Open Salaries

Buffer has taken transparency to an extreme. The social-media management tool firm has adopted what it calls an “open salaries” system, publishing all of its salaries, as well as the standardized formulas with which those salaries were calculated: Salary = job type x seniority x experience + location. In other words, a salary is determined by a base pay based upon job type; plus, a … [ Read more ]

Author: Adam Cobb | Source: "Unfair — and Unfixable? The Simple Truth About Salaries" | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Human Resources | Company: Buffer

Listen to the New Hire’s “Outsider” Ideas

One important milestone during the first six months is to get your new hire’s perspective on your operation. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but getting information from someone less experienced can be annoying. They have all these ideas and they question everything: why you do what you do and why you do it the way you do it. So we fight it … [ Read more ]

Author: Whitney Johnson | Source: "If you want your new hires to succeed" | Original Publication: LinkedIn | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Improve Your Interviewing Process

NerdWallet gives candidates the following materials to make their experience before and after company onsites better:

• An interview day outline. NerdWallet sends every candidate an outline detailing their day at the office 48-hours before they arrive. It includes: the names and roles of the team members with whom they'll meet, interview times and duration, and any activities they will be participating in throughout the day. The

Author: Flo Thinh | Source: "Turbocharge Your Recruiting Machine — Here’s How" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: NerdWallet

Great Innovators Do Not Permit the Present to Crowd Out the Future

IBM dedicates three teams to drive the company's innovation agenda by focusing separately on innovation strategy, technology trends, and innovation operations. To ensure an emphasis on both current and future priorities, IBM organizes business opportunities across three different time frames: short-term core business opportunities, medium-term growth opportunities, and long-term emerging opportunities. IBM made a conscious decision to maintain a set portion of funding (about 10 … [ Read more ]

Author: Mike Hales | Source: "Great innovation starts with the fundamentals" | Original Publication: A.T. Kearney | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: IBM

Transparency Through Peer Conversations

Intangibles such as culture, chemistry and follow-through play a significant role in M&A success. Business owners and CEOs are rightfully cautious and need transparency and hard evidence before selling equity in a company they built themselves. For that reason, we offer peer conversations with fellow CEOs who have already gone through the process and become leaders in the parent organization. This step is valuable not … [ Read more ]

Author: Bryan Adams | Source: "Best Practices For Successfully Integrating Acquisitions" | Original Publication: Chief Executive | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

The Premortem Technique
The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and … [ Read more ]

Profit Mapping
A profit map, the core analytical tool of profitability management, displays the profitability and cost structure of every product in every customer in the company. Profit maps show exactly where profit is flowing and where it is lost.

A profit map is not especially difficult to develop, but it is completely different from the information developed for financial reporting. Many finance managers make the … [ Read more ]

Review Profitability Before Expanding Capacity
When faced with the need to expand manufacturing capacity and the inherent investment required, first perform a thorough profitability analysis (a profit map) of each product produced from the capacity-constrained factories (this includes profitable products being sold unprofitably to selected customers). Since many companies have a significant amount of unprofitable business, it is quite possible that stopping the unprofitable sales can free up enough capacity … [ Read more ]

Deploy a Redeployment Pool
Intel monitors changing skill requirements and institutes a redeployment program when it becomes necessary to downsize a business. Under this program, managers effectively lay off people, and the head count of the business unit is moved off the payroll. These excised people enter a redeployment pool under the auspices of human resources. Once in the pool, employees generally have four to six months, and can … [ Read more ]

Fiercest Competitor Workshop
One good way to get at these disruptive designs (innovations) is to do what we at my firm call a "Fiercest Competitor Workshop," which starts with the premise that you have been fired from your old organization but you have access to ample capital and talent. Your task is to design the fiercest competitor that could take the market from your old firm. In my … [ Read more ]