Featured Guest: Peter Cappelli, Wharton School professor and coauthor of Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order. Download this podcast... More »
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Not every critic loved the 2009 film Duplicity, starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. The British newspaper The Telegraph complained of a lack of "any sexual charge" between the stars, and a plot whose complexity is "sometimes overdone." Slate called it muddled, and quibbled that a film should make "actual narrative sense." But seemingly everyone who has seen Duplicity loves its opening sequence. The scene is a rain-slicked tarmac, with two corporate jets facing each... More »
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As a public speaker, I'm always looking for ways to engage my audience. One old trick — which I never use, precisely because it is so old — is to challenge executives and entrepreneurs to imagine their obituary in the New York Times. What impact did you have? What contribution did you make? What kind of life did you lead? As it turns out, this audience-participation exercise requires a special act of imagination for women.... More »
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Here's an idea for your next performance review: Do what the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies do for their annual evaluation by the board of directors — write a self-assessment that helps guide the conversation. What you write will be a valuable tool for the performance review and, even better, a custom guide for your own development. Ongoing self-assessment is one of the five zones of strength that leaders have and non-leader managers don't, according... More »
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Five years from now, will we look back on the dismal unemployment that we're suffering on Labor Day 2010 and see this year as the good old days? Within today's official unemployment statistics hides the true cost of decades of economic mismanagement: Historically unprecedented levels of unemployment and underemployment. The Great Recession that officially ended in 2009 has left millions of Americans without jobs for longer than the worst economic period in modern history —... More »
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Last year it was the staycation. This year it's the digital fast. "How I unplugged" — from Twitter, from a Blackberry, from the Internet, or at the behest of the New York Times — is the new "what I did on my summer vacation." As people trade stories about how they survived, or even thrived, offline, I'm troubled by the underlying narrative, that our ability to unplug is necessary to prove that we're not Internet... More »
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People make business plans for all sorts of reasons — to attract funding, evaluate future growth, build partnerships, or guide development. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these plans are usually out of date by the time the printer ink dries. Business moves fast: the product's features morph, new competitors emerge, or the economic climate shifts. When these changes occur, many people just throw their business plans out the window. For a plan to be truly... More »
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by Laurence Prusak (Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and I are at work on a book on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organizational, not just individual, strength. Over the next few months, we'll each be authoring posts in this blog to test-drive ideas and invite input as the research progresses.) We're being treated to two new memoirs, one just out and the other due in early November, reflecting on some of the most... More »
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Accept and embrace it: summer is almost over. After all, Labor Day is next week and doesn't that mean it's time to get back to work, stop going to the pool, and start planning winter vacation? Doesn't it mean a last barbecue, a neighborhood softball game, and a final long weekend before autumn arrives? But what about celebrating "Labor"? Isn't it called "Labor Day"? When my kids were young I remember one of them posing... More »
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Analytics are now king. And they should be. (If you're not already convinced, read Competing on Analytics, one of the best HBR articles I've ever read). It's so much easier to collect and digest numbers on your business than it was even ten years ago. No less than 5% of your payroll should go toward data analysis. Who is your customer? What is she buying? How often? After what event(s)? Which version of the product... More »
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Before rolling out an enterprise innovation, Tesco (the UK's supremely innovative supermarketer) insists that it must meet three conditions. The first is that innovation must in some way be better for customers; second is that it should ultimately prove cheaper for Tesco; and, finally, the innovation must make things simpler for staff. While doing work with the company a decade ago, I quickly found Tesco's innovators had little trouble arguing their proposals would be better... More »
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Through Imagining the Future of Leadership, a symposium at the Harvard Business School and accompanying blog series, expert thinkers gathered to investigate what is necessary today to develop the leaders we need for tomorrow. Featuring: Bill George, Professor, Harvard Business School and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Medtronic Evan Wittenberg, Head of Global Leadership Development, Google, Inc. Dr. Ellen Langer, Professor, Harvard University Andrew Pettigrew, Professor, Sïad Business School, University of Oxford... More »
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Dartmouth College graduates are generally big supporters of our most famous alumni — Theodor Geisel (Class of 1925) known better as Dr. Seuss. On Sunday evening, my son pleasantly surprised me by picking one of my favorite Dr. Seuss stories, The Sneetches, from the shelf for his bed time reading. Reading the story helped me visualize why a company I recently visited was approaching innovation the wrong way. For those of you who don't remember... More »
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Do you remember those heady days of the late 1990s, in the heat of the dotcom boom? As a refresher, here are a few fashionable thoughts from that era: Startups can easily overthrow corporate behemoths."Modern" management is no longer relevant. Corporate executives need to operate like venture capitalists.Corporations are obsolete. In the new era, everyone is a free agent. Go ahead, destroy your business. If you don't, someone else will. Proclamations of profound transformation rolled... More »
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We are delighted when we get approached by readers to discuss our latest book, The Power of Pull. Based on our encounters with readers, we see four themes resonating deeply. Feeling more stress? You are not alone. We all feel increasingly stressed. This stands in stark contrast to the daily news headlines focused on the early signs of an economic recovery. Is this stress all in our minds? The 2009 Shift Index for the U.S.... More »
