HBR Blog Network

Jeffry Liker, in his recent HBR blog post, minimizes the scope of quality problems arising from Toyota's hyper growth over the last decade. He sees those who believe Toyota has serious quality/safety problems as uninformed. He accuses them of contributing to a "growing mythology," viewing their "faulty generalizations" as "laughable." It is hard to square his views with the following three statements. In January 2008, Chris Tinto, then Toyota's Vice President for Technical and regulatory... More »

The other night I went to see Mark Halperin and John Heilemann talk about their 2008 campaign bestseller, Game Change, at Harvard's Kennedy School. They were very sharp and entertaining, and they persuaded me to buy the book (the $8.61 Kindle price was a factor, too). They were also touchier than I would have expected about the criticism their book has received for its focus on the trivial and the personal. Their defense was that... More »

Over the past few months there has been growing anger and frustration about outsized Wall Street bonuses awarded by institutions that were rescued by taxpayer funds. At the core of this anger is the feeling that the pursuit of big payoffs caused bankers to develop complex products and take big risks which ultimately caused the financial system to crash — and if this dynamic is not curbed, it will happen again. At the same time,... More »

Should Sally slowly build her case for evidence-based management or does she need to take a more aggressive approach? Editors' Note: This fictional case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you'd like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your email address. Sally Randolph rose from her swivel chair and walked over to the Norman Rockwell print... More »

Sure, it's great to hang out at a hot-ticket business conference such as TED, Pop!Tech, or the annual meetings of The Clinton Global Initiative and the World Economic Forum. But these gatherings are steadily evolving beyond the standard conference model. They're going from feeding brain candy to a largely passive audience to creating and engaging communities to accomplish tangible results. These conferences have year-round programs for their exclusive lists of attendees, to encourage the cross-pollination... More »

Toyota has announced three major recalls covering a total of eight million vehicles globally since October 2009. The recalls are for defects that have been associated with 52 fatalities and 38 injuries so far. Not surprisingly, the business media and notable Toyota experts are starkly pessimistic. We looked at 108 Wall Street Journal articles discussing Toyota during February, 2010, and found that 106 were negative to Toyota. In a recent column by Dennis Seid, Jeffrey... More »

After having nearly destroyed one of the world's most recognizable and successful brands, Tiger Woods got one thing right in his extraordinary mea culpa: "My real apology," he said, "will come from my behavior over time." I couldn't help thinking that marketers should take that to heart in a world where corporate responsibility will increasingly be a critical factor in competitive advantage. In a previous post I sketched the marketing "performance enhancers" that CEOs and... More »

A shift in leadership development has occurred. While it used to be that American and European companies had cornered the market on developing the leaders of tomorrow, our latest round of research shows that Europe is now second to organizations in Asia Pacific, with India making the fastest progress. And while US companies still excel at leadership development, companies from South America are developing homegrown models that chip away at North America's dominance of the... More »

This post is part of HBR's Health Care Innovations Insight Center. If ever a field needed a makeover, it's medicine. Chaotic, expensive, inefficient, and often ineffective, health care is dying for innovation. There's no shortage of clever ideas, but, as we will be discussing online in the coming weeks, barriers to innovation — everything from heart-stopping price tags for new technologies to doctors' famous crankiness about doing things differently — are just as abundant. Here... More »

What is an economy? Is it just rivers of money and stuff, flowing back and forth between consumer and producer, resting on a bed of information? That's more or less the way we've conceptualized it. It's why economists often say that banks and funds make up the "financial economy," while industries that make stuff are the "real economy." When we conceptualize an economy that way, the implicit goal for both "producers" and "consumers" is merely... More »

My earliest memories from childhood are of brushing my teeth and of looking up at a cracked ceiling. In the first my dad explains how I can tell if my teeth are clean: I'll hear squeaking, like birds chirping, when I run my finger across the tops of them. In the second I ask my parents why we're moving, and they point to the fractures in the plaster overhead. Out of the all the moments... More »

What's the biggest emerging market of them all? I'll give you a hint: The answer isn't geographic but demographic. The answer is...women. Women leaders are the new power behind the global economy, proclaims Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's announcement of its second annual webcast (which I moderated) celebrating International Women's Day. In developing nations, women's earned income is growing at 8.1 percent, compared to 5.8 percent for men. Globally, women control nearly $12 trillion of the $18... More »

Two out of three cheers for International Women's Day (IWD), celebrated on March 8. My first cheer is loud and enthusiastic: High fives for women's diversity — all types of women in all types of careers! A 21-gun salute for women rising in the military! Multiple Olympic 10s for women athletes and athletic women leaders who perform high-wire balancing acts, juggling work and family! Let's raise a glass of vitamin water to womanpower, "womanomics," and... More »

This post is a response to Pankaj Ghemawat's article "Finding Your Strategy in the New Landscape" The 2007-2008 global financial crisis has fast-forwarded a long term restructuring of the global economies that was in motion before the crisis. Rather than reverting to a pre-crisis mean, the global economy has embarked on a bumpy, multi-year journey to a "new normal." In the process, we are shifting from a uni-polar world to a multi-polar one— and doing... More »

In my last post, I asked commenters to volunteer their theories about why some business ideas take off and others don't, and promised to reward the winner with a copy of my new book Analytics at Work. There were lots of comments, and I have read them carefully. (The process was painfully similar to grading student papers!) I'll reveal the winner below, but reading all the comments made me reflect on what makes for a... More »