Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009


Timing of conference calls



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Timing of conference calls. The best time for a meeting is early in the day with poor results around mid-day and especially 3 – 4 PM mainly because of physical and mental fatigue. In another study it was demonstrated that parole board rulings varied by whether the case was heard just before or after lunch. / In my own case I get restless if I think I could be doing something better than to be in the meeting – this is for me the norm for repeat teleconferences and large meetings – thus also a need to keep meetings short and sharp – rotating chairmanship of the meeting can help – fighting fatigue, monotony and boredom /

Seven Reasons Why Africa’s Time Is Now by Jonathan Berman. 1 It is a huge market opportunity. 2 It’s increasingly stable, 3 It will soon have the world’s largest work force, 4 Mobile is exploding, 5 Intra-African trade is in its infancy, 6 Twenty per cent of government spending goes to education, 7 It contains most of the world’s uncultivated land. (And the article has a map showing the immense size of Africa and how the combined area of the US, Europe, China and India could be fitted into Africa.)

Don’t Spin a Better Story, Be a Better Company by Leslie Dach. Thinking you can tell a better story without becoming a better company doesn’t work. “What if we used our size and resources to make this country and this earth an even better place for all of us? And what if we could do that and build a stronger business at the same time?” Today every merchandise buyer’s annual objectives call for progress in sustainability or in women’s economy empowerment. The principles are working for us (Wal-Mart) and we are showing others that taking on large social issues can be compatible with building a stronger business.

If a drumbeat of criticism starts up against your company, don’t rush to raise your voice above it. Stop and listen. And commit to getting better. /these last lines would seem to be relevant for much of politics as well/



Growing Start Ups Without Outside Investors by Hamdi Ulukaya.

The Strategy That Will Fix Healthcare by Michael Porter and Thomas Lee. Providers must lead the way in making value the overarching goal. The six components of the value agenda: Organize into integrated practice units; measure outcomes and costs for every patient; move to bundled payments for care cycles; integrate care delivery across separate facilities; expand excellent services across geography.

Existing costing systems are fine for overall department budgeting, but they provide only crude and misleading estimates of actual costs of service for individual patients and conditions. Organizations that progress rapidly in adopting the value agenda will reap huge benefits, even if regulatory change is slow.

This is an ambitious article over 20 pages recommended for all in the health care industry.

Putting the Breakthrough back into Innovation by Regina Dugan and Kaigham Gabriel. Traditional approaches to corporate research and development have difficulty consistently delivering breakthrough innovations. Compromises made to reduce risk or to avoid disrupting existing business result in evolutionary – but rarely breakthrough – innovations. The solution may be a ‘special forces’ style research group modelled after the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its key elements include tackling projects that advance science and solve significant problems; assembling the best minds from industry and academia for limited periods of time to create diverse, agile, and scalable teams; and allowing independence from the mainstream organization in project selection and execution.

Decisions should not be taken by committee. Breakthroughs do not lend themselves to consensus.



Corporate Venturing by Josh Lerner. More and more smart companies are going VC to find their next breakthroughs. Traditional R&D doesn’t do a good job of sniffing out competitive threats. More and more corporates tend to focus on a narrow range of projects, thus potentially neglecting disruptive advances that occur outside the company.

Most of the problems are rooted in incompatibilities between two mind sets: that of the risk-solving, sometimes ruthless venture-capitalist and that of the process bound corporate executive.

A tortuous approval process inevitably burdens the fund with too many goals.

Well managed corporate venture funds can hold their own with independent VC firms, and even outperform them.



Rethinking the Decision Factory by Roger Martin. Knowledge workers shouldn’t be managed as if they were manual workers. A new approach can boost efficiency and productivity.

Most companies make two big mistakes in managing knowledge workers. The first is to think that they should structure the workforce as they do a manual workforce – with each employee doing the same tasks day in and day out. The second (which derives in part from the first) is to assume that knowledge is necessarily bundled with the workers and, unlike manual labour, can’t readily be codified and transferred to others.

Job descriptions are written as a collection of ongoing tasks that add up to one full time job. But knowledge work comes primarily in the form of projects, not routine daily tasks. The nature of project work is that it has peaks and throughs but as a carry-over from managing manual workers, managers are often uneasy with down time, thinking it is something to address and eliminate. Thus it is in every knowledge workers interest to look busy all the time.

Professional service firms have grown so quickly in part because they’re organized around projects rather than permanent jobs.

A company with 100 flat jobs is almost certainly obsolete. Some people are clearly needed to solve the next new mystery. The key is to invest significant knowledge worker resources in projects that move knowledge forward. Only then can organizations avoid cycles of binge and purge while improving the productivity of their knowledge workers.

Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption by Clayton Christensen, Diana Wang, and Derek van Bever. The same forces that disrupted industries as steel and publishing are starting to reshape the consulting industry, with profound implications for its future. Established firms have traditionally relied on opacity and agility to maintain their industry leadership, but those two advantages are disappearing in the increasing transparent and sophisticated business environment. Now these firms are starting to rethink their own service models and even to experiment with new models that could prove disruptive to the core business. And organization’s capabilities becomes its disabilities when disruption is afoot. No challenge is more difficult for a market leader facing disruption than to turn and fight back – to disrupt itself before an upstart competitor does. Every industry will eventually face disruption.

If you are currently on the leadership team of a consultancy and you’re inclined to be sanguine about disruption, ask yourself: Is your firm changing (at least) as rapidly as your most demanding clients.



Sir Alex Furguson’s Winning Formula by Anita Elberse. Allow yourself ample time and room just to observe and don’t busy yourself with things others can do for you. Explore any means of improving, continue to work hard and view every success as your first.

Diaspora Marketing by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp. Nearly a quarter billion people live in countries where they were not born. Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese Americans reported median household incomes of $ 90 K, $ 66K and $ 55 K respectively compared to the overall US median of $ 50 K. Chinese emigrants now serve as conduits between their host countries and the mainland, while members of the Indian diaspora help connect global entrepreneurs and knowledge workers to the subcontinent.

Immigrants face the dual challenge of maintaining their distinctiveness and affiliating themselves with the host culture. Compared with ethnic affirmers, bi-culturals are better educated; have higher incomes, socioeconomic status, and self-esteem; and are more involved in local social networks.



Be Yourself, but Carefully. How to be authentic without oversharing by Lisa Rosh and Lynn Offerman. This article points out that it is easy to go over-board in conviviality which has the potential to back fire.

Notes by frank@olsson.co.nz 28th September, 2013


Harvard Business Review September 2013

This issue is themed on gender biases and how to overcome them. I am not sure it adds much new to the debate but it is good to keep the issue at the forefront given how slow the progress is towards the equality a vast majority of people say they want. I find the September issue providing yet again support for doing business in a more humane and community oriented way. One would have to believe that business started by people helping each other to satisfy needs and in the process improving their own well-being. This seems such a natural basis for human action and interaction that one wonders why it had to take 200 years of toil, meandering and academic research to take us back to what looks like the starting point. If what we are doing as a business doesn’t serve the community in some way we may well need to rethink and adjust our approach. Please find below a few notes from the September issue.

In corporate America women hold 15% of C-suite jobs and 17 % of board seats. (According to a recent presentation I attended, NZ women hold 4% of all board seats, meaning most boards have no woman).

CEOs with generalist skills – having a background in many functions- earn 19 % more than their expert counterparts. (Experts should be on tap and not on top)

To reduce emails – start at the top. Reducing top executives’ message outflows causes subordinates to cut back even more. Teach executives to be more deliberate in their email use. Ask them to set a target for reducing the number of messages they send, and include it in their performance goals. Give them weekly feed-back.

Triple-Strength Leadership by Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas. We need executives who can move easily among business, government, and social spheres. Tri-sector issues need to be incorporated in in formal academic and executive training; mid-career leaders need to build inter-sector networks. Successful tri-sector leaders typically have a strong sense of mission – the primary focus of non-profits. There needs to be a strong desire to create ‘public value.’ It is inspiring to meet this kind of leaders but the model is not the prevailing one in the USA or Europe. / To me this is one of these articles stating the obvious– but it is still useful as business often lives in a world of its own shielded from real life and common sense /

Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers by Hermina Ibarra, Robin Ely and Deborah Kolb. Identifying biases can help women and men alike to understand what’s going on. Often what is deemed assertiveness in men is seen as aggressive in women.

Great Leaders Who make the Mix Work by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Conolly. People with different lifestyles and different backgrounds challenge each other more. Diversity creates dissent, and you need that. Without it, you’re not going to get any deep inquiry or breakthroughs.

When internal diversity and inclusion scores are strong, and employees feel valued, they will serve customers better making the organization better off.

Many CEOs perceived that women are less political, less likely to define themselves by their careers, more collaborative, better listeners, more relationship oriented, and more empathetic and reasonable.

Practices that make a difference: Measure diversity and inclusion. Hold management accountable. Support flexible work arrangement. Recruit and promote from diverse pools of candidates. Provide leadership education. Sponsor employee resource groups and mentoring programs. Offer quality models. Make the chief diversity officer count.

IKEA has a grandfathering/ grand mothering principle for recruitment – a hiring boss has to have another manager say yes to a candidate before that person can be hired.

Half of CEOs interviewed said their most important role was to set the tone for the organizations culture by demonstrating a commitment to inclusion.



How Women Decide by Cathy Benko and Bill Pelster. Women tend to treat proposal presentations as opportunities for exploring opportunities, while men work to narrow down options and close in on a decision.

Women In the Workplace, A Research Roundup. When women leave it is more often due to work place problems than to care for the family. There is a motherhood penalty – mothers are offered $ 11,000 p.a. less than single women.

Innovating for Shared Value by Marc Pfitzer, Valerie Bockstette and Mike Stamp. Companies that deliver both social benefit and business value rely on five mutually reinforcing elements: embedding a social purpose, rigorously defining a social need, measuring the social and business value, creating the optimal innovation structure and co-creating with external stakeholders.

Many global social issues represent technological challenges as well as market opportunities. Social purpose helps a firm identify the needs it might want to address, but the reverse is also true: As a company understands social problems more thoroughly, employees’ commitment to its social purpose will increase. A deeply held social purpose is also important for co-creation, forming the basis for trusted relationships.

Notes by frank@olsson.co.nz 24 August 2013

In the last article commented on there is a reference to this article from Jan/ Feb 2011;


How to reinvent capitalism – and unleash a wave of innovation and growth by Michael E Porter and Mark R Kramer

Capitalism is under siege. Diminished trust in business is causing political leaders to set policies that sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle. The purpose of the corporation must be redefined around Creating Shared Value.

Companies must take the lead in bringing business and society back together. The recognition is there among sophisticated business and thought leaders, and promising elements of a new model are emerging. Yet we still lack and overall framework for guiding these efforts, and most companies remain stuck in a ‘social responsibility’ mind set in which societal issues are at the periphery and not at the core. The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.

Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress. Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. This will drive the next wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy. Learning how to create shared value is our best chance to legitimate business again. Government and business have each assumed that the other side is an obstacle to pursuing its goals and acted accordingly.

For decades business people have studied positioning and the best ways to design activities and integrate them. However, companies have overlooked opportunities to meet fundamental societal needs and misunderstood how societal harms and weaknesses affect value chains. Our field vision has simply been to narrow.

Companies can create economic value by creating societal value. There are three distinct ways to do this: by reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain and building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations. Each of these is part of a virtuous circle of shared value; improving value in one area gives rise to opportunities in the others. The concept of shared value resets the boundaries of capitalism. By better connecting companies’ success with social improvement, it opens up many ways to serve new needs, gain efficiency, create differentiation, and expand markets.

The new concept blurs the line between for-profit and non-profit organizations.

The congruence between societal progress and productivity in the value chain is far greater than traditionally believed. Heightened environmental awareness and advances in technology are catalyzing new approaches in areas such as utilization of water, raw materials, and packaging, as well as expanding recycling and reuse. The opportunities apply to all resources, not just those that have been identified by environmentalists. Better resource utilization will permeate all parts of the value chain and will spread to suppliers and channels.

The focus on holding down wage levels, reducing benefits, and off-shoring is beginning to give way to awareness of the positive effects that a living wage, safety, wellness, training, and opportunities for advancement for employees have on productivity. Leading companies have learned that poor employee health costs more than health benefits.

Profits involving a social purpose represent a higher form of capitalism – one that will enable society to advance more rapidly while allowing companies to grow even more. The result is a positive cycle of company and community prosperity, which leads to profits that endure.

Most business schools still teach the narrow view of capitalism, even though more and more of their graduates hunger for a greater sense of purpose and a growing number are drawn to societal entrepreneurship. The results have been missed opportunity and public cynicism. There is nothing soft about the concept of shared value. These proposed changes in business school curricula are not qualitative and do not depart from economic value creation. Instead they represent the next stage in our understanding of markets, competition, and business management.

My comment: The Article should be read in its entirety. One thing the article doesn’t talk much about is the increased energy and commitment levels achievable by giving people a strong sense of value and purpose, beyond financial return. This in itself has a great potential for increased organizational prosperity.
Harvard Business Review July-August 2013

This double summer issue is themed ‘influence, how to get it, how to use it.’ Perhaps the main article is about leadership, suggesting demonstration of warmth must precede competence. In many ways this is common sense and what I have thought for decades but it is reaffirming to see the HBR telling its readers: first be human and caring, then start to pursue growth, change and business objectives. The epoch of making business a science run by experts has reached its use-by date, and what we need going forward is thinking that serves the community and human needs. If you want to serve customers well and satisfy them emotionally, you also must serve your staff well and cater to how they feel. How has such a simple truth become so muddled? The article ‘Connect – then lead’ deserves to be read in its entirety. Below, please find a few notes from the summer issue.



One More Argument Against Cubicles. People who worked outside a 5 ft. x 5 ft. cube got more correct answers on a test involving verbal creativity than did subjects inside the cube. The superior performance of the subjects who worked outside it shows that ‘enacting metaphors for creativity…enhances creativity.’

To Change The World, Invest in One Woman by Carly Fiorina. The correlation between gender equality and national competitiveness is strong. Even in the most developed economies, gross domestic product could be increased by as much as 16% if the gender gap was closed. The imperative to take action is clear. Many companies have a strong business case for supporting women. When Coca-Cola invests in training thousands of women entrepreneurs in Africa, it directly benefits from a stronger base of distributors and marketers. The single greatest point of untapped leverage in the world today is a woman who could be an entrepreneur.

Building Sustainable Cities by John D Macomber. Over the next 40 years the number of people living in cities will double to 6 billion. Yet even today many cities lack sufficient clean water, electricity, reliable public transit, and other basic resources needed to support their exploding populations and strengthen their economies. Governments don’t have the political will, money, or managerial skill to solve this problem on their own. A vast opportunity exists for the private sector to provide products and services such as water desalination and incentive programs to smooth spikes in electricity demand and combine sophisticated technology with financial engineering. The necessary demand, capital and technologies exist. What is now required is farsighted investors and businesses to organize the players.

Connect, Then Lead. To exert influence, you must balance competence with warmth by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinger. When we judge others, particularly our leaders, we look first to two characteristics: how loveable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence). These traits answer two questions: “What are this person’s intentions towards me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the work place, but that is exactly the wrong approach. Projecting fear before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviours. The chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.

Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Evidence of trustworthiness is the first thing we look for in others. When asked to choose between training programs focusing on competence-related skills (such as time management) and warmth related ones (providing social support, for instance) most people opted for competence-related ones for themselves but soft skills training for others. In management settings, trust increases information sharing, openness, fluidity, and cooperation.

Feeling a sense of personal strength helps us to be more open, less threatened, and less threatening in stressful situations. When we feel competent and calm, we project authenticity and warmth. Such leaders face troubles without being troubled.

People have a need to be included, to feel a sense of belonging. In fact, some psychologists argue that the drive to affiliate ranks among our primary needs as humans.

Before people decide what they think about your message, they decide what they think of you.

Smile and mean it – when we smile sincerely, the warmth becomes self-reinforcing. Feeling happy makes us smile and smiling makes us happy.

Once you establish your warmth, your strength is received as a welcome reassurance. Your leadership becomes not a threat but a gift.

The Network Secrets of Great Change Agents by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro. Change agents are more successful when they are central in the informal network, regardless of their position in the formal hierarchy; when the nature of their network matched the type of change they were pursuing; and when they had close relationship with fence-sitters, or people ambivalent about the change. / from my experience as a captain in the army one needs to identify mood setters – or (non-hierarchical) opinion leaders - and bring them on board to accelerate change and action /

The Uses (and Abuses) of Influence, interview with Robert Cialdini. The six principles of persuasion; Liking – If people like you, because they sense that you like them, or because of things you have in common, they’re more apt to say yes to you; Reciprocity – People tend to return favours; Social proof – people will do things they see other people are doing; Commitment and consistency – people want to be consistent – or at least appear to be; Authority – People defer to experts and those in authority often more so than they are aware of; Scarcity – things perceived to be more scarce are more highly valued.

If an organization chooses to be unethical with clients or suppliers, it will ultimately be cheated by people who are happy to work in a dishonest culture. Eventually the organization will pay for it on the bottom line.



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