156 Posts Found

Recent research by Christensen, Brigham Young University Professor Jeffrey Dyer and INSEAD Professor Hal Gregersen concludes that successful innovators share a set of attributes. The good news is that anyone can bolster their “Innovator’s DNA” by taking the right actions.

For example, organizations can help individuals develop their DNA by providing experiential learning opportunities such as “job swaps.” In 2008, Procter & Gamble swapped employees with … [ Read more ]

Author: Scott D. Anthony | Source: “The Innovative HR Leader” | Original Publication: Human Resource Executive Online | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Ford has put a rule in place. It says: ‘You have 24 hours to take a new and emerging issue, try to understand it and see if you can resolve it yourself. After that, you have to go public with it.’ It’s an escalation process. Because with a lot of these issues, we can solve them pretty quickly by applying the intellect we have in … [ Read more ]

Author: Bennie Fowler | Source: “How Ford Profits from its ’24 Hour Rule'” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

How do you find the smartest people in an organization? As we all know, intelligence does not always correspond to current job title. And in an technology company such as Novell, the real brilliant guys and gals are engineers hidden many layers below the top.

Here’s how Eric Schmidt found them, as he told Harvard Business Review in 2001.

“I used a kind of algorithm to locate … [ Read more ]

Author: Sean Silverthorne | Source: “Find the Smartest People in Your Organization” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Focus conversations on meaningfulness, choice, competence and progress. Leaders from the top down need to convey the same message—that the organization stands for doing work that matters and doing it well. When approaching any work project, leaders can underline the importance of contribution by focusing discussions on the basic questions in the self-management process:

• What can we do here that is meaningful?
• What creative

… [ Read more ]

Author: Kenneth W. Thomas | Source: “The Four Intrinsic Rewards that Drive Employee Engagement” | Original Publication: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Mosaic, a faith-based nonprofit organization that provides a variety of support services for people with developmental disabilities, has institutionalized a feedback process. Mosaic has more than 4,800 employees in 50 communities in 15 U.S. states and Great Britain. Very few of them directly report to a central administration office, which could hinder communication. So Mosaic developed the Feedback and Change Team (FACT), which consists of … [ Read more ]

Author: Jennifer Robison | Source: “Getting the Most Out of Remote Workers” | Original Publication: Gallup Management Journal (GMJ) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

One easy, fun and impactful system you can put in place is called the “101 Dream Goals.” Give each employee thirty minutes and have them write as many things they can think of that:

* They’d like to buy
* They’d like to do
* They want to learn
* They want to try for the first time
* Personal goals they want to … [ Read more ]

Author: Cameron Herold | Source: “Make Your Employees’ Dreams Come True” | Original Publication: OPEN Fourm | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Improving information flow is not just a matter of rolling out a new IT system; it’s a more complex endeavor. It’s not just how data gets to headquarters that is material, but what data gets there and how it is framed. Often, competitive realities have been white-washed by the time they are revealed to the executive suite.

Some winning companies create an independent “market sensing” function … [ Read more ]

Author: Christine Harada | Source: “The Dominant Genes: Organizational Survival of the Fittest” | Original Publication: Booz & Company | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Management

In a hierarchy, the lion’s share of recognition and recompense goes to those who hold the biggest titles. The real heroes are left unsung.

Linden Lab’s Remedy: The community—not some select group of corporate overlords—does the rewarding. …It does this through a software tool, called the Rewarder.

Each quarter, every associate is given an equal share of a portion of Linden’s net proft—recently, about one thousand … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeffrey Hollender | Source: “The Death and Life of Corporate Responsibility” | Original Publication: ChangeThis | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

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 ]

Author: Gary Klein | Source: “Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab’s charismatic founder and chairman, took one long night to build a simple but potent tool for community building. He calls it the “Love Machine.” It’s a Web page that lets any of Linden’s roughly three hundred associates zap a quick-hit message of appreciation to a colleague.

Say a coder beats a do-or-die deadline for patching a troublesome bug that’s infected Second Life’s … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeffrey Hollender | Source: “The Death and Life of Corporate Responsibility” | Original Publication: ChangeThis | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

The CEO of a luxury goods company identified personal contact with his top staff as an important lever that would help move the business if he invested his discretionary time in it. “I always carry two documents with me,” he said. The first is a set of pictures of his direct reports and “every day I mentally ask myself, ‘Have I talked to these guys’? … [ Read more ]

Author: James Allen | Source: “Resolving the CEO’s Dilemma” | Original Publication: Bain | Subjects: Leadership, Management

Instead of asking employees to suggest new initiatives to improve the company, why not turn the question around? Ask employees for ideas about what to terminate. Employees often respond with a slew of good suggestions. …Regularly ask yourself, your managers, and the whole company: “Which of our current activities would we start now if they weren’t already under way?” Then eliminate all the others.

Author: Heike Bruch | Source: “The Acceleration Trap” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

Most companies are accustomed to identifying major internal issues, such as whether to build a business, divest an asset, or lay off people. What’s harder is the early surfacing of opportunities and threats arising out of external events such as dramatic shifts in demand, competitive behavior, industry structure, regulation, or the macroeconomic environment.

A commonsense approach to identifying such issues early is to poll, regularly, all … [ Read more ]

Author: Lowell Bryan | Source: “Dynamic management: Better decisions in uncertain times” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Henry Chidgey, who once ran several railroad and diamond companies, advocates monthly performance reviews. These reviews need not and should not be complex; they work best when kept extremely simple. Maximum accountability is the main goal.

Here’s how the process works. The day before meeting, your coworker brings you a list of five or six key objectives, detailing her progress on each. During the … [ Read more ]

Author: Gary B. Cohen | Source: “Author’s Choice: Performance Reviews on Steroids” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

Many of us subscribe to the “cockroach theory,” the idea that earnings shortfalls and other problems are like cockroaches: there’s never just one. As a result, stocks commonly sell off more than an earnings miss seemingly warrants. The cockroach theory works because business executives rarely take the vigorous steps necessary to ensure that bad news reaches them. All too often, problems get stuck in the … [ Read more ]

Author: Anne-Marie Fink | Source: “Beyond Buy or Sell: What a Business Leader Really Can Learn from an Analyst Report” | Original Publication: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

During the first month of training, Zappos offers new employees $2,000 to quit, plus their time worked. It sounds expensive, but in the long term, it’s not. We want people to be here because they are passionate about customer service and because they like our culture. We don’t want people who are just here for a paycheck. Those people generally end up leaving six or … [ Read more ]

Author: Tony Hsieh | Source: “The Ultimate Business Tune-up for Times Like These” | Original Publication: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Companies need a more comprehensive approach to reducing workforce costs without impairing workforce quality. To do this effectively, a company needs a better understanding of the different roles within its workforce and needs to conduct what we call strategic role assessment, or SRA.

The purpose of SRA is to identify strategic talent—individuals who are top performers relative to their peers and who perform … [ Read more ]

Author: Peter Cheese | Source: “The New Talent Equation” | Original Publication: Accenture Outlook Journal | Subject: Management

A useful tool to zero in on decision-making problems and create higher-yielding change programs is a decision management tool we call RAPID. The idea is to clearly map out who plays what role in each critical decision and use that to enable swift decisions, without endless debates, second-guessing or pocket vetoes. It determines the captain of the boat, so to speak, but in a more … [ Read more ]

Author: Miles Cook | Source: “Pulling Away: Managing and Sustaining Change” | Original Publication: Bain | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The way a company approaches downsizing can make or break its performance. Using 355 undergraduates as their sample, the authors randomly assigned five-person teams to work on military-based command-and-control simulations. The teams’ performance was gauged first at full strength in control groups and then after one of three separate downsizing approaches was applied to the same groups.

The first approach was to maintain the hierarchy, eliminating … [ Read more ]

Author: D. Scott DeRue | Source: “How Different Team Downsizing Approaches Influence Team-Level Adaptation and Performance” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Ask an employee to write down the names of four people who have had a huge positive impact on his life — peoples he respects, admires, or looks up to. The people can be famous or mundane, real or fictional, dead or alive.

Next, ask your employee about each name, one at a time. Who is this person? Why is he or she important to you? … [ Read more ]

Author: Frode Heimen | Source: “How to Manage Better in Just 20 Minutes” | Original Publication: BNET | Subject: Management