Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009



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Living in the Future by Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers. This article is about Royal Dutch – Shell’s scenario planning for the future. The process helps those involved to keep in mind that the future cannot be forecast with certainty and exploring a few ‘what if’s is useful.

Health Care’s Service Fanatics – How the Cleveland Clinic leaped to the top of patient satisfaction surveys by James I Merlino and Ananth Raman. Doing the best by patients means continually analysing what can be done better and then figuring out how.

Understanding the Arab Consumer by Vijay Mahajan. The Arab world has 350 million people and if adding up the GDP it would be the worlds 8th largest economy. Companies that gloss over the interplay between culture and religion ignore a critical factor for success in the region. These are five pillars of Islam to consider: Shahada – there is only one God. Foreign companies should distance themselves from anything that could be construed as offensive to Islam. Zakat – Islam requires that Muslims donate 2.5 % of their wealth every year. The estimate of the aggregates of this is somewhere between US $ 3 and 25 billion. Sawm – fasting during the month of Ramadan. Hajj – the hajj to Mecka - a duty that able bodied Muslims must carry out if they can afford it. Yalla! Lets Go. You hear it everywhere in the Arab world and despite the region’s political and social challenges, it encapsulates the vibrancy of the marketplace.

Notes by frank@olsson.co.nz 5 May 2013


Harvard Business Review April 2013

Three Rules for Success is the headline for this issue. These rules are very simple; Better Before Cheaper; Revenue before Cost; There Are No Other Rules. Reading this particular article there is not much more to it which is good. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said: ‘perfection is not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing more to take away’. And most of us are familiar with the Gettysburg Address where the president’s speech after one of the world’s worst battles was less than a page long. Or quoted from Deng Xiaoping: “Continue reform and opening, keep a lean government, train young people, talk less, and do more.“ A few notes from the April issue:



http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/antoine_de_saintexupery.html

Experts Who Beat the Odds Are Probably Just Lucky by Jerker Denrell. The analysts who successfully predicted the highest number of unusual events (on interest rates and inflation) had the lowest overall accuracy rates. In many contexts luck breeds more luck. A firm that got lucky and had a great year starts the next year with an advantage.

Women and the Economics of Equality by Booz & company. This article is built on research from Booz $ Co – see link at and of this summary – and it says that if women in US Japan and Egypt were employed at the same rate as men, the GDPs of those countries would be higher by 5 %, 9 % and 94 % respectively. The article says the country most supportive of women is Sweden and the most equal in pay are in Norway and Australia with Finland, New Zealand and The Netherlands also among the top countries. The report estimates than nearly one billion women could enter the global work force in the coming decade. The world is changing. Half of the world’s self-made female billionaires are in China.

http://www.booz.com/global/home/what-we-think/third_billion

The Two Most Important Words – Thank You! By Robert A Eckert. There are two things people want more than sex and money – recognition and praise. Why not say thank you more often and mean it. The author suggests these tips: Set aside time every week for acknowledgements; handwrite thank you notes whenever you can; punish in private – praise in public; remember to cc people’s supervisors; foster a culture of gratitude. It is a game changer for sustainably better performance.

Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner by Kevin J Boudreau and Karin R Lakhani. The authors have studied dozens of interactions between companies and crowds in a wide variety of industries, and have identified 4 ways in which to tap into crowd-powered problem solving; contests, collaborative communities, complementors and labour markets. Crowds are energized by intrinsic motivations, such as the desire to learn or burnish one’s reputation in a community of peers. The crowd has become a fixed institution available on demand. Recent experience and mounting research suggests that we may just now be seeing outlines of a genuine expansion of capabilities – one with important implications for solving the most enigmatic problems, which might go unsolved if kept inside companies, and for taking care of a number of more categorizable tasks. The management challenges, while real, are hardly crippling. But they demand that we put as much energy and intelligence into designing systems for organizing work outside company walls as we do for work within them. / A good example of using the outside I guess is the Cloud and a good example of drawing on crowds are democratic Elections. /

Now Is Our Time by Face Book COO Sheryl Sandberg. If we could get to a place of true equality, where what we do in life is determined not by gender but by our passions and interests, our companies would be more productive and our home lives not just better balanced but happier. For the past decade women in USA have held only 14% of C-suite jobs and 17 % of board director ships. More women need to sit at the tables where decisions are made. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Women are given messages all through their lives that they shouldn’t lead. The struggles I write about are the ones all women face: the struggle to believe in yourself, to not feel guilty, to get enough sleep, to believe that you can be both a good professional and a good parent. I wear jeans to work almost every day. It’s a great place for women, because it really is all about what you build and what you do.

In the Company of Givers and Takers by Adam Grant. Your organizations success depends on the generosity of your employees. The link between employee giving and business outcome is surprisingly robust. The successful givers produced 50% more annual revenue, on average, than colleagues who focused less on helping others. Bill Gates at the 2008 Davos meeting: “There are two great forces of human nature – self-interest, and caring for others.” In many organizations, those forces come together with damaging effect. With thoughtful management, however, they can be yoked in such a way that caring for others becomes the best strategy for the most ambitious. Givers can become comfortable asking for favors as well as granting them. Time can be spared for others’ projects but also protected for one’s own. Generosity can be guided in the direction of greatest impact. And organizations can gain ever-increasing benefits from the constant give and take.

What CEOs Really Think of Their Boards by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Melanie Kusin, and Elise Walton. CEO wish lists for boards include: Focus more on crucial risks; do your homework; bring broad relevant knowledge to the table; Challenge strategy constructively; make succession less disruptive. Board members should police one another in terms of disruptive personalities. You want it to be a minority group that is doing it for the income. Bring character and credentials to the table – not celebrity. There needs to be more younger digitally savvy directors.

Three Rules for making a Company Truly Great by Michael E Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed. Rule 1. Better Before Cheaper; 2. Revenue before Cost; 3. There Are No Other Rules. When you feel pressure to follow that path, use our research to make the case that by and large, companies don’t become truly great by reducing costs or assets; they earn their way to greatness. Exceptional companies often, even typically, accept higher costs at the price of excellence. In fact, many of them have developed quite a taste for spending and investment. These organizations put significant resources, over long periods of time, into creating non-price value and generating higher revenue. When companies are led astray by the seeming certainties of short-run cost cutting or disinvestment, they are more likely to destroy what they most want to enhance.

Notes by frank@olsson.co.nz 4 May, 2013

Harvard Business Review March 2013

The theme for this issue is Advertising That Works. This is a little outside my expertise. My limited experience suggests that advertising doesn’t work. That it is too scattergun and that it is very difficult to establish cause and effect and that much advertising is building brand support which no doubt is valuable but hard to measure. For someone more expert, the issue may be more useful. Please find below some notes from this issue.



The editor quotes William Bernbach as saying: “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science but an art.” It also says that getting advertising right can lift marketing performance as much as 30%.

Smart Fundraisers skip the tote bags. Many charities offer donors small gifts as a sign of appreciation. But new research suggests this is misguided. In experiments by George E Newman and Y Jeremy Shen of Yale University, subjects asked to donate to public broadcasting were willing to give 38% less on average, if they were offered a pen in return. The researchers observed the same pattern regardless of the value and desirability of the gift and the familiarity of the charity. Why? A thank-you gift creates ambiguity in the donor’s mind about whether the donation is supporting the charity or simply a quid pro quo for a product. When gifts were presented as having an altruistic purpose (for example as raising awareness for the cause) donations rose significantly.

Long CEO Tenure Can Hurt Performance by Xueming Luo, Vamsi K Kanuri and Michelle Andrews. We studied 356 US companies from 2000-2010 measuring CEO tenure and calculated the strength of the firm-employee relationship each year (by assessing such things as retirement benefits and layoffs) and the strength of the firm customer relationship (by assessing such things as product quality and safety). We then measured the magnitude of the volatility of sticky returns. All this allowed us to arrive at an optimal tenure of 4.8 years.

More Oestrogen, more accuracy by Lawrence J Abbott. Companies with at least one female director are 38 % less likely to have to restate their financial performance figures in order to correct errors compared to companies with all male boards. Gender diversity may make boards more open to viewpoints that oppose the CEO’s and may encourage a more deliberative and collaborative decision making process.

The Multitask Paradox: Stick to one thing at a time and you will get more done. The optimal worker is efficient 85 % of the time with breaks amounting to 15 % of the time. But the distracted procrastinator is unproductive up to 67% of the time by allocating too much focus on digressions like music, video games, social networks etc.

Big Bang Disruptions by Larry Downes and Paul F Nunes. Big Bang Disruptions hold immense potential for those who can quickly learn the new rules of unencumbered development, unconstrained growth, and undisciplined strategy. The innovators that are threatening are not even trying to disrupt you – you’re just the collateral damage. Your current business may be replaced by something more dynamic and unstable but also more profitable. And the change will come not over time but suddenly. In other words, not with a whimper – but with a bang! In the fight against this kind of disruption, intangibles are your most valuable assets – and perhaps the only ones you’ll want to take with you.

Advertising Analytics 2.0. by Wes Nichols. The days of correlating sales data with a few dozen discrete advertising variables are over. Many of the world’s biggest companies are now deploying analytics 2.0, a set of capabilities that can chew through terra bytes of data and hundreds of variables in real time to reveal how advertising touch points interact chemically. The results: 10% - 30 % improvements in marketing performance. Companies that don’t adopt next generation analytics will be overtaken by those that do.

For Mobile Devices, Think Apps and not Ads by Sunil Gupta. Smart marketeers will create apps that enhance consumer’s live rather than annoying ads.

Advertising’s New Medium: Human Experience by Jeffrey F Rayport. In a media saturated world, persuading through interruption and repetition is increasingly ineffective. To engage customers, advertisers must focus on where and when they will be receptive. The four domains of ads are public sphere, the social sphere, the tribal sphere and the psychological sphere. Advertising successfully in each of these domains requires that messages offer value and that consumers trust and welcome them.

Making Sustainability Profitable by Knut Haaneas, David Michael, Jermey Jurgens and Subramanian Rangan. Ready or not, we are moving to a world of scarce resources, in which companies will increasingly need to consider their total return not just on assets and equity but on resources. They will have to monitor how much water, soil, and other natural resources they consume, as well as the payback they get from them. Companies that fail to calculate this equation will find themselves at the mercy of price increase and volatility, regulation, and social pressures, while those that master it will enjoy competitive advantage and gain market share.

Know What Really Motivates You by Heidi G Halvorson and E Tory Higgins. Two different personality types are the promotion focused ones and the prevention focused ones. You may think your business should concentrate on creating new opportunities for advancement, while your colleague thinks the emphasis should be on protecting your relationships with existing clients – and both are right. These categories need to co-exist to make a good organization.

The Silent Sex by Alison Beard. Nearly 2/3 of people feel the world would be a better place if men thought more like women. According to a recent McKinsey study, men hold 85 % of corporate board and executive seats in the US and (setting a few Scandinavian countries aside) there is a similar imbalance in the world. Men account for 90 % of the world’s billionaires, still control most of the world’s governments, and continue to out-earn women with similar skills and education. In the book The Athena Doctrine two male writers John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio argue that ‘feminine’ traits like connectedness, humility, candor, patience and empathy are the new keys to success. The author of this article asks for more balance, in the endeavours to seek gender equality expressing concerns that men may be short changed.

Notes by frank@olsson.co.nz 2nd March 2013

Harvard Business Review January - February 2013

Again an issue with several interesting articles and the theme this time is ‘the future of knowledge work.’ Please find a few notes below.

Leadership is not something which is gained because of birth or tenure but rather something that is practiced in every moment of opportunity. It is truly 20% technique (tools, methods) and 80% actions (behaviours). The most productive companies world-wide are those where the leaders have ongoing conversations across the organization.

The Grass isn’t Greener On the Other Side by Evan Hirsh and Kasturi Rangan. The capabilities that matter to an organization form over decades and may involve millions or billions of dollars in human and financial capital. Firms that have moved into and dominated new areas, such as Apple in online music and Amazon in computer services, chose industries that took advantage of unique capabilities that they already had. And hot companies often cool. Generally it is very risky to enter a new industry at its peak. Be a good or great company in just about any industry, and you won’t be looking for new businesses to enter – you’ll be popping champagne. As long as you serve customers well and beat the competition you will do well.

Rethinking the Marketing by R Ettenson, E Conrado, and J Knowles. Marketing mix usually include the 4 Ps – product, place, price and promotion. These under emphasize the need to build a robust case for the superior value of their solutions. The emphasis needs to shift from product to solutions, place to access, price to value, and promotion to education – SAVE for short. The SAVE framework is the centrepiece of a new solution-selling strategy.

The Kind of Capitalist You Want To Be by John Mackey. All businesses operate in a broader system thick with interdependencies. Being a conscious capitalist means that you don’t ignore those interdependencies by taking a narrow view on the impact you make. You remain aware of the whole system. Firms of Endearment research shows how conscious businesses outperform the market over time.

What would you be signing up for if you joined Conscious Capitalism? Mainly you’d be resolving to create more value for the suppliers you buy from, the workers you hire, the customers you trade with and the world in which you operate. You’d take a stand against the too-common perception of business as exploitative and of business people as selfish. You’d help people see that building a business can be good – often heroic.

The capitalist haters see reform as putting lipstick on a pig and the capitalism stalwarts will see any call for evolution as heresy. /In Sweden and Europe we don’t view it as that black and white, realising that a good solution to anything usually entails taking the best from many different points of view as pure capitalism and pure socialism are equally flawed/

Advice from Robert B Zoellick former president of The World bank on how to succeed in a public enterprise. Study the roots of your department’s mission and culture. Reach out to Congress. Put good people in place. Work with the media and external constituencies. Form formal and informal networks with colleagues in other departments and with White House staffers. Accept the ‘process’ will dominate more of your existence. Keep your eye on achieving results.

Redesigning Knowledge Work, How to free up high-end experts to do what they do best by Martin Dewhurst, Bryan Hancock, and Diana Ellsworth. An example is that in one hospital in Bangalore, the senior cardiac surgeon comes only after the patient’s chest is open and the heart is ready to be operated on. This approach helps the hospital provide care at a fraction of the cost of US providers while maintaining US level mortality and infection rates.

Tasks that require scarce skills but do not depend on in-person interaction can be shifted to people in less costly locations. Aggressive companies are shaking off conventions about where, how and by whom knowledge work is done.



The Third Wave of Virtual Work by Tammy Johns and Lynda Gatton. Experts predict that within a few years more than 1.3 billion people will work virtually – i.e. away from any office. At IBM more than 45 % of its 400,000 contractors and employees work remotely.

Success in the new wave of work will also require that employers encourage and support individual work preferences and customize approaches to engaging and motivating different work personalities. This will entail a delicate balance between best practices and flexible accommodations. Most work environments have committed heavily to standardized HR practices in the interest of fairness and efficiency, yet this one-size-fits-all assumption ignores the fact that wants and needs vary even over the span of an individual’s career. As the impact and importance of features such as flexible working hours, relocation, and travel wax and wane, the ability to adapt to life’s changes is vital to workers and a significant value proposition for an employer to offer.



Making Star Teams out of Star Players by Michael Mankins, Alan Bird, and James Root. Across all the job types, we estimate that the best performers are roughly four times as productive as the average performer. That holds in every industry, geographical region, and type of organization. The conventional wisdom is that star teams don’t work but this assumption needs to be revisited. For important issue and with good leadership, star teams can be exceptionally effective and productive. Star performers are in short supply and smart organizations utilize these people to the maximum.

The Best Performing CEOs in the World By Morten T Hansen, Herminie Ibarra, and Urs Peyer. HBR lists the best 100 CEOs based on a number of data, particularly long-term performance of wealth generation and success. The late Steve Jobs of Apple is ranked no 1 and Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon.com as no 2. Bezos focus on consumers above shareholders has at times vexed Wall Street. But smart investors have stayed with his company. In 16 years as CEO of Amazon, the online retail giant he created, Bezos has delivered shareholder returns of 12,266% and the value of the company has grown by $111 billion. He has all along clearly communicated to investors that this is not a short term business. The highest ranking woman is Margaret Whitman of eBay with a number 9 ranking, who over ten years have generated 1,434% return and $ 40 billion increase of value. The average MBA ranked 40 places higher than the average non-MBA.

There is no direct link between doing good (socially and environmentally) and doing well but there are several examples of role models who achieved both. This breed of new leaders not only rejects the idea that financial markets demands are more important than stakeholders’ needs but also demonstrates that companies can excel at meeting both. These CEOs have shown the way, and others can learn from them. We don’t foresee a time in the near future when measures of social performance will be as objective as the measure of long-term financial performance. That said, we will continue to track how CEOs are doing in the two areas, with the aim of encouraging leaders to shine in both.



Negotiating with Emotion by Kimberlyn Leary, Julianna Pillemer and Michael Wheeler. Emotions are facts of life whether your own or others’ and smart people try to understand them and their role in building people and results. Being an effective manager, a high-performance team member, or a skilled negotiator requires attunement to one’s own emotions and the ability to relate affirmatively to the emotions of others. Emotionally intelligent people have the ability to: Identify the emotions they and others are experiencing; understand how those emotions are affecting their thinking; use that knowledge to achieve better outcomes; productively manage emotions to effect.

Why IT Fumbles Analytics – another article saying that IT should focus more on Information and less on Technology or ‘don’t leave it to the techos’.

The Price of Incivility by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson. This article states the rather obvious that things go better when people respect each other and are nice to each other than when they are abusive. These positive aspects need to be radiated 360% as most people find rudeness offensive no matter who is the target of it. Rude people – don’t hire them, don’t promote them. Just one habitually offensive employee critically positioned in your organization can cost you dearly in lost employees, lost customers, and lost productivity.

When the Crowd Fights Corruption by Paul Healy and Kathik Ramanna. This is an article about endemic corruption in Russia. My comment is that these wrongs have been going on for several centuries so they will not be easy to stamp out. Looking at the U.S. the political decision process is almost at a stand-still because of vested interests expressing themselves through lobbying which arguably is another form of corruption and impediment to a functioning democracy. Corruption is also rampant in many other parts of the world like China, India, Indonesia, Africa, etc. No doubt it comes at a great cost to these societies.

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