156 Posts Found

I would have a policy like Hewlett-Packard had when I worked there, before starting Apple. They encouraged you to work on little inventions of your own, and you would get some financial support from the company to build them. The company benefits in two ways. You’re becoming better at designing things for the company because you’ll force yourself to learn ways to solve your own … [ Read more ]

Author: Steve Wozniak | Source: “Creating Great Products with Apple’s Steve Wozniak, Inventor of the Personal Computer” | Original Publication: Babson Insight | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Borealis (the Danish based international plastics business) split their management requirements into four distinct agendas. They had a need to forecast, set direction, manage costs and control capital expenditure. They then set up four distinct systems to deliver each of these requirements. Forecasting was done centrally using a financial model that collected basic data from key points within and outside the company. As a result … [ Read more ]

Author: Mike Bourne | Source: “Six Steps to Improving your Planning and Budgeting System” | Original Publication: Think: Cranfield | Subject: Management

At one well-known energy company, the five executives of a top team were asked to list the company’s 10 highest priorities. Alarmingly, they listed a total of 23 priorities; only 2 appeared on every executive’s list and only 7 on the lists of more than three members; indeed 13 of the 23 priorities appeared on only one list. In other cases, the team doesn’t agree … [ Read more ]

Author: Erika Herb | Source: “Teamwork at the Top” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

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

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

• 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

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

Organization design can and should provide an effective and practical resolution to many stubborn strategy and business-execution issues. If a redesign is to work, senior executives need to recognize that all three elements of design—structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration—are essential in making a change.

If an organization’s structure is its skeleton, then individual capabilities are its muscular system, providing energy and vitality, … [ Read more ]

Author: Julie Kilmann | Source: “Role Charters” | Original Publication: Boston Consulting Group | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Sometimes workplace rules don’t have anything to do with customer engagement, a better workplace, limiting risk or liability, or avoiding catastrophes—they exist to make life easier for a small part of the organization without any regard for other more important factors. These rules ensure compliance with the policies of a particular department. And those in that department often fiercely guard and protect their rules.

[ Read more ]

Author: Tom Rieger | Source: “Guarding the Guards: Crushing the Bureaucratic Rules that Limit Success” | Original Publication: ChangeThis | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

37signals recently held a Comedy Central-style celebrity roast of its top-selling product in an attempt to find out what employees really thought were its weaknesses and ways it could be improved.

How was this different than the usual product meeting? For one thing, everyone was there. Designers, programmers, customer service folks—everyone had an opportunity to rip on something without worrying about hurt feelings. People … [ Read more ]

Author: Jason Fried | Source: “Want to Know What Your Employees Really Think?” | Original Publication: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Management

Looking back at past forecasts and their realizations can help prevent overconfidence and suggest places where unexpected factors may emerge. Recently, researchers Victor Jose, Bob Nau, and Bob Winkler at Duke University proposed new rules to score and reward good forecasts. An effective “scoring rule” provides incentives to discourage the forecaster from sandbagging, a proverbial problem in corporate life. For example, Gap Inc. measures the … [ Read more ]

Author: Tim Laseter | Source: “Cleaning the Crystal Ball” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Management

It’s often difficult in creative fields to set specific deliverables to which you can attach incentives. And the very fact that a manager focuses so much on money can strip away workers’ own intrinsic motivations or blind them to other goals that don’t come with a bonus attached.

In the search for other solutions, Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and London Business School professor … [ Read more ]

Author: Karim R. Lakhani | Source: “Getting to Eureka!: How Companies Can Promote Creativity” | Original Publication: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Bill [Gates] required that the first slide in the deck be the lowlights—not the highlights—the lowlights. In other words, what’s not going well and you would tend to focus the whole meeting on the first slide which is the lowlights which is what you should be doing. I can’t tell you, and I suspect you’ve experienced the same thing, how many meetings you go to … [ Read more ]

Author: Barry Moltz | Source: “The Secrets Of Working With Bill Gates” | Original Publication: OPEN Fourm | Subject: Management

In order to take full advantage of the latent practical knowledge of staff and conduct a revision of company processes, after 3 weeks every new employee is encouraged to single out all the idiosyncrasies that the company has as well as question practices and procedures. Using the simple questions below (or more sector specific questions), management encourages communication and discovers new ways of looking at … [ Read more ]

Source: “Hack: Getting Value out of New Employees by Kaeden Arnold” | Original Publication: Management Innovation eXchange (MiX) | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

When bringing a new employee onto your team, the experience of current employees can be extremely valuable, particularly those who themselves were recently the new kid on the block. Ask your current employees what they wish they had known sooner. Brainstorm a list of buzzwords and acronyms. And ask current employees what their plans are to help the newcomer get on board and up to … [ Read more ]

Author: Dick Grote | Source: “Making Onboarding Work” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior