24 Posts found for Publisher: Harvard Business Review

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

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

Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, is one company that takes great pains to signal its distance from the shareholder value principle. Back in 1997, just after the firm’s IPO, the founders made a rule that any manager who talked about the share price at work had to buy a doughnut for every person in the company. Early infractions were not terribly … [ Read more ]

Author: Roger Martin | Source: “The Age of Customer Capitalism” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Jim Lavoie, CEO of the technology firm Rite-Solutions, built something called a “Mutual Fun” market within the company’s intranet that has three indices employees can invest in—Savings Bonds for ideas on saving costs, Bow Jones for ideas on extending existing products, and Spazdaq for new product concepts. Any Rite-Solutions employee can suggest a new idea in any of these markets. Workers can also view the … [ Read more ]

Author: Jim Lavoie | Source: “Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation