to see resistance as a resource – as energy to be channelled on behalf of the organization. Even difficult people can provide valuable input when you treat their communication with respect and are willing to reconsider some aspects of the change you are indicating. Frustrating though it is, resistance can lead to better results. Buy in can be a simple matter of being heard. Resistance properly understood as feed-back, can be an important resource in improving the quality and clarity of objectives and strategies at the heart of a change proposal. And properly used it can enhance the prospects for successful implementation. Getting Brand Communities Right by Susan Fournier and Lara Lee Embrace conflict, resist the urge to control, forget opinion leaders – and build your own brand. Many companies that try to turn their customers into a cohesive ‘brand community’ falter because of serious misconceptions, for instance, they relegate community building to the marketing department instead of treating it as a high-level strategy, or they assume that an interactive website will do the trick. To build and maintain strong brand communities, companies must understand the individual and social needs of members and so do everything possible to support and engage them on their own terms. By managing their communities with a light, open touch – and sustaining them with corporate-level commitment – firms can build fierce customer loyalty, increase marketing efficiency, and enhance their brand. Although every brand can benefit from a community strategy, not every company can pull it off. It takes fortitude to meet people on their own terms, cede control, and accept conflict as part of the package. When you get community right, the benefits are irrefutable. frank@olsson.co.nz Harvard Business Review February 2009 Into February already and HBR is endeavouring to help readers cope with the recessionary outlook. A couple of key pieces of advice is manage for cash rather than profit, stay lean, and don’t forget improvements and the future to be well positioned when things normalize. Talent and good ideas come from everywhere and open systems are better able to take advantage of this than closed ones. A few notes from the issue; The leader says; Put your financial house in order; maximize cash, tightly manage customer credit, control working capital, and strengthen your balance sheet. Second tackle operations: Reduce cost, manage the top line aggressively, rethink your product mix, divest noncore businesses, and rein in nonessential investments. Seize opportunities! Consumer safety for consumer credit by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi. Applying basic safety standards to this segment would provide badly needed security for consumers, investors, and the global economy. Just because I am nice, don’t assume I’m dumb by Amy Cuddy. Personal warmth and competence aren’t opposites. Mothers, like the elderly, are chronically stereotyped as les competent (although warmer) than other workers and as a result are under promoted and underpaid. Forget Citibank – Borrow from Bob by John Sviokla. Lending clubs are starting to be an alternative to banks able to give personal loans at better rates. Considerable growth expected. www.lendingclub.com The Ikea effect – When Labor Leads to Love by Michael Norton. Things that people have fully or partly constructed themselves they overvalue. Managers should keep in mind that ideas they have come to love because they invested their own labor in them may not be as highly valued by their co-workers – or their customers. Beware global Cooling by Peter Swartz. Global warming is real but not straight line. Each new high about every ten years – with some cooler years in between – is higher than the previous high The Dynamic of Personal Influence by Nicholas Christakis. A person is 15% likelier to be happy if his or her friends are happy. / I believe that the goal of happy customers is unattainable unless staff are happy – a necessary but not sufficient condition/ Western Union World by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. In 2007 expatriates remitted some $350 billion – more than OECD annual development aid – to relatives left behind. Immigrants tend to know much more about their new country than the new country knows about them. They are not even on the radar screens of many marketers in their adopted lands. Should You Outsource Your Brain by Thomas Davenport and Balia Iyer. With a shortage of analytical skills in the USA and Western Europe and a ready supply in India, Eastern Europe, and China, it’s perhaps not surprising that organizations are now outsourcing these more cerebral functions. Seize Advantage in a Downturn by David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter Inaction is the riskiest response to the uncertainties of an economic crisis. Rash scattershot action can be nearly as damaging. Do a thorough but rapid assessment of your vulnerabilities and then move decisively to minimize them. This will position you to seize future competitive advantage. To seize advantage companies must make farsighted investments, identify opportunistic and potentially transformative mergers, and consider possible redefinitions of their business models. Why Good Leaders make Bad Decisions by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead and Sydney Finkelstein. Managers need to find systematic ways to recognize the sources of bias – what the authors call ‘red flag conditions’ – and then design safeguards that introduce more analysis, greater debate, or stronger governance. Sometimes decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are hopelessly flawed. We are particularly bad at revisiting our initial assessments. Moon Shots for Management by Gary Hamel Tomorrow’s organizations must be adaptable, innovative, inspiring and socially responsible, as well as operationally excellent. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. Hierarchies need to be dynamic, so that power flows rapidly toward those who are adding value and away from those that aren’t. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust demoralizes and fear paralyzes, so they must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems. Reinvent the means of control. Leverage the power of shared values and aspirations while loosening the straitjacket of rules and strictures. Leaders will need to become social architects, constitution writers, and entrepreneurs for meaning. Expand and exploit diversity – a prerequisite for long-term corporate viability. Executives and experts must admit that they’ve reached the limits of management 1.0 – the industrial age paradigm built atop the principles of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, control, and primacy of shareholder interests. They must cultivate their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Why should the first impulse of management be to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship rather than to embrace them? All too often scholars have been content to codify best practices instead of looking beyond it. Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose than maximizing shareholder wealth. It is not specific or compelling enough to spur renewal. We must focus on the achievement of socially significant and noble goals. Highly collaborative systems will outperform organizations characterized by adversarial win-lose relationships. Reinvent strategy as an emerging process. Create the conditions in which new strategies emerge. Large organizational units that encompass hundreds of thousands of employees pose another danger, as they often lead to groupthink on a grand scale. (Citicorp/ GM). Companies must reorganize themselves into smaller units and create fluid, project based structures. Building new incentive systems that focus executive attention on creating long term stakeholder value must be a critical priority for management innovation. Many companies institutionalize a sort of creative apartheid. Instead – equip people with innovation tools and allow them to set aside time for creative thinking. Deeper soul stirring ideals such as honour, truth, love, justice, and beauty have long inspired human beings to extraordinary accomplishment and can no longer be relegated to the fringes of management. Control is critical but all too often it comes at the expense of initiative, creativity and passion – essential building blocks of organizational success. The aim of management 2.0 is to make every organization as genuinely human as the people who work there. Tragically the technology of management frequently drains organizations of the very qualities that make us human: our vitality, ingenuity, and sense of kinship. Creating organizations that are genuinely human has become an inescapable business imperative. (Full article available on request) Notes by Frank Olsson Feb 2009 From: Frank Olsson [mailto:frank@olsson.co.nz]
To Dean Jay O. Light" <DeanLight@hbs.edu Dear Jay - I read your attached letter of November 08 and found it well composed and thought through. However perhaps the more important question now is what did HBS forget to teach all those who created the mess. I am not suggesting that HBS is responsible for the mess - but I do think that curricula and teaching should be reviewed and adjusted to reflect the enormous cost that decision makers, many educated at the finest schools in America, have caused society by lack of vision or commitment to values, or working towards a common purpose rather than personal financial gain. I think this a very important issue and I would expect your prestigious school would take a lead role in this analysis. Thank you, Frank Olsson 20 Russell Street, Freemans Bay, Auckland, New Zealand ph +64 9 3781277 mobile +64 21 989 414 fax +64 9 3781272 www.olsson.co.nz Harvard Business Review January 2009 The cover of the January HBR issue says: Transforming Leaders. This ignited my interest but after reading the issue I don’t feel much wiser. It is hard to write about leadership. Perhaps a little like trying to teach people to play golf or get more out of sex by way of research articles. The fact is, I believe, that leadership development is so intertwined with doing, experimenting and experiencing that writing about it can make but only a small contribution to understanding and improving the outcomes. Far too many people put in leadership positions have not been allowed the space and time to learn leadership on the ground. Far too many are elevated to management/ leadership positions after being a good individual performer. The essence of leadership is to enthuse others to achieve great things – not to do all or most of the things yourself. My observation is that a majority of promoted high performers stumble already on this basic point. One of the articles talks about women leaders/ managers. It suggests that women are as good or better as men on nearly all measures with the exception of being visionary and forward looking. Women manage and lead from facts and reason the article says. To me it seems that this is contrary to natural inclinations. Women have traditionally been seen as more emotional and more willing to go with their judgment rather than by scientific fact. Because this is an established bias, women perhaps react the other way, and show that they can also be scientific and fact based. Whereas the best visionary men are those who show typical female characteristics, asking how do I feel about this, how do all my stakeholders and the community feel about this. Unless you are in tune with and understand how people feel you will never be a good leader. Another article suggests that outgoing CEO’s should be contracted to be advisers or mentors to incoming CEO’s. I don’t think the article, supported by a lot of research, is very convincing. Generally I would think it better to be mentored by someone other and less involved than your outgoing predecessor. It is great if the outgoing CEO is available and it may be ok that his retention as an adviser is part of the exit package, but actual usefulness depends on personal appreciation and harmony between the two individuals and that cannot be by command or instruction. A few notes from the January issue: It is a challenging time to do business in the global economy – but a perfect time for great leaders to emerge. Leaders must ask, “What’s new?” “What’s next?” “What’s better?” but they can’t present answers that are only theirs. Constituents want visions of the future that reflect their own aspirations. So how do new leaders develop this forward-looking capacity? First they must carve out time from urgent but endless operational matters. But secondly, they must not put too much stock I their own prescience. If people are involved in creating the goals and vision the end vision can be arrived at together. /To Lead, Create a Shared Vision – by J M Kouzes and B Z Posner / Yüklə 0,9 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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