299 Posts Found

When Halliburton Energy Services Group, a leading oil field services company, revamped its strategic planning process, senior managers decided that these two processes were in fact one and they designed their strategic planning accordingly. Halliburton now has one owner of strategy and capital allocation, with clear accountability for ensuring alignment between the two. This senior manager owns the corporate-wide strategic managing process and chairs a … [ Read more ]

Author: Phyllis Rothschild | Source: Strategic Planning Redux | Original Publication: Mercer Management Journal | Subjects: Finance, Strategy

Superquinn awards shoppers “goof points” for pointing out problems such as an out-of-stock item, a dirty floor or a checkout line longer than three people. The goof points, which provide discounts off future purchases, have proved a good way to get customers talking about their experience.

SAS Institute, the North Carolina–based software company, creates a “SASware Ballot” every year, giving customers a chance to vote … [ Read more ]

Author: James Allen | Source: Closing the delivery gap | Original Publication: Bain | Subject: Customer-Related

Send out a Friday email with “good news” from the week, highlighting the achievements of each of your team members. If he/she is willing, go even further and have the CEO speak to the team every Friday on hot topics, concerns, achievements.

Author: Suzanne Bates | Source: New, Innovative, Low-Cost Ways to Motivate Employees Your Company Has Survived; Now, How Can You Energize People? | Original Publication: Bates Communications | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

At McKinsey mentoring is regarded as a vital part of the development culture but is still not as common as it should be. To encourage it, several McKinsey offices now ask all associates at regular intervals which partners they view as mentors. Although a small number of partners were named by as many as a dozen associates, most partners were surprised to find that fewer … [ Read more ]

Author: Helen Handfield-Jones | Source: How Executives Grow | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the most effective ways to improve your team dynamics is to dialogue as often as possible. Books, DVDs and even magazine articles are a great way to get your teams talking. And you might learn a thing or two about yourself in the process! Once a month, pick a relevant business book and purchase them for your team. Give them a deadline to … [ Read more ]

Author: Jim Jenkins | Source: Cost-Effective Team Building Exercises | Original Publication: The CEO Refresher | Subject: Management

Retirement represents the loss of a worker with the skills needed to perform a specific job. It may also represent the loss of crucial knowledge whose value to the organization extends far beyond the worker’s individual position.

Freightliner, a large truck manufacturer based in Portland, Oregon, has anticipated this dual risk. It set about assessing the extent and severity of the risk, focusing on employees who … [ Read more ]

Author: Rainer Strack | Source: Managing Demographic Risk | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior

If you have a disparate relationship between sales and marketing and want to get it together in rapid order than try the following gambit that has worked for Mark Walker, Head Coach of Marketing Whisperers, Ltd.

Give the sales team carte blanche to build an outline for a Marketing ROI model – without any marketing input. They will love it! Then tell the marketing team … [ Read more ]

Source: Culture Clash | Original Publication: CMO Magazine | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior

Your first challenge is to attract the “ideators,” the people who traditionally come up with the biggest ideas, regardless of the topic.

Great ideators tend to be a bit competitive. Tap into that. Post challenges—through your intranet, bulletin board, or e-mail system—on behalf of clients, and offer prizes for anyone who can come up with the answer within a set period of time. Competitive, inventive people … [ Read more ]

Author: G. Michael Maddock | Source: Finding Your Company’s Great Thinkers | Original Publication: BusinessWeek | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

We’ve all seen those generic testimonials that are totally contrived: “Oh wow, this is the best product I ever bought and it changed my life forever!” You need real testimonials, and the best source is people that have bought your products. Send them an email that says, “Hey, hope things are going well. So happy to see how everyone is doing.” Then tell them to … [ Read more ]

Author: Michael Alexis | Source: Ramit Sethi Exposed: How He Earns Millions Blogging | Original Publication: ProBlogger | Subject: Marketing / Sales

• Providing clear minimum targets and acceptable levels of performance.
• Defining top performer profiles including extraordinary results and behaviors.
• Removing obstacles and constraints to performance (such as poor systems or processes).
• Improving the visibility of individual performance and results (such as employee dashboards).
• Creating transparency of performance relative to peers (such as league tables).
• Using top performers to coach and spread leading practices.
• Aligning talent management levers to motivate and develop performance.

[ Read more ]

Author: Catherine Farley | Source: Transforming Workforce Performance in the New Business Reality | Original Publication: Accenture | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

If the service you’re delivering is disappointing—if it’s average or spotty in a model you assumed would produce reliable excellence—a common explanation is a mismatch between your employees and the jobs you’ve tasked them to do. Sound at all familiar? If so, we advise companies to first try to get a sense of the size of the employee-job gap.

First: Go undercover. Get out of the … [ Read more ]

Author: Anne Morriss | Source: Only Human | Original Publication: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Customer-Related, Management, Organizational Behavior

New employees at Rite-Solutions get issued $10,000 worth of “opinion money” and are invited to become part of the company’s internal stock market for ideas. The stock market, named Mutual Fun, “is a mechanism to take the employee relationship beyond the transaction level—I pay you, you do a job—to an emotional level where people are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for … [ Read more ]

Author: Jim Lavoie | Source: Are you ‘Humbitious’ enough to lead? | Original Publication: Leader To Leader Journal | Subjects: Innovation, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

In almost every large-change effort the change agent finds at least four identifiable groups of people – those who immediately support the change, those who are skeptical, those who are opposed to it on a rational basis, and those who are implacably opposed and cannot be convinced to change their minds, at least through rational argument. Here’s an idea: put a poll on the company … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeff Blum | Subject: Change Management

Too often we find firms with more strategic clutter than clarity. Leaders in these firms have become enamored of the latest strategy twist and continually articulate a new way to position the firm. Nonetheless, it is possible to develop or enhance the required clarity. In one company, a newly appointed leader asked each of his direct reports to answer the question “What are we doing … [ Read more ]

Author: Dave Ulrich | Source: Aligning Firm, Leadership, and Personal Brand | Original Publication: Leader To Leader Journal | Subjects: Management, Strategy

One suggestion is to start with an exercise that is well labeled “Smart Bombing.” Analyze your company. What would you do if you were your closest competitor looking to attack your own company? Put yourself in your competitors’ position and think about how they might try to counter or off-set your advantages in the market place. Where are you possibly vulnerable?

Have your sales and … [ Read more ]

Author: Dana Baldwin | Source: Strategies and Processes for a Changing Economy | Original Publication: Center for Simplified Strategic Planning | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Management, Strategy

The Problem
Subordinates don’t want to offend the boss. Therefore, as you become more senior in an organization, you tend to get less feedback. Over time, you risk growing confused about your development needs and becoming isolated from criticism. While many senior executives do have outside mentors, because they do not directly observe the executive their advice is only as good as the narrative … [ Read more ]

Author: Robert S. Kaplan | Source: Top Executives Need Feedback—Here’s How They Can Get It | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Career/Employment, Personal Improvement

Separate jobs into three or four buckets based on their impact (low, moderate or high) on a handful of high-level corporate objectives such as revenue growth. Combine this with rating employees — A player, B player or C player, for example — based on their job performance. This dual-rating system can provide valuable insights into human capital deployment and compensation. For example, it can help … [ Read more ]

Author: Eric Krell | Source: Human Capital Management: How CFOs Manage Investments In Their Company’s Biggest Asset | Original Publication: Business Finance | Subject: Human Resources

Headsets.com president and CEO Mike Faith offers employees several opportunities to earn bonuses. The most unique one is a $50 award for complaining. “On their time sheets every week, people have an opportunity to make comments, from praise for another employee to complaints. I pick a bunch each week to pay $50 to. I’m most often eager to pay for complaints. Whether I think it’s … [ Read more ]

Author: Lesley Hensell | Source: The Root of All Great Service | Original Publication: CRM Buyer

Several studies have shown that when groups fail to arrive at decisions, it’s often because they devote too much time to finding common ground rather than weighing the pros and cons of what each person is saying. Meetings are especially ineffective when attendees begin by disclosing which way they are leaning; upon voicing an opinion about a decision, people are more likely to ignore information … [ Read more ]

Author: Matt Palmquist | Source: Listen First, Comment Later | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Change depends on the effectiveness of those providing the consequences – the sponsors of the change. But sponsorship is a cascading process and a “black hole” anywhere along the line will stop the change process below it. That’s why it’s essential to build a Sponsorship Spine from the bottom up. You can’t really appoint sponsors. You start by targeting the people who will need to … [ Read more ]

Author: Patrick Litre | Source: Realize results: Busting Three Common Myths of Change Management | Original Publication: Bain | Subject: Change Management