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"Oh no, here comes another one of those conversations," you say to yourself. You know what I'm talking about — we all have to face them from time to time, and they can be the bane of a leader's existence. Imagine that you're leading a project and one member of your group has been aggressive and counterproductive in team meetings recently. The first time you saw this behavior, you were stunned. It seemed so out of character that you let it pass. After all, even good people indulge in bad behavior now ...Mobile shopping is here to stay whether retailers like it or not. Some 44% of shoppers use their smartphones while they're shopping; more than a third of them are comparing prices. The impact of mobile research can be profound, affecting the buying behavior of nearly 90% of mobile shoppers, according to our research. But retailers shouldn't despair when shoppers whip out their smartphones among the product displays. Smartphones could be a retailer's best friend not just because they can open up new buying ...I've written before about the science that helps explain why and how constraints and limits, often in the form of intelligent, well-set stretch goals, result in more creative solutions. Too often, though, managers set what appears to be a good stretch goal, only to discover that it did not produce the hoped-for innovative thinking. One common reason for this is that the goal was in fact not "stretch" enough. When I ask executives what they consider "stretch," I commonly hear about 5% to 10% increments in ...Anyone who has hiring responsibilities in 2013 would like to think that the U.S. is tackling diversity head-on. But how far have American companies really come? We have been examining what has happened to equal opportunity in the private sector since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . Our data show that progress has stalled, many firms are showing signs of increased gender and racial employment segregation, and few firms monitor equal employment opportunity progress. The reality is that while your company may ...Protecting a company's critical information is a value proposition. Trade secrets, confidential business plans, and operational security depend on it. Losing that kind of information can mean a plunge in stock price and market share. So who's responsible for information security in your company? To find out, I like to ask questions. But when I put the question to top management, well, they're busy — not their problem, that's for sure — and they refer me to the chief information officer or the ...The middle-of-the-road, "mainstream" content of early television in mid-twentieth century America contributed to a dampening of citizens' extreme political views, say Filipe R. Campante and Daniel A. Hojman of Harvard. By studying Congressional elections as TV spread unevenly from 1946 to 1960, the researchers determined that television helped cause, rather than merely accompanied, the remarkable decrease in party polarization during that period. They estimate that TV induced approximately a ...After promising your boss you would complete an important assignment on time, you realize you're behind and it's going to be late. You unintentionally leave a colleague out of the loop on a joint project, causing him or her to feel frustrated and a bit betrayed. On the subway, you aren't paying attention and accidentally spill hot coffee all over a stranger's expensive suit. It's time for a mea culpa . Apologies are tricky. Done right, they can resolve conflict, repair hurt feelings, foster forgiveness, ...Navi Radjou , innovation and leadership strategist, suggests multinational companies rely on comprehensive networking to ensure successful expansion. He is the coauthor of Jugaad Innovation .If you have considered investing in Africa, you have no doubt been influenced by frequent recent reports on the continent's apparently large, burgeoning middle class. These rising Africans are said to be increasingly armed with the hard currency, and the taste, to pay for your goods and services. But if you have actually taken some steps toward attaching hard numbers to this supposedly massive middle-class consumer base, you probably have also found a fair amount of confusion. Part of that confusion stems ...Not that long ago, cybersecurity was an issue for the back room. Now, it's made its way to the boardroom and the Situation Room. In February, President Obama issued an executive order aimed at protecting critical infrastructure, adding the administration's voice to those of Congressional members and corporate leaders in the national conversation on cybersecurity. Just as government and industry coordinated the telecommunications response after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the order enlists both public and ...You probably know the famous scene in the movie Glengary Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin's character tells his team to "Always be closing." I wish it were that simple. These days closing the deal, or even getting close, comes with more prerequisites — the biggest of which is understanding. People will not buy what they do not understand. Quality explanations are the key to getting prospects to become customers. I suggest a new motto for today: "Always be explaining." We rely on explanations so often ...A recent teacher-incentive program aimed at boosting student performance in New York City had no effect at all, according to a study of 200 public schools by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard. Experiments in Kenya and India have shown positive effects of incentives, but the New York program, under which schools were eligible to distribute up to $3,000 per teacher, may have been so complex (due in part to union influence) that teachers couldn't predict how their efforts would translate into rewards, Fryer says. ...There is a pressing need for more businesspeople who can think quantitatively and make decisions based on data and analysis, and businesspeople who can do so will become increasingly valuable. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report on big data , we'll need over 1.5 million more data-savvy managers to take advantage of all the data we generate. But to borrow a phrase from Professor Xiao-Li Meng — formerly the Chair of the Statistics Department at Harvard and now Dean of the Graduate School of ...At last week's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) conference and show, both Microsoft and Sony unveiled their new gaming consoles which will be released this holiday season. While both systems support a wide variety of games, they each have unique differentiating features. Microsoft's Xbox One, for instance, provides strong integration with television, Internet, and Skype . Sony's PlayStation 4 (PS4) is less restrictive in its digital rights management, which makes sharing games easier and renting games ...The web isn't print. The way we publish on the web — our process and workflow — is mostly derived from what we know about putting ink on paper. Which makes sense, because for most of human history, print was all we had. In a world of connected devices, we need to publish digital content onto all kinds of different devices, screen sizes, and form factors. Right now, our challenge is dealing with PCs, smartphones, and tablets. Tomorrow, who knows where our content will need to go? As we adapt to ...In both C suites and boardrooms, discussions about business performance usually center on topics like market momentum, M&A opportunities, capital management, and productivity enhancements. While these factors are important, in my experience they are best leveraged when employees are engaged, aligned, and motivated to win. In the course of leading six successful turnarounds and transformations at Schering-Plough, Pharmacia, Pharmacia and Upjohn, Wyeth, and two operating units within Novartis, I've learned ...In business and in life, the most critical choices we make relate to people. Yet being a good judge of people is difficult. How do we get better at sizing up first impressions, at avoiding hiring mistakes, at correctly picking (and not missing) rising stars? The easy thing to do is focus on extrinsic markers — academic scores, net worth, social status, job titles. Social media has allowed us to add new layers of extrinsic scoring: How many friends do they have on Facebook? Who do we know in common ...Because of the high cost of mounting a proxy fight, the average hedge fund makes less money on its activist investments than on its nonactivist portfolio, Nickolay Gantchev of the University of North Carolina discovered in a study of 1,164 campaigns by 171 hedge funds. A few do score big: A small minority of firms earns twice as much through activism as from nonactivist investments. But on average, the mean $10.71 million cost of a campaign ending in a proxy fight (think of all that printing and mailing) ...Traditionally, cyber security research has focused on technical solutions to specific threats: for example, how to filter spam or protect PCs and mobile devices against the latest malware. This approach has greatly enhanced our ability to defend information systems against attack. Widespread use of antivirus, intrusion detection technologies, improved cryptography algorithms, and methods for blacklisting infected web sites are just a few examples of how technical advances have improved cyber defense. Such ...If you're in a workplace in America right now, chances are most of the people around you are pretty checked out. You might even be plodding through the day yourself, counting down the hours until you can fly out the door. Or you're doing your very best to make your unhappiness known to anyone within earshot. This type of disengagement is outlined by Gallup's latest " State of the American Workplace " report, which has implications for you, your financial bottom line, and the well-being of your company, so ...Patience Is a Virtue Oh, to be that close. Succession planning, we know, is often a fraught and/or ignored task. But the case of Goldman Sachs is rare: It's pretty clear that the bank's president, Gary D. Cohn, is ready in the wings. Except, of course, for a tiny problem: Lloyd Blankfein, the current CEO, ain't going anywhere (except for global speaking engagements and parties), joking that he's going to die at his desk. So what are Cohen — who reporter Susanne Craig calls the "Prince Charles of Wall ...Organizations constantly replace outdated computers, servers, laptops, copiers, and countless other types of electronic devices to keep up with technology and enhance worker productivity. This rush to upgrade, however, creates a challenge: large numbers of excess electronics must be managed and disposed of properly. During a recent IT asset disposal project for a large New York bank, a chain-of-custody audit revealed three computers were untracked. An IT director was suspected of taking them. When first ...It's not easy for brands to get their message across in a world of highly fragmented media and dangerously short attention spans. The brands that are able to forge connections with their customers are the ones who are the most gifted storytellers. What makes a story good enough to captivate and motivate your audience? The best stories are designed to get the audience to care. Stories that start with "why" — that articulate the organization's purpose and passion — are able to get more consumers ...Nearly every mid to large size company in the world now has some kind of performance management system, a process that in theory should help people set to achieve goals and ultimately drive performance. Yet only 14% of organizations are actually happy with their performance management system as it stands, according to industry research firm CEB. Despite that, so far only 3% of companies are doing anything radical around how they manage performance. The rest are tinkering on the surface, altering the number ...Kantar Worldpanel predicts that 75% of growth for consumer products companies in the next decade will come through new product development. And yet, more than half of senior executives declare themselves unsatisfied with the financial returns of product innovation. Why? Because their innovation models don't determine where the growth is actually coming from. So, companies end up developing a product that tested well in market research only to find out later that they've got a cannibal on their hands, ...Yes, you can become a CEO if you come out of a specialized field such as marketing or finance, but you probably won't earn as much money as a generalist CEO whose specialty is being a manager. The annual pay premium for generalist CEOs (those who have held a number of positions in a range of companies in varied industries) is 19% relative to chief executives who have had relatively few jobs in a limited range of companies and sectors, according to a team led by Cláudia Custódio of Arizona State ...As a marketer, I work to engage women online with brands and causes. Ultimately, however, we hope for more than merely sales or action: we want to build a relationship with our audience. Ideally, a brand and a woman of influence interact directly, one to one. But there's something that's increasingly coloring our relationship. It's her phone. The phone is more than our hardware. It's our lifeline. A stunning 64.7% of emails to my all-female marketing database are opened on iPhones, likely because many on ...Imagine that you've just looked at a really nice hotel on your favorite online travel site, but you haven't yet booked your trip. Next, you're off browsing other websites, and an ad for your favorite travel site pops up. Would you be more likely to go back to them and book your vacation if the travel ad had a picture of the specific hotel that you just browsed? Or will you be more likely to go back if the travel ad is a general ad for their brand? This is the kind of question online retailers are asking ...An interview with Scott Barry Kaufman adjunct assistant professor of psychology at New York University and author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined . Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by June 21.Companies in commoditizing industries tend to follow one of two strategies: either they try to find new services to offer around the product or they compete on price. The one certain outcome of these two strategies, of course, is to accelerate the commoditization process itself. But, as an HBR article on this topic once pointed out, even commodities have customers. And where there are customers there can be differentiation. And where there is differentiation, there can be innovation. Lets look at a company ...During a painfully dull futures workshop Down Under, a simple word change helped transform a stagnant discussion. The facilitator, with a world-class flair for bafflegab and platitude, had asked the group to envision products customers might desire a decade hence. The conversation regurgitated cliché after customer-centric product cliché until the moment the team rejected and replaced the facilitator's language. Instead of brainstorming new "products," the group instead collectively chose to imagine ...Today's business leaders are allocating more resources to cyber security, yet appear to have less to show for it. The reason for this disconnect: the fundamental paradigm driving cyber security has not changed with the times. Most businesses try to prevent cyber attacks by focusing on their internal networks. They map their networks in detail, identifying every device on those networks and plugging security holes, to minimize vulnerabilities in software and hardware. They use signature-based products to ...Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called Functional Fixedness and while you probably won't need to build a fort during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from it and it is impacting your work. How can I be so sure? Well ... you're human, right? Like the ...Most brands face a slippery slope when it comes to their engines of content creation. We live in a day and age when the term "content marketing" stumbles out of a brand's mouth almost as often as buzzwords like "big data" and "native advertising." Woe the brand that is not creating, publishing and curating relevant content, yet many brands struggle with precisely that. They struggle with everything from its creation to its strategy to its editorial content, and even the best places to publish and share it ...Women who called auto-repair shops to inquire about getting a new radiator were quoted prices that averaged 6% higher than those offered to men, according to an experiment led by Meghan Busse of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Yet female callers who requested a price reduction were successful about 35% of the time, compared with just 25% for men. Shops may be caught off guard when women ask for discounts on car repairs, the researchers say.It has been a surreal two years for shareholders, customers, and employees of J. C. Penney (JCP). On June 14, 2011, JCP appointed Apple Store star Ron Johnson as CEO to replace what activist investor Bill Ackman derided as the completely failed regime of then-CEO Mike Ullman, who had apparently badly mismanaged JCP for his seven years at the helm. But after almost two years of plummeting sales, profits and stock price, Ackman and friends had to steal a line from The Who and ask shareholders, customers and ...We all know no one posts the best jobs. The really juicy positions usually get handed around like a treasured prize within social networks. Maybe you'll see a notice on LinkedIn, or a posting on your alumni listserv — but probably not. The most exciting jobs have an infinite number of aspirants, so unless you've been personally recommended by someone close to the action, it's difficult to get noticed . But what I learned again and again during the course of researching my book, Reinventing You , is ...If your business is relatively small, keeps a low profile, and isn't involved in financial services or national defense, you might assume that data security isn't a big issue for you. Why would someone in the presumably limited pool of hackers take the time to target your company? How would they even know about it? And if by some strange chance a hacker did get in, so what? You might assume you could hire someone to clean up your systems. All of your employees would have to change their passwords, which ..."A properly integrated business model forms the essence of a company's competitive advantage," my colleague Mark Johnson advises. That quote ran through my head as I watched a young man in a track suit prance around my table twirling a 10-foot noodle. I was in one of the Shanghai locations of a chain of hot pot restaurants called Hai Di Lao. If anything deserves to be commoditized, it would be a hot pot restaurant. The essence of the meal is cooking food yourself in close-to-boiling broth. The popularity ...People in every age think they're living in a time of transition (I'm sure Adam turned to Eve and said, "Darling, I think we're living in a time of transition"), but some ages really do usher in broad and deep change. Right now in American workplaces, I believe we're experiencing a transition with regard to well-being. An increasing number of employers and employees alike are acknowledging that the current model of success isn't working, and is in fact leading to burnout, stress, decreased productivity, ...Her confession was blurted out in the midst of our first conversation about the new digital marketing strategy which we would eventually advise them on: "You know, I don't think I believe in segmentation anymore." She said it fast and softly, almost in hope that the sounds around us would make it inaudible. But we did hear it, and responded, "Well, we don't either." For us, this exchange was the culmination of a reflection that had started in the classroom and in client engagements, where we were finding ...Another women's conference finds another predominantly female group of HR Directors seeking to improve the gender balance in their firms. In reality, women are working far too hard at an issue actually beyond their power to solve. Corporate leaders must recognize that additional women-dominated efforts are not the way to get companies to take the gender issue seriously. Rather, the solution requires action by those in leadership positions, still frustratingly rare, as hundreds of women at the recent JUMP ...If shareholders think a CEO has done something good to boost profits, they reward the boss with a pay increase amounting to 48.9% (on average) of the perceived contribution to higher profits. But when the CEO is seen as causing a profit decline, there's a zero effect on his or her pay, Lucian A. Taylor of The Wharton School reports from his study of more than 4,500 chief executives. This "downward rigidity" of CEO pay is pervasive in companies, whether their governance is good or bad. CEOs are in effect ...In the beginning, mobile advertising was all about conversions. Remember QR codes? Vouchers? What got people excited about mobile were the opportunities that didn't exist at all on desktop — to use location and behavioral cues to speak to the consumer on the path-to-purchase and become part of the in-store experience. It was about converting a potential customer into a buyer, right then and there. Then rich media arrived on the scene, and over the past couple of years has evolved so quickly that ...Imagine a sales leader who's looking over data from exit interviews with salespeople who've left his company in the last year. Among the departing reps, 32% left primarily because of their relationship with their first line manager, 27% left primarily because of inadequate pay, and 21% left primarily because of the lack of promotion opportunities The question: What should the sales leader do to fix this problem? Is it time to upgrade the first line managers, enhance pay, revisit promotion opportunities--or ...Mobile is turning "path to purchase" on its head. One of the most time-honored marketing concepts, that notion that a customer takes a predictable journey toward a sales transaction (in its earliest definition , starting with attention to a product, then moving to interest in it, then desire for it, and finally, action ), has long provided the framework for marketers to strategize how to communicate with customers and exert influence. While the steps have been debated and refined over time, and the path is ...Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to boost a team's creativity is to unshackle them from constraints. The less they have to worry about, the more open they'll be with their ideas, the theory goes. Budget? Unlimited! Ideas from outside? Bring 'em on! Different business model? Consider it entertained! Unfortunately this approach can actually be counter-productive. Some constraints are realities that must to be dealt with — laws of physics, or perhaps a budget. Other constraints may seem ...We've all seen examples of unstoppable companies that suddenly hit the wall. Growth slows down, stock prices start to decline, shareholders get nervous, and the press starts to speculate that something is wrong. In some cases, like P&G and Starbucks, the board brings back a former CEO who can presumably return the firm to its previous glory. In other cases, like with Apple , GE, or Cisco, the board holds its breath and hopes that things will change. But the reality behind many of these cases is that ...Thomas H. Davenport , coauthor of Keeping Up with the Quants , describes the three major stages of analytical thinking.Who's the target audience for the new iTunes Radio ? Me. My family and I have a bunch of Apple devices, a WiFi network built around an Apple Time Machine, and not enough technological savvy (or time) to figure out workarounds. I signed up for Spotify a while ago, and like it. But I can't figure out how to get it to play on the multiple speakers hooked up to my WiFi network, so I imagine that when Apple's alternative is rolled out this fall I'll immediately start using it instead. I might even pay extra for ...Life is full of negotiations, big and small. We negotiate for raises, we negotiate with clients and providers over prices, and we negotiate for more staff, the best projects, and flex time. (Then we go home and negotiate with our kids about how old you have to be to get your own smartphone.) To be successful, you really need to know how to negotiate well. But the truth is, this particular skill doesn't come naturally to many people. This is because a negotiation is an experience that is rife with ...I recently served as a mentor at a hackathon and came away shaking my head. In hackathons, teams compete intensively, typically for just a day or two, to create software (and sometimes hardware) solutions. What struck me was that most of the participants — young, tech-savvy programmers, engineers, and others — seemed largely uninformed or unconcerned about intellectual property. Participants tend to come from many different organizations, and often view hackathons as recreational social events, ...Although about the same proportion of midlevel female and male managers say they'd like to advance to higher levels in their companies ( 69% and 74% , respectively), only 18% of women say they'd become C-level leaders "if anything were possible." That's just half the proportion of men, according to a McKinsey study of 60 leading companies. Numerous women said they were put off by the corporate politics of the C-suite.Don't underestimate your cyberattacker. He's patient and meticulous, adept at targeting the weakest link in your network's security: Your organization's employees. He analyzes his targets in great detail and probably knows your employees better than you do. He studies them on social-networking sites to understand what they care about, what they respond to, how they behave, where they went to school, who their friends are, where they live, and what their hobbies are. Hackers have proven themselves to be ...So now it has been revealed : the U.S. National Security Agency may know as much about you as Google does. Google (and Facebook, and other Internet companies) use this information to better target ads and services. The NSA is out to find people on the verge of doing bad things. That private companies and governments are doing this shouldn't be a surprise at this point. This is the promise of big data, after all. To cite two authorities : We can measure and therefore manage more precisely than ever before. ...Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, intellectuals have had to ask themselves, 'Does Capitalism Still Work?' I have explored this question for several years now, beginning with a seminal column I wrote for Forbes: Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw . Two particular problems stand out. First, Capitalism has been hijacked by speculators. Second, the system enables amassing wealth at the tip of the pyramid, leaving most of society high and dry. Both problems have resulted in a highly unstable, volatile world ...Using data to manage is nothing new. But using big data to manage IS new, offering unprecedented challenges, opportunity, and risk. Senior executives need to learn and learn quickly. They must be prepared to ask penetrating questions when their data scientists bring them a new idea. Those who ask the following questions will be better prepared to both exploit the valuable insights and avoid the disasters that can arise from big — but bad — data. When your data scientists bring you an idea, ask ...Let's establish up front that Billy and Nick, the two 40ish, out-of-work salesmen played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in the new movie The Internship , are unlikely to land a coveted summer spot at Google. But in Hollywood, the place where Cameron Diaz can be an orthopedic surgeon (in There's Something About Mary ), anything is possible. So let's suspend disbelief (and put aside the question of whether or not it's funny ) and consider what the movie gets right about midcareer internships. College ..."I wish there was just this one-stop tool for all things social." "It would be great if we had one tool that would do everything." "There is no one good tool." Talk to the head of social media at any Fortune 500 company, and you're likely to hear comments like these. It's not that social media professionals are lacking software options: on the contrary, "there are a hundred different solutions for aggregating discussion, tweets, et cetera," Miguel Moreno Toscano told me. Toscano is marketing communications ...In Greek mythology, Hydra , an ancient water-serpent had many heads. If one head was cut off, two rapidly grew in its place before another head could be cut off — an energy-sapping disappointment for any opponent trying to overcome it. Regenerative speed made the Hydra formidable. Even Hercules, the legendary Greco-Roman hero, needed his nephew's assistance to win. To sustain a competitive edge, your company's new business development engines must similarly fire on all cylinders at supersonic speed. ...Your customers are in the midst of a mind shift. First they get a smartphone. Then they learn that they can ask for any information and get an instant result. What's the weather forecast? Is this dishwasher highly rated, and is it available more cheaply elsewhere? What's the song playing on the radio in the deli? Mobile answers all these requests and reinforces, in a Pavolovian way, the concept that we call the mobile mind shift: the expectation that any desired information or service is available, on any ...Just 9.8% of chief executives can be categorized as highly risk-averse, compared with 64% of the (similarly aged) general population, according to a survey of about 1,000 top leaders in the U.S. by John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Manju Puri of Duke University. Moreover, 80% of CEOs are very optimistic, well above the mean. CEOs are also much more optimistic than CFOs; only 65% of CFOs can be classified as very optimistic.We pay for things with the swipe of a finger. We ask Siri how to get to a restaurant. Our friends can track exactly when we'll show up. We can monitor our heart rates and calories burned — and compare our results with friends and strangers. We're in the early days of a digital, mobile transformation. The benefits can seem limitless. And as a society, we are already becoming accustomed to the convenience, the connectivity, and the new insights that surface. This democratization of technology impacts ...The digital marketer who effectively runs Qantas Airlines' highly regarded — and very successful — loyalty program has an unusual iPad problem. Flight attendants on Australia's flagship carrier can now get up-to-the-minute data on the airline's most elite and valued frequent flyers displayed on their onboard tablets. The information is useful, helpful and the app was a digital innovation actually sought by Qantas staff. The unhappy catch? Too many flight attendants sounded like they were ...Rang, Recorded, Delivered, I'm Yours When the news broke about the U.S. government's PRISM program, which collects data from phone companies like Verizon and online sites like Facebook, the reactions and reporting mostly focused on the NSA's broad ability to know exactly what many Americans (as well as foreigners) are doing, one keystroke or call at a time. For telecom companies like Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T, complying with government requests for information isn't uncommon: In 2011, Verizon received ...From denial of service attacks to server crashes to day-long disruptions of Google Drive, almost all organizations are familiar with threats to their information security. Given that digital information is more central than ever, it's worrisome that the history of data security is littered with failure. Organizations seeking to be better prepared for and more resilient in response to information threats may want to draw on a far larger and older source of lessons on information security — the 3.5 ...The findings are sobering: almost half of CEOs view their CIOs as out of step with the business and about the same percentage think IT should be a commodity service, purchased as needed. We tackled this thorny issue in a webinar sponsored by the Harvard Business Review, Dell, and CIO.com called "Change the Conversation, Change the Game." It was an enlightening conversation with business strategy guru Gary Hamel , Newport News Shipbuilding's CIO Leni Kaufman , and Walgreens' CIO Tim Theriault, with HBR ...I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall came down — old enough to grasp that something important was happening, but not really old enough to understand exactly what was happening. Like a lot of kids born around that age, the specter of communism has never seemed like that much of a threat. We would hear stories about how horrific life was living under conditions such as these; but only in the context of something that had already failed. It's only through history and books or films that my generation ...The failure last month of green-tech start-up Better Place, which promised to free drivers and nations from oil dependence and revolutionize transportation, has generated both attention and derision. But a blanket dismissal of its effort is a mistake. For entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers, there is plenty to learn from both the strategy and the outcome. There was good reason for the attention and funding (over $800 million) that Better Place attracted . While every other player in the electric ...Germany's relatively strong economy has led to a proliferation of "minijobs," a special employment classification originally designed for stay-at-home mothers that allows people to earn up to 450 euros a month tax-free. About 7.4 million people, or nearly 1 in 5 working Germans, now hold these low-wage, part-time positions, which include restaurant and clinic work, says the Wall Street Journal . Proponents say minijobs give employers flexibility to adjust their workforces and keep wages low; opponents say ...Safety is now Americans' overriding concern. Several years ago, as I sat in a secondary school board meeting, the visiting headmaster of a K-8 school was asked what he considered the highest priority for parents in choosing high schools. I was astounded when he said "safety" rather than, for example, "quality of education." But that was just a hint of how Americans' safety fears would blossom in the years to come. We have become the most anxious of nations, fearing terrorists, gun rampage, sexual assault, ...An interview with Sandeep Baliga and Jeff Ely , professors at the Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern University. For more, see The Power of Purple Pricing . Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by June 14.Facebook regularly abuses the privacy of its users. Google has stopped supporting its popular RSS feeder. Apple prohibits all iPhone apps that are political or sexual. Microsoft might be cooperating with some governments to spy on Skype calls, but we don't know which ones. Both Twitter and LinkedIn have recently suffered security breaches that affected the data of hundreds of thousands of their users. If you've started to think of yourself as a hapless peasant in a Game of Thrones power struggle , you're ...A survey evaluating a team's performance can be a powerful tool for making that team more effective. And the first message that consultants and HR professionals often communicate on these surveys is: "To ensure that the team gets the best data and feels protected, we will make sure responses are confidential." The widespread assumption is that if team members know their answers are confidential, they will respond honestly. But if you ask for confidential feedback, it might create the very results you are ...Quick: when someone says "IT," what comes to mind? Usually, people think of the systems they use as employees inside organizations — not customers. Here's a familiar story: Marketing conducts research (" Big Data "! " Analytics "!) and uncovers new customer insights; it then turns to operations to translate the insights into action...and hits a wall. The people in operations are too focused on fulfilling internal requests and service agreements to worry about customers, the ones that pay real money. ...In my recent HBR article, The New Dynamics of Competition , I present a new analytical tool called Value Network Maps, which I explain below. Video Platform Video Management Video Solutions Video Player These Maps are an outgrowth of exciting new work by strategy scholars developing a mathematical model of firm strategy that I refer to as the Value Capture Model (VCM). The VCM calls our attention to three important truths of competitive strategy that other theories obscure. Business strategists ignore ...The halls of every marketing organization are filled with rumors about the new crop of hires — computer scientists, math majors and big data experts. For them, consumers are a mass of 0s and 1s that represent online behavior that can be collected, analyzed and targeted. But the one thing companies seem to keep forgetting is that customers are actually human beings. The chocolatier Ferrero Rocher learned that lesson recently from Sara Rosso, a big fan of its Nutella brand. Such a big fan, in fact, ...People who were instructed to think about their own mortality were more receptive to the idea of having cosmetic surgery than those who weren't ( 3.57 versus 2.96 on a seven-point scale), suggesting that fear of death is a motivator behind patients' decisions to have tummy tucks, says Kim-Pong Tam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. When people experience unconscious death terror, they tend to engage in behaviors that maintain their sense of symbolic immortality, even though cosmetic surgery ...In a recent column for the New York Times, David Brooks posited that the U.S. has one clear advantage over Chinese competition: branding. He notes that U.S. firms are powered by "eccentric failed novelists" (presumably from agencies and consulting firms that are gifted at brand positioning and execution) and "visionary founders" (think Steve Jobs) who have created exceptional brands. This talent is lacking in the Chinese market where "executives tend to see business deals in transactional, not in ...In 1956, journalist William H. Whyte described the American worker — in particular the white-collar worker — as an "organization man" out to build his career and his life around a single corporation. These conformist sorts, living in tidy new suburbs like Park Forest, Illinois, which Whyte described in depth in his classic study, The Organization Man , looked happily upon the steadiness and predictability of their lives: For them society has in fact been good — very, very good — for ...There's a well-known anecdote about Gil Amelio, the CEO of Apple Computer just before Steve Jobs' return in the late 1990s. In a conversation with a reporter, Amelio compared Apple to a ship loaded with treasure, but with a hole in the bottom, leaking water. "My job is to get everyone to row in the same direction." When Steve Jobs later recounted the story at a conference panel in 2010, the audience erupted in laughter. But the metaphor, while it may seem bungled at first glance, actually describes the way ...My MIT colleague Frank Levy had the great idea a while back to put on a series of lunches bringing together the MIT economics, business, computer science, and robotics geeks who are interested in how recent technological progress is affecting the economy and labor force. It's a large group, and a ridiculously impressive one. The Institute is home to some of the world's best people in each of these areas, so the lunches always leave me with a buzzing head, a full notebook, and an advanced case of impostor ...The term "digital disruption" sounds painful. The word disruption implies that things are going to get broken up. But for companies that take advantage of what digital can do, disruption will have the opposite effect. Even if business models, traditional processes, and long-standing industry practices are about to be broken up — and they are — when the dust settles one part of your business can and should be stronger than ever: the relationship you have with your customer. Unfortunately, most ...This week's anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre provides a good opportunity to revisit the thorny question of what responsibilities foreign businesses have in dealing with a repressive government like China's. Over the years, I've seen tough-as-nails CEOs abandon their normal prudence when dealing with China and its potentially vast market. It's a dangerous trap, not just for the media companies that I know best but for any company trying to operate or expand in China. When I worked for Time ...In our work with leaders on overplayed strengths, people sometimes object to the idea that every strength can be taken too far . For instance, an academic journal editor once held up publication of a research article stating flatly that "it is impossible for a leader to be too supportive, caring, and loyal." Did that journal editor have a point? Recent interest in one of the greatest American presidents offers a fascinating example. Let there be no doubt that Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinary leader who ...Everyone's talking about the Japanese economy and Abenomics , but what's happening in Tohoku two-plus years after a tsunami , on the heels of the most powerful earthquake in the country's history, took the lives of some 16,000 people and destroyed almost 300,000 houses? If you visit the northeastern region of Japan's main island today, you will see bare earth, with nothing more than a few gutted buildings, a rare pile of debris, and some construction trucks dotting the landscape. If you didn't know that ...People who were told they would get 0.10 euro to 1 euro for each correct answer on an IQ test scored up to 6% higher than those who didn't get such rewards, suggesting that IQ numbers are a matter of motivation as well as intelligence, says a team led by Lex Borghans of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The rewards prompted participants to invest more time on the questions, leading to better performance. The amount of money didn't matter as much as the mere presence of an incentive.On Friday, May 31 at the Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that cyber threats posed a "quiet, stealthy, insidious" danger to the United States and other nations. Wait a minute. What exactly is quiet and stealthy about a security issue that Hagel's colleague General Keith B. Alexander, the Director of the National Security Agency, labeled just a few weeks earlier the source of the "greatest transfer of wealth in history" from US companies to foreign hackers? ...Rita Gunther McGrath , author of The End of Competitive Advantage , explains how to identify and abandon a declining project, product, or business.Climbing the organizational ladder often requires employees to work long hours and deal with difficult and complex issues. Some days on the job are likely fun and positive and other days are tension-filled and stressful. A common dilemma for many people is how they manage all of the competing demands in work and life and avoid letting any negative effects of work spill over into their personal lives. Research has in fact shown that employees who believe they do not have time for the personal life feel ...Complexity is not a new condition. While it's true that many aspects of life have become more densely connected and unpredictable, the fact is that our world is inherently complex. Most of the environments we move in and tasks we perform require us to deal with interdependent and dynamic phenomena. Consider (as economists Andrew Haldane and Vasileios Madouros recently did ) the seemingly simple task of catching a Frisbee. It requires the resolution in real-time of two infinitely variable factors: the ...Have you ever pondered what you'd ask the CEO if you were made chairman of the board for 10 minutes and could pose one question? You'd want to make it count. Nothing about markets or strategies — CEOs have canned answers for that kind of thing. You'd want a question that would strip away the cloak of invincibility and reveal the CEO's innermost fears. A question that could tell you a lot about the company's potential under this leader. How about this, the boardroom version of Sophie's Choice: "Who ...Shh. Don't say a word. If you're hacked, don't let on. That's the knee-jerk response at a lot of corporations, which routinely conceal cyber attacks from shareholders and the public. Incidents at Coca-Cola and BG Group weren't acknowledged, according to Bloomberg . Nor were breaches at ArcelorMittal and Chesapeake Energy. Even governments have been mum about the cross-border hacking that has risen to furious levels lately, which is why President Obama's vow to raise the issue of cyber security with Chinese ...Every project manager has one key role to play: scope cop. But it's a job you can't do in isolation. You need to share nitty-gritty details and related financials with your team members on at least a weekly basis (more often than that in some industries) so they'll support your efforts instead of undermining them with the best of intentions. It's the only way, aside from sheer luck, that you'll even come close to hitting your deadlines and your budget. The alternative, of course, is scope creep — a ...How long can this go on? According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal , the 17-nation euro zone remains the "weakest link" in our global economy after years of economic stagnation, mired in high unemployment, plagued with stalled or contracting economies, and paralyzed by political dysfunction. Similarly, The Economist also lambasts eerily complacent EU leaders for "sleepwalking through an economic wasteland." The resulting human suffering is sobering — tens of millions of Europeans who ...Gasoline demand has been modest in America this spring, mainly because of East Coast drivers' purchases and habits; while demand is flat in the South and West, it has fallen 10% below its 2007 peak in the East, says the Wall Street Journal . Hybrids constituted 4.3% of new vehicle registrations in five Eastern cities in the first quarter of 2013; elsewhere, the figure was 3.8% . Meanwhile, half-ton pickups made up 9.7% of vehicle sales in the rest of the country but just 3.7% in those Eastern cities. The ...Smartphones and tablets are the first things many of us check in the morning, and the last things we read at night. We use smartphones on the sidewalk, at work, at lunchtime, in line at the grocery store. In the evenings, we're on our tablets while we watch TV. Being constantly connected has changed our behavior: we simply expect the right information to be at our fingertips. And the more we come to expect that information will be there whenever we seek it out, the more we search and browse, research, ...People will continue to debate Procter & Gamble's move to replace CEO Bob McDonald with his immediate predecessor A.G. Lafley, but for us the most compelling and determinative part of this story lies with the board. Many wonder why an academy company like P&G, historically known for developing talent, did not, or was not able to, promote a successor from within its ranks. Where was its leadership bench? What kind of signal did this choice send to P&G's top managers? Is the problem that P&G produces ...There are lots of reasons someone might be upset at work, from the personal (divorce, illness, kid troubles) to the professional (a failed project, bad review, or nasty colleague). Given how much time we spend in the office, it seems inevitable that people will occasionally get emotional. But how should you handle tears as a manager? What should you do with a distraught employee? What the Experts Say Many managers are uncomfortable with emotional behavior — whether it's positive or negative. "People ...Almost nowhere else in the world is the tech entrepreneur glamorized as much as in Silicon Valley. The Valley is rife with smart, incredibly energetic, tremendously talented new entrepreneurs — instead of stars in their eyes, they have successful exits and Zuckerberg-like acclaim in their sights. Yet 75 percent of startups fail , despite demonstrable ingenuity and an almost superhuman output of hard work. As a serial tech entrepreneur growing my own company, Reputation.com , I know there are no easy, ...In 2009, security staff at a Texas bank smelled something funny in the air and asked customers to evacuate because they suspected a carbon monoxide leak. Thirty-four people were rushed to the hospital complaining of chest pains and headaches. Of course carbon monoxide is odorless; the cause of this sudden hysteria turned out to be a strong whiff of a lady's perfume. But by announcing that there might be something harmful in the air, the context was
created for people to think the worst — and they ...Reflecting upon an internship with Wal-Mart last summer, Daniela*, an MBA student, raved to me about her manager and how much she learned on the job. She was encouraged to keep a running list of questions about how the mammoth retailer's operations worked, and she discussed them with her manager during weekly calls. Then, whenever feasible, the manager put her in touch with the people directly related to her inquiries. By the end of the summer, Daniela had a strong handle on Wal-Mart, and had built up a ...One of the safest bets in the corporate world is that a splashy acquisition will end up disappointing. You won't make money every time you take that bet — Google's purchase of Android sure paid off, for instance — but the successes are more than balanced by disasters like the merger of AOL and Time Warner, which famously lost more than 80% of its combined market cap over a decade, or News Corp buying MySpace for $580 million in 2005 and selling it in 2011 for $35 million. Yahoo! CEO Marissa ...Every organization evaluates the performance of its employees in some way, whether that process is formal or informal, or on a regular cycle or an ad-hoc basis. At a small start-up, feedback is likely to be informal and spontaneous, while larger organizations are likely to have structured systems including competency models, specific evaluation criteria, and a technology platform that enables quantitative and qualitative input to be collected, aggregated and stored. Despite their differences, the one ...81% of people in a study lied about themselves during job interviews, with the more extroverted being more apt to tell untruths, say Brent Weiss and Robert S. Feldman of the University of Massachusetts. When the job requirements were more technical, deception increased, probably because applicants were trying to compensate for their lack of job-required skills. Participants in the study told an average of 2.19 lies per 15-minute interview.Change is an arduous process. Whenever I have to make a big change in my life, I tend to go through three phases. First, I simply wish ("somehow it will happen"). When that doesn't work, I'll look for a quick Hail Mary fix. (Sadly, those specially formulated seaweed pills didn't help me lose 1 to 2 pounds a day). Finally, still stuck in the same situation, I realize that I have to confront the challenge and strategize to make things happen. Brick and mortar stores have been muddling through similar stages ...People are drawn to and influenced by leaders who communicate authentically, easily and effectively. How do you become one of these leaders? You need to have a "signature voice"—a means of self-expression that is uniquely and distinctly your own. Once you discover and express this voice, you won't believe the impact you can have on those around you. In this interactive Harvard Business Review webinar with Amy Jen Su and Muriel Wilkins —co-authors of Own the Room—share a compelling ...It's hard to think of a company providing a mostly useful, non-polluting service that gets rooted against as much as Facebook does. Well, maybe I can think of a couple: AOL and Microsoft in the second half of the 1990s. AOL wasn't entirely non-polluting, given how many unasked-for CDs it flooded mailboxes with to lure people to its dial-up service. But the negativity was more about its status as the Internet on training wheels. Microsoft, meanwhile, was scarily powerful — the company that was going to ...Mobile in China and Collecting Your Fitness Data As she does every year, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins has bestowed upon us over a hundred slides that analyze internet trends. It's worth clicking through all of them (seriously, you can spare a half hour), though I can save you some time by pointing out a few that probably have implications for you, your business, and the rest of the 2.4 billion internet users across the globe. Consider slide 5, which highlights just how much advertising opportunity there ...Every employer can tell stories about an applicant who sounded like an A-player at the interview but ended up a dud once at work. Good candidates prepare, of course, but rehearsed interview answers can make it hard to separate the winners from the spinners. Gauging an applicant's true colors and skill level in an hour is certainly tricky. But there are ways to take interviewees out of their comfort zones, snap them off their prepared script, and encourage the kind of candor that will enable you to find the ...The promise of digital marketing continues to grow as big data gets bigger and is turbo charged with mobile and social. In theory, digital marketing should be more precise and better than traditional analog marketing. So why is digital marketing still so ineffective? Data from the 2012 Direct Marketing Association benchmarks say that direct mail — yes junk mail via snail mail — still reigns supreme, offering response rates of 1.1 to 1.4% versus 0.03% for email, 0.04% for Internet display ads, ...What's better than a really excellent engineer working on a project? Not just more engineers working on a project but more engineers who can collaborate effectively. I've been working on an engagement focused on increasing the productive output of teams of software engineers. One part involves identifying who the most successful software engineers are, so their performance can be replicated. To supplement my own observations, I had the chance to talk with a team at IBM that was doing much the same thing ...What advice would you give new college graduates about launching themselves into the workforce? Beginning May 12, 2013, I facilitated a discussion around this question on LinkedIn. The hundreds of responses offered a wealth of advice and insight about what it takes to make a successful transition from college into the workforce. I distilled the discussion down into twelve key pieces of advice — "rules" if you will — for getting off to a good start in one's career. Each rule is adapted from a ...With more and more farmers using genetically modified corn from Monsanto Company that resists plant-killing rootworm, the share of U.S. acreage treated with insecticide fell from 25% in 2005 to just 9% in 2010. But the rootworm has modified its genetics too. Insects resistant to the Monsanto corn appeared in 2011 and are now scattered across the Midwest. The development threatens to undermine one of the main benefits of genetically modified crops: that they reduce the need for chemical pest control, says ...Good managers focus not only on bottom-line performance, but on the means by which their people achieve that high performance. Unethical behaviors can be damaging to a broad variety of stakeholders, and are often the cause of organizational crises. Ethical behavior not only keeps consciences clean; it can boost the reputation and performance of your firm. More than ever, ethics must be a primary management concern. A common opinion is that the way to avoid ethical lapses is to figure out how to hire good ...An interview with Jonah Berger , Wharton School professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On . Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by June 6.Today's top IT leaders have moved beyond ensuring operational efficiency. Many IT leaders are now at the forefront of business model enablement, organizational architecture, management practice, and innovation. But stepping into the role of strategic visionary and business driver requires CIOs to have a dramatic new conversation with their C-suite colleagues. In this wide-ranging panel discussion, renowned business author Gary Hamel joins with Jim Stikeleather , author and chief innovation officer for Dell ...The panel discussion was invented by someone who liked to sit three feet above his audience, talk with five of his closest friends for an hour, and barely acknowledge that there are 100 other people in the room, usually sitting in uncomfortable chairs. But until the panel discussion disappears from the agendas of conferences and networking events, you may be asked to moderate one. Lucky for you, the bar is very, very low. If you can find a way to deliver a few fleeting moments of entertainment or ...In 2010, one of us was sitting in a room at the Harvard Business School with Eric Ries and a number of budding entrepreneurs. They were pitching their ideas and plans to Eric and their peers; once the pitch was complete, the group would then brainstorm. One of these young entrepreneurs in particular stood out. He was not your standard internet entrepreneur — the student presenting was pitching a project to increase sub-Saharan farm income, by helping farmers shift from traditional crops to rubber ...Americans are addicted to their smartphones. A recent report by Flurry Analytics revealed that Americans spend about 2 hours and 38 minutes a day glued to their mobile devices, with 80% of that time spent in/on mobile apps. With over 700,000 apps available for download in both Google Play and the Apple App Store, it is safe to say that apps have reached critical mass. With this intense competition, brands and mobile app developers are forced to reevaluate tactics for growing user retention and engagement ...In 1890, the poorest 10% of male U.S. workers labored an average of 10.99 hours per day, while the richest worked 8.95 hours . A century later, the poorest's hours had dropped to 8.83 hours a day, while the richest's hours had barely budged, say Diego Restuccia of the University of Toronto and Guillaume Vandenbroucke of the University of Southern California. Over the course of 100 years, the poorest's productivity rose dramatically, and their resulting higher hourly earnings allowed them to spend less time ...It's say-on-pay season at American corporations. What shareholders have been saying, in overwhelming numbers, is yes! At 74% of the 1,471 companies that have voted so far in 2013, according to Equilar's say-on-pay tracker , the "yes" percentage exceeded 90%. That's up from 69% in 2012 and 2011. Only 31 companies (2%) have gotten sub-50% no-confidence votes in 2013. One key reason for shareholders' positive tone is that the stock market has been doing well. Since say-on-pay hit the U.S. in 2011 (it was part ...In recent weeks both J.C. Penney and Procter & Gamble replaced a sitting CEO with his predecessor. This back-to-the-future approach to succession isn't common — and surely most company boards aren't seeking to make it so. After all, returning the reins to a former leader smacks of desperation and failed succession planning. But that doesn't make it the wrong move. In fact, sometimes it works spectacularly well — consider the triumphant returns of Steve Jobs to Apple and Howard Schultz to ...Over the past 30 years there have been three major waves of change in how employers and workers have converged on new knowledge work arrangements. To capitalize on this third wave of change, employers should rethink their compact with workers on five key dimensions: 1) the strategy behind the design of work arrangements; 2) the setting for work; 3) the organization of workflows; 4) the technologies used; and 5) the degree of tailoring work arrangements. In this interactive Harvard Business Review webinar, ...A client recently asked me to comment crisply on the future. I came up with these observations. See if you can spot my error. The world is speeding up . In 1989, Alan Kay said it takes at least 10 years for an innovation to get from the lab into everyday life. Twitter did it in 4. Faster change means more turbulence . Assumptions are now less reliable. Best guesses are often shots in the dark. Planning sounds like an act of courage, strategy like a flight of imagination. When Alvin Toffler warned us of ...Why is it that when your friends, your significant other, and especially your mom tell you, You need to stop working so much! — you hesitate? On the one hand, you know they have a point. It's unsustainable to pull 12- to 14-hour days on a consistent basis, and you feel burnt-out and cranky. But when it comes to actually setting boundaries, you stall and tell yourself and others, "It's just a busy time. It will get better soon..." But, it doesn't. And you find yourself wedged between the fact that you ...Who wouldn't want a higher level of emotional intelligence? Studies have shown that a high emotional quotient (or EQ) boosts career success , entrepreneurial potential , leadership talent , health , relationship satisfaction , humor , and happiness . It is also the best antidote to work stress and it matters in every job — because all jobs involve dealing with people, and people with higher EQ are more rewarding to deal with . Most coaching interventions try to enhance some aspect of EQ, usually ...John Butman , author of Breaking Out , believes you need to embody the ideas you believe in.A guy walks into a store. No, it's not the opening salvo for a bad joke. It's a critical moment of truth for the in-store and brand marketer that, today, is complicated — even compromised — by the hyperconnected consumer. You know this person. He's standing in the aisle striking the familiar pose: feet planted, arms extended to form the smartphone hunch. He's lost in a parallel world. What's he doing? Searching, browsing reviews, comparing prices, cultivating social input. Is he gaining ..."You really hate people," said an ex to me during intermission at the theater, as we discussed our weekend plans. He, as always, wanted to get groups of friends together. I wanted, in contrast, a night to ourselves. "I do not hate people," I said, angry and sad that it was this conversation again. "I just don't want to be around them all the time." I'm an ambivert — both an introvert and an extrovert. As an ambivert, I also love being social and participating in social activities, but with active ...I've been researching what allows companies to be successful even when their competitive advantages are short-lived — a phenomenon I call transient advantage . The Regus Group, Ltd. , a company that provides many services but is best-known for its offices-for-rent business, is one of many I've been studying whose leaders seem comfortable that their current competitive advantages won't last, and don't waste too much time clinging on to them once competitors have caught up or the moment has ...How many employed American mothers work more than 50 hours a week? Go on, guess. I've been asking lots of people that question lately. Most guess around 50 percent. The truth is 9 percent. Nine percent of working moms clock more than 50 hours a week during the key years of career advancement: ages 25 to 44. If we limit the sample to mothers with at least a college degree, the number rises only slightly, to 13.9 percent. (These statistics came from special tabulations of data from the US Census Bureau's ..."Nonsmoking" rooms In hotels that allow smoking elsewhere had up to nearly 5 times the tobacco-related air pollutants as accommodations in smoke-free hotels, according to a study of 40 hotels led by Georg E. Matt of San Diego State University. In some cases, traces of nicotine in nonsmokers' urine was more than twice as high for those who had stayed in nonsmoking rooms, as opposed to smoke-free hotels, The New York Times says in a report in the study.Talk about turning a bug into a feature. SAP, the German software giant, announced that it hopes to hire hundreds of autistics as talented programmers and product testers. The firmAs the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh makes all too clear, the factory jobs in our global supply chain carry significant risks for the millions of people who fill them — the majority of whom are women under the age of 30. Their work lives consist of sitting and standing in dense lines for up to 12 hours a day (sometimes more), cutting fabric, sewing garment pieces together, placing buttons and collars, printing T-shirt designs, and cleaning stray threads. And they often find themselves vulnerable ...If you want to empower, engage, or motivate others, don't just focus on increasing your positive behaviors . Pay attention to what you need to stop doing as well. Why? Because people remember the bad more than the good. To quote from a previous HBR article, How to Play to Your Strengths , "Multiple studies have shown that people pay keen attention to negative information. For example, when asked to recall important emotional events; people remember four negative memories to every positive one." So, which ...What is top of mind for corporate boards worldwide? In one of the most comprehensive global surveys of corporate directors to date, we found that they were very worried about developing and enacting strategic plans that will enable their organizations to succeed. And what did they say was their biggest concern? Not competitive threats. Not rising costs. Not innovation, risk management, technology, debt, or the regulatory environment. Corporate directors identified talent management as their single greatest ...This post is co-authored with Lisa Bodell. Over the past several years we have heard hundreds of managers talk about the negative impact of complexity on both productivity and workplace morale. This message has been reinforced by the findings of major CEO surveys conducted by IBM and KPMG [PDF], both of which identified complexity as a key business challenge. Agreeing on complexity as a problem is one thing, but doing something about it is quite another — particularly for managers who are already ...In a recent interview, Jeffrey Katzenberg described his first day at Disney as the newly appointed head of The Walt Disney Studios. The equally new Disney CEO, Michael Eisner , gave him a simple, unambiguous mandate: fix animation at Disney. Although a veteran in the film business, Katzenberg had no experience with animation and little appetite for it. Disney long-timers, however, informed him that Walt Disney had left extensive notes and audio recordings concerning his experiences making animation, which ...Although the 1985 arrival of crack cocaine in large U.S. cities had dire consequences, including a doubling of the homicide rate among black males aged 14 to 17, the epidemic's social ills subsided after a few years, despite continued high use of the drug, says a team led by Roland G. Fryer Jr. of Harvard. After experiencing severe disruption from this technological innovation, illicit drug markets settled down and crack prices fell sharply, hurting the business's profitability and reducing ..."They can just use their desktop computer to do that." One of the most persistent misconceptions about mobile devices is that it's okay if they offer only a paltry subset of the content available on the desktop. Decision-makers argue that users only need quick, task-focused tools on their mobile devices, because the desktop will always be the preferred choice for more in-depth, information-seeking research. But what about people who don't have a desktop computer? What about people who have access to a PC, ...You've been working at a small start-up for a while now when a large, deep-pocketed corporation comes knocking, asking you to join its innovation team. Should you take the job? Will this be the chance to exercise your entrepreneurial imagination in a more secure environment with ample assets? Or will you end up drowning in bureaucracy, pining for the white-knuckled start-up pace you're used to? We have similar concerns whenever we consider accepting an innovation engagement. Since 2009 we've conducted ...Ron Bradley was pacing back and forth in his office. He knew it was time to schedule quarterly feedback sessions with his team members. This was something he did on a regular basis. But this time was different. He was more uncomfortable than ever before, and he knew exactly why. Ron felt disconnected from his employees — especially his foreign-born employees — and that put him in a very uncomfortable and awkward position as a mentor. And it certainly wasn't from a lack of trying. As a senior ...There is a new player emerging on the cultural and business scene today: the idea entrepreneur. Perhaps you are one yourself — or would like to be. The idea entrepreneur is an individual, usually a content expert and often a maverick, whose main goal is to influence how other people think and behave in relation to their cherished topic. These people don't seek power over others and they're not motivated by the prospect of achieving great wealth. Their goal is to make a difference, to change the world ...There's no hotter topic in human resource management at present than how to manage Millennials (aka Generation Y), the age 30-and-under members of the workforce. Millennials are the "kids nowadays!" that managers from previous generations fret about. Typical challenges older people experience in working with Millennials surfaced during a conversation I recently had with a group of executives. For example: "I used to be able to give an order to a young employee and expect it to be carried out at once. Now I ...There are an estimated 600,000 open advanced manufacturing jobs across America, and the White House recently announced that 34,000 troops are returning from Afghanistan over the next year. While these two facts are seemingly unrelated, an innovative program connects them in a meaningful way. Led by GE, along with partners such as Alcoa and Lockheed Martin, the new Get Skills to Work (GSTW) program convenes manufacturers and educators to prepare and place veterans in long-term careers in advanced ...For all of the books (thousands) written on leadership, individuals (millions) who have participated in leadership seminars and dollars (billions) invested in leadership development, too many leadership experts still fail to distinguish between the practice of leadership and the exercise of bureaucratic power. In order to engage in a conversation about leadership, you have to assume you have no power — that you aren't "in charge" of anything and that you can't sanction those who are unwilling to do ...Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley explains why strategy has to be more than an aspiration. For more, see Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works , by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, or, from the HBR archive, his 2009 article, What Only the CEO Can Do .In my research, I use eye-tracking technology, facial-expression analysis, and lab experiments to better understand why people choose to view online videos, what narrative techniques keep them watching, and what features prompt them to share videos with friends. Since writing about this work in HBR last year , I've received a steady stream of requests from companies asking: How can we put that research to use? As a result, I've been studying how companies create and distribute online video advertisements, ...A.G Lafley is back as the CEO of P&G (nothing like the day before an American holiday weekend to announce a leadership change at a major company). There's a lot we don't know about this evolving story, but we wanted to give you a few insights. In Bloomberg Businessweek , Justin Bachman points out that one investor in particular has been increasingly irritated by the company's performance relative to its earning abilities. His colleague Diane Brady notes the very different consumer landscape than the one ...Even before I released the disc, I knew it was a long shot. And, unfortunately, it was a clumsy one too. We were playing Ultimate Frisbee, a game similar to U.S. football, and we were tied 14-14 with a time cap. The next point would win the game. I watched the disc fly over the heads of both teams. Everyone but me ran down the field. I cringed, helplessly, as the disc wobbled and listed left. Still, I had hope it could go our way. Sam was on my team. Sam broke free from the other runners and bolted to the ...With former CEO A.G. Lafley returning to the helm of Procter & Gamble, I asked Rosabeth Moss Kanter for her analysis. She holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School. She's an expert on strategy, innovation, and leading change. She is also Chair and Director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative. She is a regular contributor to HBR and HBR.org . She's on twitter @RosabethKanter . In her latest book, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, ...Community is the heart of university. Students mix with other similarly aged people in an environment ripe with social activity, friendship, ideation, and discussion. It's the most powerful element of college or graduate school — and also the most jarring to leave behind. Social isolation often follows graduation. I know firsthand. After college, I moved to Washington, D.C., and ended up living in the suburbs near work for a year, struggling to connect with others in a new city where few friends ...Digital marketing is evolving as fast as any other medium on our tablets, smartphones, Google Glass and beyond. To learn about what the future may bring to this marketing genre, we reached out to Gerd Leonhard , an author, strategic advisor, CEO of TheFuturesAgency, and someone whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the leading media-futurists in the world." Here are some of Leonhard's predictions for what's coming. Add yours in the comments section below. 1. By 2020, most interruptive marketing will ...Good corporate governance is about many things — boards that act independently, robust shareholder rights, accurate accounting, reasonable and fair executive compensation, and so on. No single parameter defines good governance. It takes a village. But with board independence in the spotlight recently, it's easy to overlook another aspect of good board health that's just as important to performance: diversity. While not all studies on board diversity reach the same conclusion, many agree that putting ...In the name of science, 2,500 people have participated in Harvard's Personal Genome Project, anonymously sharing DNA data along with such information as histories of depression and sexually transmitted disease. But Harvard Privacy Lab director Latanya Sweeney demonstrates what "anonymous" really means. Of 579 participants who listed their birth dates, ZIP codes, and genders, her team was able to identify 42% by name using public records. Previously she was able to identify up to 87% of the U.S. population ...Cool ideas for new businesses are a dime a dozen. That — plus all the new tech enablers such as instant websites and e-commerce platforms — makes it deceptively easy to start up a new venture. The bigger challenge is to start up a big venture that just happens to be small at first. Fortunately, real entrepreneurs are growth-obsessed: they cringe when you call them "small." In fact, I don't think you can call something entrepreneurship unless it is driven by big vision, big aspiration, and a ...An interview with Michael Raynor , director at Deloitte Services LP and coauthor of the article Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great . For more, see his book . Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by June 2.Thanks to U.S. Sen. Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations , corporate taxes were all over the headlines this week. Subcommittee staff produced a fascinating 40-page "memo" on Apple's creative tax avoidance, then Apple CEO Tim Cook submitted to what turned out to be a not all that heated grilling from Levin and colleagues. On the assumption that, while this story will wax and wane over the coming months, it's not going away, here's some context (for you headline purists , the final two items ...To be a successful entrepreneur - or really, a successful anything - you need to be able to recognize an opportunity when you see one. Specifically, you need to be able to identify a problem or gap, and come up with an innovative solution. (Of course you also need to be able to execute that solution, but without spotting the opportunity in the first place, you aren't going anywhere.) So how, exactly, does one become good at spotting opportunities? It's probably innate — you're either good at that ...On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified in front of the Congressional Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as a part of their look into the company's corporate tax practices — according to Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the committee , "Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere." I asked Mihir A. Desai , a professor and dean at Harvard Business School, a professor at ...All his life, he hated brushing his teeth. Getting toothpaste onto a toothbrush can be messy if your fine motor skills are still developing. And, of course, even though you know you're supposed to replace a toothbrush every three months, who really keeps track of that? So, Houston Diaz decided to invent a solution . And several prototypes later, he designed a toothbrush that has the toothpaste dispenser integrated into the brush itself, allowing himself and others to have a more convenient solution. And ...Ever had to look at a data visualization while you were in a lousy mood? Chances are you were more likely to make an error in visual judgment than if you had been feeling more cheerful. New research suggests that putting users in an emotionally positive mindset improves their accuracy in interpreting data visualizations. So even if your company publishes only the occasional graph, provoking a positive emotional response in the audience might just help you get your data across more accurately. Moreover, as ...Marketing professionals have learned the hard way that no matter what they do or do not plan to do with consumer information, privacy matters. In part, that's because marketing has always been something of a black art. When an ad appears to speak to a consumer directly, of course, it's likely to be most effective. But that's also the moment when the creepy response kicks in. How did they know what I wanted, perhaps even before I did? Couple the lack of transparency of marketing generally with the shock of ...David Karp, who sold Tumblr to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, is one more in a line of twenty-somethings and even pre-twenty-somethings whose technology innovations have made them a fortune. We've seen this before. In the 1990s, young techies with purple hair, ponytails, and earrings (that was the men) disrupted boardrooms; in the 2000s, they wear hoodies. College dropouts such as Mark Zuckerberg have quickly created empires. Parents or future parents-in-law have lent their kitchen tables and garages, as Sergey ...Who sells your products or services? This may seem like a silly question, the answer being of course, the sales & marketing team. But increasingly, the most important person selling what you're offering is — your customer. More specifically, your customer advocates . And, as buyers increasingly expect to learn about products and services from their peers who are using them, companies are getting more creative at putting their happy customers in front of those buyers. The forms that this kind of ...Ever since Amazon's Price App appeared on the retail scene some 18 months ago, pundits have prophesized the demise of big-box retailers. There's no question that Amazon's innovation went right for the jugular of any volume- and price-focused retailer selling commodity goods like consumer electronics and household wares. Indeed, retailers from Best Buy and Target to Bed Bath & Beyond, PetSmart, and Toys R Us are in danger of becoming mere showrooms for Amazon and its ilk. But innovative retailers are ...Whether you are just graduating with a Bachelor's, MBA, or some other graduate degree , you have probably heard how hard it is to find a job . But before you to take any opportunity that comes your way, stop and think: Far worse than continuing to look for a while longer is having a job with a bad boss, who won't just make you miserable in the short term. In fact, a poor manager can have a seriously negative impact on your career . This is particularly true for your first job after graduation. Without a ...Most speakers dread the time slot right after lunch, with good reason. The nodding heads and half-mast eyelids are usually blamed on the energy-sapping process of digestion combined with a satisfied state of relaxation. However, published data indicate that 25% of the audience is losing the battle to stay awake for an additional reason; that's the percentage of people who suffer, at some level, from sleep-disordered breathing . They're not just experiencing a post-prandial lull. They are being drawn toward ...If your company is already well established and has smart management, it is likely that it will become a hybrid in the next ten years, blending its legacy business with a new business model that is rising to threaten it. Take Walmart, for example. After suffering several years of Amazon's online hegemony, Walmart responded with a hybrid approach. Merchandise ordered online can now be drop-shipped for same-day pickup at local stores. This and other creative solutions have driven over $9 billion of online ...Tim Cook performed brilliantly in front of Congress today. He was authoritative, in breathtaking command of his facts, as he always is, and brought a unique perspective to each response. Senator Levin was out for blood, but "No one laid a glove on him," as Phillip Emer DeWitt wrote for Fortune. He put his questioners to shame. His response to the question of whether Apple was violating basic rules of fairness was brilliant: "I am a fair person. Apple is a fair company. I would not administer [something ...As screens get increasingly getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, are we going to keep counting them? Not too long ago, I was asked to give a presentation on the state of digital media and how well brands are intersecting the worlds of marketing and technology. Prior to my closing keynote, there was a panel discussion about the state of media. One senior media executive was discussing the power of "a four screen world." I thought that he had made a mistake. I was familiar with the concept of three screens ...Most measures of creativity are based on the work of psychologist Joy Paul Guilford (1897-1987), who defined creativity as the ability to think differently along a number of clearly defined dimensions. Building on Guilford's work, psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance (1915-2003), probably the international leader in creativity research, developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which are used in the business world and in education to assess individuals' capacities for creativity. In the early ...Freek Vermeulen , associate professor at London Business School, explains how the newspapers improved sales by debunking an industry myth.In an impressively short time, Kickstarter has quickly become the go-to high-impact mashup of crowdsourcing sensibility and entrepreneurial endeavor. If you've got a genuinely creative idea — or even a " me, too with a twist " — Kickstarter's "crowd funding" platform offers a genuinely innovative way to finance creativity and innovation. Since its 2009 launch, Kickstarter claims that more than 4.1 million people have pledged over $619 million to fund over 41,000 projects. It's exciting. But ...The death of over 800 people in the collapse of Rana Plaza , a building with garment factories in Bangladesh, spurred widespread outrage over working conditions in offshore factories. In the search for blame, many commentators point to the absence of building codes, lack of workplace safety rules, and the greed of US corporations. Many of the solutions proposed are around paying people more to manufacture in the USA. But however well intentioned the ideas are, this is not the best use of one of the most ...In this time of hope and decorative mortarboards, we reached out to some of our favorite writers, asking them: What do graduates really need to know about the world of work? Their answers are below. Heidi Grant Halvorson Associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently . There will be obstacles, setbacks, challenges. Many things will be more difficult than you thought they'd be. The key to success ...As Yahoo goes through with its acquisition of Tumblr , CEO Marissa Mayer may have a user rebellion on her hands. The early reaction from the Tumblr community is not encouraging — blogs lit up with memes of crying babies and apocalyptic rants upon the announcement of the news. The uproar was bolstered by stories critical of Yahoo's earlier acquisitions , and fueled by rumors that Yahoo may introduce advertising to the popular blogging site. Amidst this uproar, Mayer can take a page from the book of ...Employees at semiconductor-chip-maker Intel recently devised a new chemistry process that reduced chemical waste by 900,000 gallons, saving $45 million annually. Another team developed a plan to reuse and optimize networking systems in offices, which cut energy costs by $22 million. The projects produced financial and environmental benefits, of course. But just as valuable is the company's ability to energize and empower front-line employees. New data shows that sustainability is an increasingly important ...Enjoy these cartoons from the June issue of HBR, and test your management wit in the HBR Cartoon Caption Contest at the bottom of this post . If we choose your caption as the winner, you will be featured in next month's magazine and win a free Harvard Business Review Press book. "It's not a requirement, but if you have a PhD in the arts or humanities, it's definitely a plus." Kaamran Hafeez "Most people prefer to keep their pencils and coffee in separate cups." Michael Shaw "Interns." Kaamran Hafeez "Oh, ...Design is a service, not a magic spell. There are designers who do it well, and those who do it poorly ; some produce profitable outcomes, and some waste money. More and more companies view design as an important strategic element of their business and are seeking partners to help them understand how it can help. If you're setting out to do so, you'll need to confront uncertainty about how to get the most value from the investment and carefully consider what you're setting out to achieve. An effective ...The annual 10-K report that JPMorgan Chase filed with the SEC in February includes a 13-page section on "Risk Factors." It's a lawyerly, exhaustive, exhausting rundown of all the things that could possibly weigh on the earnings of a giant global bank, from regulatory changes to loans going bad to a liquidity crisis to the possibility that "one or more of its employees causes a significant operational breakdown or failure." What's missing, though, is something like this: CEO Risk: Much of JPMorgan Chase's ...Generic drugs can be inexpensive and effective alternatives to their branded counterparts. But according to this devastating Fortune investigation , they can also be useless on a good day and deadly on a bad one — that is, if they were manufactured by Ranbaxy, an Indian drug maker. In this epic piece, Katherine Eban uncovers downright fraud in how generics were tested (or, rather, weren't) and exposes a corporate culture so steeped in greed and dysfunction that fistfights were known to break out ...We don't often think about the way we usually operate at work, whether we're performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time. But our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping our daily habits of mind and practice — our "standard work." Consider the experience of my friend Lynn Kelley , who joined Union Pacific Railroad , the largest railroad network in the United States with 46,000 employees, as vice ...The workplace has never been more global than today. But despite that, I often find the last thing on people's minds when doing international work is the global element. Instead, and often for good reason, people focus on concrete and pressing work details: finishing that PowerPoint deck, running the financials one more time, or planning the logistical elements of foreign travel. As a result, they tend to follow "gut" theories — what they assume to be true about adapting behavior across cultures. The ...Organizations have nearly perfected implementing the industrial model of managing work — the effort applied toward completing a task. For individuals, this model ensures that we know what we're supposed to do each day. For organizations, it guarantees predictability and efficiency. The problem with the model is that work is becoming commoditized at an increasing rate, extending beyond manual tasks into knowledge work, as data entry, purchasing, billing, payroll, and similar responsibilities become ...One of the dumbest corporate governance issues is whether to split the roles of Board Chair and CEO. That debate is now playing out on the front pages of business sections (print and online) as shareholders will decide next week in a nonbinding vote whether to take the chairman of the board title away from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon . This is a reprise, for the zillionth time, of the pointless push by governance types to call the senior director "chairman of the board" rather than "lead" or "presiding" ...An interview with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh , coauthors of the forthcoming article "The New Employer-Employee Compact." Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by May 24.Overcoming people's past perceptions of you isn't easy. When I launched my consulting business seven years ago, I was astonished to find — years later — that acquaintances and even friends hadn't kept up with my career transition. They'd ask about my past work in politics or nonprofit advocacy, oblivious to the changes that had been consuming my life. It wasn't their fault, however. These days, we all have thousands of Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections; it's just not realistic to keep up ...Listen to the language that any leader, consultant, or HR professional uses, and you'll hear them expound at length about how "we" need to change "them." That says it all: the fact is, no one likes to be changed, even if the change is ultimately beneficial. In his recent HBR blog post , Ron Ashkenas argues that the reason most change management initiatives fail is due to stunted managerial capability to implement change. He points out — correctly, I believe — that in many organizations the ...For millennia people have run by feel, an "art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain," says Christopher McDougall in his anthropological study of the topic. Many of us still run this way, of course, but for how much longer? Now we can lace up a pair of "smart" sneakers and instantly shift from running by feel to running by metrics. Guesses at how far and how fast are replaced by real time stats on pace and meters travelled. If you think you'll never make ...Writing under a pseudonym in the Financial Analysts Journal in 1960, mutual fund executive Jack Bogle made "The Case for Mutual Fund Management." Bogle took the track records of four leading mutual funds going back to 1930 and compared them to the performance of the Dow Jones Industrials. Not only had the four beaten the Dow, handily, but during the period from 1950 through 1956, for which the brokerage Arthur Wiesenberger & Co. (the Lipper/Morningstar of its day) had calculated mutual fund volatility, all ...Michael Watkins , author of The First 90 Days , explains how to secure early wins during a transition.If you want to provoke a vigorous debate, start a conversation on organizational culture. While there is universal agreement that (1) it exists, and (2) that it plays a crucial role in shaping behavior in organizations, there is little consensus on what organizational culture actually is, never mind how it influences behavior and whether it is something leaders can change. This is a problem, because without a reasonable definition (or definitions) of culture, we cannot hope to understand its connections to ...Unhappily shocked by Sputnik's unexpected 1957 success, President Eisenhower quickly pushed the Pentagon to establish the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) . Its ostensible mission: " to prevent technological surprise to the U.S. military, and to create surprises of its own ." Anticipating and enabling " technological surprise " has become even more challenging, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar recently told an MIT audience, because more people in more places have more access to more ...Humans engage with their world in two reciprocal ways: firstly as passionate participants and secondly as detached observers. As managers we cycle between these modes constantly. It's the mark of a great manager to be able to judge, in a complex situation, when and how to use each of them. Detached observation requires a certain maturity. Consider that we are born into the world immersed in context. We are embodied organisms, fine-tuned by evolution to garner cues to action from our surroundings. We pay ...The next time we hear about a bank or insurance company's "green program" — like using energy efficient light bulbs or operating out of a LEED Platinum building — we'll either scream or throw up. Don't get us wrong. We aren't "climate change deniers" and we believe that every individual and organization should use energy and other natural resources responsibly. Our problem with banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions that tout their commitment to sustainability by focusing ...At 7:30 on a sunny winter day in London, I settle into a conference room with the usual low-tech tools for high-stakes teamwork: Big white Post-It pads, Sharpies of every color, and a sense of urgency. Six top executives are midway through a 12-week assignment: Figure out how thousands of employees in their $8 billion company can absorb major changes—three acquisitions, a new global IT system, and a mandate to double revenue in three years—in minimal time. Their employer has hired me to ...Years ago, as a family physician in Louisiana, I made house calls. Certain patients were too sick or too hurt to get to my office. Sometimes a condition or injury had worsened, requiring my evaluation bedside. I would visit patients at home for the simplest of reasons: home was where they needed care. By the mid-1980s, the pressures of time and money prevented most physicians from making house calls anymore. But I kept seeing patients at home until I retired from my practice after 29 years. Home visits ...Much has been said about the virtues of failure — it's a learning opportunity, it happens to everyone, it's character-building. Failure is becoming some romanticized rite of passage, invoking images of young entrepreneurs burning the midnight oil and yelling "Eureka!" I can say from experience that any entrepreneur who fails repeatedly before finding the golden ticket had better be ready to coat themselves in protective armor, because your stakeholders may not be as understanding of your failures. ...Something astonishing is happening to the market for young, smart labor. The luster of big prestigious firms, particularly on Wall Street, has dimmed: " The End of Wall Street as They Knew It ," goes a recent New York Magazine headline. A few months ago at Davos, CEOs complained about the brain drain affecting their companies. Where are all these people going? Increasingly to start-ups, which seem to have captured the public imagination, particularly among millennials (ages 18 to 29). In an opinion piece , ...Just as America's visa rules enabled the rapid growth of India's information-technology companies over the last two decades, the Obama Administration's recent drive to reform immigration regulations could prove to be a turning point for them. Although the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Bill of 2013 — introduced four weeks ago by a bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators — seeks to increase the number of visas that the US government can grant highly-skilled ...Check out these new and forthcoming books from HBR Press: What You're Really Meant to Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential By Robert Steven Kaplan How do you create your own definition of success — and reach your unique potential? Building a fulfilling life and career can be a daunting challenge. It takes courage and hard work. Too often, we charge down a path leading to "success" as defined by those around us — and ultimately, are left feeling dissatisfied. Each of us is unique ...Earlier this month the Rolling Stones kicked off a brief 2013 tour celebrating their 50th anniversary. The Stones have always been aggressive in setting ticket prices, and it appears they've pushed too hard this time. With arena seats reaching $600 and general admission packages in the "Tongue Pit" (close to stage) topping out at $2,000, ticket sales are reportedly tepid. As a result, tour promoters are on the verge of a "19th Nervous Breakdown." I have a particular interest in this topic, because I attend ...More than 50 years ago, U.S. President John F. Kennedy captured the world's imagination when he said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." And thus, the term moonshot entered the lexicon as shorthand for "a difficult or expensive task, the outcome of which is expected to have great significance." The term has experienced a recent resurgence in the corporate world. Google's moonshots include ...With graduation season upon us, it's important to remember that as a manager you must often be a teacher too. A major part of your role is instruction — which means that you need to pay attention to the massive disruption going on in higher education and what it means for company learning. The most visible part of educational disruption is the proliferation of online learning through MOOCs , or massive, open, online courses. These programs, sponsored by elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, ...Reed Hastings has emerged from hiding. Well, maybe not hiding — he was still posting on Facebook and talking to the occasional magazine writer . But by his previous standards, the Netflix co-founder and CEO had been laying uncharacteristically low in the almost two years since the Great Qwikster Fiasco . It took a clear recovery from the company's missteps, as evidenced by a blowout earnings report last month , to convince the Netflix PR team (and/or Hastings himself) that it was time to unleash him. ...Here's a very strange thing: Europe's decades-long effort to reduce carbon emissions has been thrown into a shambles because utilities and manufacturers are exceeding their carbon-reduction targets. That's right. Exceeding them. It almost sounds like a joke, but it's not. Europe's $100 billion carbon market, an innovative force in the powerful carbon-reduction approach known as cap and trade, has ceased to function the way it's supposed to. The resulting chaos in Europe's energy and environmental policies ...The real enemy of salespeople today isn't their archrivals; it's no decision. That's according to the several hundred business-to-business salespeople I conducted recently . What is it that prevents a prospective customer from making a purchase even after they have conducted a lengthy evaluation process? The reasons may surprise you. Regardless of the prospective customers' confident demeanor, on the inside they are experiencing fear, uncertainty, and doubt while making their selection. The stress this ...Some of the best advice we have all got — be it while making big personal decisions or making critical business decisions — is the same: Follow your inner voice. Most of us have heeded that counsel, yet if we were asked to list the elements that enable better decision-making, we would cite experience, research, data, even polls — but never our inner voices. Logic precedes sixth sense because the known outnumber the unknown. When the reverse was true, people counted on extra-sensory cues ...The form of capitalism that has emerged in Britain is the textbook description of how to organize capital markets and corporate sectors. It features dispersed shareholders with powers to elect directors and remove them with or without cause, large stock markets, active markets for corporate control , a good legal system, strong investor protection, a rigorous anti-trust authority — the list goes on. It is what many countries around the world aspire to, what economists recommend, and what ...If you are sitting in a job interview and hear the words "dotted line reporting," you have just encountered the world of matrix management . In these organizational structures, you typically have two bosses: a "straight-line" direct boss, who is the person who prepares your performance review and decides on your raise; and a "dotted-line" boss, who may also assign you work but has less control over your review. It is easy to see how difficult a job could be if your two bosses aren't in agreement about your ...Here is a leadership lesson: Be selfish. Be very selfish. For this message to be an effective leadership tip, we need to understand what selfishness is. Selfishness is typically defined as "concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself." If someone hears that the CEO is being selfish, the thought that is likely to come to mind is, "The leader is maximizing personal financial rewards even at the cost of the company's interests." If that is the case, it is unfortunate and unacceptable. But there is a ...The board of directors is supposed to keep watch over the CEO, right? So if the CEO also serves as the chairman of the board, you're setting yourself up for trouble, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The checks and balances are inadequate. The CEO has the run of the place. He or she is free to set compensation, engage in empire building, and make decisions that destroy shareholder value. Arguments like these are embroidered on the banners of activist shareholders such as AFSCME , which is urging that ...Let's say you believed deeply in the importance of sleep health, and you wanted to start a movement to change people's attitudes and behavior. Maybe, like Arianna Huffington , it's a personal crisis that convinces you. Or maybe it's a key piece of research or two that opens your eyes, as it were, to the dangers of too little sleep: As a choice of cause, you could do a lot worse. Getting sufficient sleep is a need that every human on the planet shares. And for many people, the ability to do that is ...Last week Apple's Tim Cook made fleeting reference to "new product categories." Bloomberg West called it " tantalizing ." There are a couple of candidates in Apple's "big thing" category. One is an iWatch, but I think the one to monitor is the other, Apple TV. The current Apple TV, as it stands, is a set top box that enables an end-run around the cable companies and lets us pipe movies and TV into our living rooms. But an Apple-produced television has the potential to be so much more. As I've written in my ...It seems that everyone is freaking out about teens abandoning social media sites like Facebook. By "everyone" I mean advertisers. They’re racking their brains trying to figure out why it’s happening. If you’re puzzled too, read this lovely piece in Medium by Cliff Watson , who argues that the number one reason kids don't need Facebook is that they "literally don't need Facebook." After running through a host of theories as to why, including the fact that parents (ew) and even grandparents are on ...As a senior professional in financial services — an industry with comparatively few women in the executive ranks — I've spent a lot of time thinking about why there aren't more women at the top-most levels of companies . I've read the studies and heard the theories that women don't network well ; don't have the "vision thing" ; communicate too passively ; don't ask for bigger jobs and the top clients ; and have fewer sponsors who are willing to use political capital to advocate for them the way ...Life has never been more predictable. Yelp provides an early-warning system for dining out, by helping us avoid bad restaurants and alerting us to must-try items at good ones. Facebook lets us investigate a potential romantic interest before the first date. Turn-by-turn instructions from Google Maps prevent us from ever getting lost. The same thing is happening in marketing organizations. "Big Data" is the latest buzzword in our industry. Data-rich practices such as econometric modeling, analytics and ...One of the dilemmas of firms in rapidly transforming environments is that their ownership structure may get in the way of making tough decisions. Investors in publicly traded companies are understood to desire stable, predictable earnings and growth. But such expectations are unrealistic in many industries. As noted management expert Geoffrey Moore told me with respect to high-velocity competition, "I'm not sure you ever want to be in the public markets." The problems with public markets and ...A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers. I marveled at these courageous men and women who woke before dawn, endured freezing water, paddled through barreling waves, and even risked shark attacks, all for the sake of, maybe, catching an epic ride. After about 15 minutes, it was easy to tell the surfers apart by their style of surfing, their handling of the board, their skill, and their playfulness. What really struck me though, was what ...An interview with Heidi Grant Halvorson and E. Tory Higgins , authors of Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World to Power Success and Influence . For more, see the article Do You Play to Win--or to Not Lose? Download this podcast A written transcript will be available by May 17.Big Data and Analytics could be the twin forces driving innovation in Asia—one provides information while the other sifts through it for precious insight. In Asia, the applications are endless: Forecasting the revenues of a new business unit; pinpointing bottlenecks in the regional supply chain; even searching for niches in unwieldy consumer markets. But in a world of uber-statistics and change, how can companies develop the capabilities to truly distinguish between signal and noise, nuggets and the ...Much like newspapers, conventional advertising agencies are becoming irrelevant. When one person with a wireless connection can be an agency, a media company, or even a manufacturer, traditional advertising organizations have to change their culture, processes, structure, talent policies, resources, and even their business and revenue models in order to embrace the power of open systems being fueled by digital connectivity. The old agency businesses may still have time to correct their course, but they ...GE, perhaps more than any other major company, is dedicated to the use of data visualization as a key part of its marketing and communications efforts. Stemming from last month's Insight Center on visualizing data , I spoke with Linda Boff, GE's executive director of global brand marketing, about the benefits and challenges of this approach. An edited version of our conversation is below. What's the history of data visualization at GE? How did your strategy around it develop? GE specializes in complex ...Disclaimer: It's probably not a good idea to read this before you eat. I still remember how it felt when, as a medical student, I drained my first abscess in a patient. We called the procedure "I & D" which stands for "Incision and Drainage" (I told you not to read this just before you eat). When you do an I & D, you locate what is the most protruding and bulging part of the abscess, wipe it off with alcohol, than pierce it with a scalpel. At that point the pus comes out first, followed by any blood. After ...Recently, the marketing director for a tech start-up told me that her CEO was furiously drafting job descriptions for a half-dozen summer interns. She was planning to bring a small army of youngsters on board to help push her business into overdrive this summer. As the director of marketing looked at her CEO quizzically, she asked, "you know you need to manage all those interns, right?" Interns can be a great addition to your team, but beware of the well-meaning twenty-year-old who lands in your lap ...We knew that the Internet would bring with it a whole wave of new media disruption. We were unprepared for just how massive the disruption has been. You needn't look any farther than this one staggering statistic to understand the scale of change: Google's advertising revenue is larger than that of the entire print industry's revenue . In the past short while, we have seen a rise in new ways for advertisers to connect with consumers like never before. We're also seeing an increasing amount of media budgets ...So is the best man for the job a woman? Research by Hay Group, culled from its 17,000-person behavioral competency database in 2012, finds that when it comes to empathy, influence, and the ability to manage conflicts in the executive level, women show more skill than men. Specifically, women are more likely to show empathy as a strength, demonstrate strong ability in conflict management, show skills in influence, and have a sense of self-awareness. "Women often face barriers throughout their careers that ...World economies are unstable, making it increasingly difficult to lead a business over the past few years. The uncertainty that business leaders face today is palpable. Some of the news is good, some is bad, but it is altogether uncertain and seemingly random. On one hand, there are wars, terror, market crashes, bailouts, budget crises, cliffs, and sequesters. Yet we also have higher corporate profits, positive consumer sentiment, and low interest rates. This is part of the reason that the stock market, ...Any business trying to sell its products profitably must have some idea of what sales and hence revenue would be at different prices. Suppose we double our prices. Sales will fall, but will margins go up so much that it is worth it? Suppose we halve our prices. Margins will fall, but will sales go up so much that it is worth it? In making these judgments, a business might use historical data or simply guess by adding a mark-up over costs. But there is a better way to learn the structure of demand, one that ...Over the past 20 years, no group has endured greater pain and humiliation within organizations than mid-level managers (MLMs — managers from two levels below the CEO down to the line managers). Before the IT revolution, MLMs wielded genuine power within companies, acting as gatekeepers of crucial data, financials, and intelligence. Then, automation and the Web put senior executives in touch with their own front lines — and handed many MLMs their pink slips. MLMs who remained were labeled ...Henry Beyer walked up to a Mini Cooper in the city parking lot across the street from his office in downtown Houston. He waved his brand-new VillageCar card near the door handle and got in. "It looks like someone left something behind," his colleague Tony Cummins said, reaching into the back and picking up a pair of socks. He laughed; Henry grimaced. The two were executives of Beacon Car Rental, one of the industry's most established and respected brands. Henry was the senior vice president of operations. ...Graduation season is upon us — and that means approximately 700,000 U.S. students will be receiving master's degrees and another 150,000 or so will be getting their doctorates. For some, the path forward is clear: the math experts will be snapped up by hedge funds, the software engineers will have their pick of start-ups, and elite investment banks and consultancies will duke it out for the top MBAs. But a significant number of those students will fling off their mortarboards only to find themselves ...In the data world today, "big" dominates. But sometimes you don't need big. You need a small dose of exactly the right data. Data that bear precisely on the question at hand, that you understand deeply, and that you can trust. If such data are already at hand, great. But frequently they are not. And then, nothing beats a well-conceived, -designed, - controlled, -executed, and -analyzed experiment. Companies need to make sure experimentation is included in their "data toolkits," learn when to use it, and ...Robert Steven Kaplan , author of What You're Really Meant to Do , explains how to reach your unique potential.Anyone who has served on a board of directors can appreciate that each board has its own characteristic rhythm, social rules and level of effectiveness. I've been advising boards and management teams for 25 years as a consultant and C-Suite executive, and have served on several corporate boards, and can attest that it's long been a puzzle to me what exactly makes a board effective. To try to answer the question, I went back to school. As part of my PhD research , I interviewed directors at 22 small- to ...Although the U.S. is a highly developed country, the US government's work/family policies have not changed since 1993,when the Family and Medical Leave Act ( FMLA ) passed. We are the only developed country without any required paid parental leave. (FMLA entitles employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave with an equivalent position available on return.) Even so, most large companies provide six weeks of paid leave, usually covered by a short-term disability insurance plan. Such insurance only works economically ...Speaking at the recent Global Philanthropy Forum , Toyin Saraki — founder and president of the WellBeing Foundation Africa — articulated her evolving approach to giving. Whereas her Nigerian parents tended to give indiscriminately to poor people, with religion as the driving motivator, Saraki has embraced a more structured, purpose-driven approach to giving. "I didn't take it up from the point of giving money," Saraki explained. "I took it up from data. Facts." Saraki's approach is emblematic ...Your palms are sweaty. You stumble over your words. You don't seem to be getting a clear message across. You look around the table — everyone is more senior than you — both in age and title. You wonder if you'll ever be taken seriously. Sound familiar? If so, you are among many who experience what we call the "grey hair complex." The grey hair complex is a self-induced state of intimidation in the presence of more senior executives. It often begins with the false conviction that you would have ...Currently in the business world we are witnessing something like the epic collision of two galaxies — a rapid convergence of two very unlike systems that will cause the elements of both to realign. It's all thanks to the Internet of Things . If you are not familiar with the term, the Internet of Things refers to a dramatic development in the internet's function: the fact that, even more than among people, it now enables communication among physical objects. By 2015, according to my own firm's ...Each one of us holds a set of beliefs and attitudes — a mindset — that determines how we interpret and respond to situations. That mindset shapes how we interact with others, and therefore it also affects the people we work with — in ways both subtle and profound. A person with a distrustful mindset, for example, views situations at work as competitive and acts to advance his own interest at others' expense by politicking: shifting allegiances, taking credit, assigning blame, withholding ...The benefits of a strong corporate culture are both intuitive and supported by social science. According to James L. Heskett , culture "can account for 20-30% of the differential in corporate performance when compared with 'culturally unremarkable' competitors." And HBR writers have offered advice on navigating different geographic cultures , selecting jobs based on culture , changing cultures , and offering feedback across cultures , among other topics. But what makes a culture? Each culture is unique and ...Groundbreaking ideas are no longer a luxury when success is contingent upon an organization's ability to adapt, innovate, and improve. We need look no further than Kodak, Sears, or Sony for validation that status-quo thinking is the fast-track to failure. How, then, can organizations break free of conventional thinking to spark creativity? The first step is to consider the way you have always done business — and stop. Failing to do so not only prevents truly innovative thinking; it also ensures ...Nobody would deny that the world has become more complex during the past decades. With digitization, the interconnectivity between people and things has jumped by leaps and bounds. Dense networks now define the technical, social, and economic landscape. I remember well when the idea of applying complexity science to management was first being eagerly discussed in the 1990s. By then, for example, scholars at the University of St. Gallen had developed a management model based on systems thinking. Popular ...Jamie Dimon, the perpetually embattled chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, likes to say, "Do the right thing." This time, Dimon is doing the wrong thing. Dimon's latest battle is with his own shareholders. Investors in the bank have proposed splitting Dimon's job and naming someone else chairman. Although the vote wouldn't be binding, it would be difficult, to say the least, for Dimon to remain as chairman were his own investors to vote against him. The bank's management has been lobbying big ...It's happened to every founding CEO. You're in a meeting — with fellow founders, potential partners, VCs, or even just friends — and you're asked that simple question that often feels like the hardest one: "How are things going?" "Great!" you respond Cue, awkward pause. Where do you go from there? As a CEO, I have to answer a lot of tough questions: What's our 5- and 10-year vision? Where do we hire next? Should we focus on existing products, or launch our next one? But for the open-ended "How ...The business model canvas — as opposed to the traditional, intricate business plan — helps organizations conduct structured, tangible, and strategic conversations around new businesses or existing ones. Leading global companies like GE, P&G, and Nestlé use the canvas to manage strategy or create new growth engines, while start-ups use it in their search for the right business model. The canvas's main objective is to help companies move beyond product-centric thinking and towards business model ...Does anyone else find it strange that the debate heating up in the US around gender imbalances in the workplace is overwhelmingly a conversation among ... women? This constant frame of gender as a "women's issue" is one of the big obstacles to progress — in both countries and companies. Is there any doubt that women are where they are today in part thanks to the male partners — at home and at work — that accompanied them throughout the last half century's revolutions? I have rarely met a ...There is a marked dissonance between CIOs and the C-suite — a fact that we uncovered in new research conducted with HBR, The Economist, CEB, and TNS Global. We have identified the problem , which is that CEOs believe that the CIO does not understand or help with the CEO's issues and the needs of the business. We have explored the dramatic business changes that have contributed to this dissonance, and described how the enterprise is adapting in order to keep up with the changes. Now, I'd like to ...The most useful question I've learned to ask people about analytics is, "What do you plan to do with them?" By far the most interesting answer I've gotten comes from basketball superstar LeBron James: Hire Hakeem Olajuwon . Until his championship 2011-2012 season, NBA cognoscenti viewed James as a phenomenally gifted loser. He could do everything but win when it mattered most. No one doubted his desire or ability, but they demonstrably weren't enough. You don't have to care about sports to realize that ...One of the most inspiring things to come out of the horrendous recent events in Boston and West, Texas, was the outpouring of help from ordinary people. In Boston, people ran toward the blast site to help victims, or opened their doors to stranded marathon runners so they could rest, make calls if needed, and then gave them rides to wherever they needed to go. In West, firemen who had never seen such a horrific explosion walked into the flames to try and save lives — in some cases losing their own. ...Most of the 89,000 leadership books offered on Amazon.com focus on traditional interpersonal leadership: the relationships between leaders and followers. Interpersonal leadership sets up an expectation that leaders must be in dialog or at least in view of their followers. Yet this style of interaction is less likely as work stretches across locations and company boundaries as we telecommute, crowdsource, and take on joint ventures. Modern leadership may be as much about facilitating strategy through ...Tough Supply-Chain Choices It's been a little more than a week since a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 400 people. Suddenly, companies and consumers across the world are finding themselves in a moral quandary: How can you make (or purchase) clothing cheaply without compromising supply-chain ethics? There's a lot to read on this topic, from information about companies whose products are made in Bangladesh to companies’ attitudes about gestures of contrition . One company, ...You may not know this, but Big Data has a little brother. And together, Big and Little Data are far more powerful than Big Data alone. Big Data is what organizations know about people — be they customers, citizens, employees, or voters. Data is aggregated from a large number of sources, assembled into a massive data store, and analyzed for patterns. The results are more accurate predictions, more targeted communications, and more personalized services. Big Data is what enables banks to predict credit ...In a targeted effort to appeal to Gen Y, Pizza Hut offered free pizzas for life to any attendee of last October's presidential debate who dared ask President Obama or Governor Romney, "Sausage or Pepperoni?" Outraged by the mockery to the democratic process, millennials shamed the popular company across national outlets. The backlash against the campaign shocked Pizza Hut and forced it to backpedal . Pizza Hut's campaign unwittingly shut the door on thousands of customers who were either: 1) people within ... |