A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.
David McCullough, historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman and John Adams, on what the history of leadership means for managers today.
A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.
A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.
The authors argue that strategy can be defined and created using a simple framework that entails answering five questions - the same five questions, no matter the type, size or context of the organization.
Thriving employees are less susceptible to stress and burnout - and much healthier, overall. When employees are thriving, they are not satisfied with the status quo, and behave proactively to co-create their job environment in ways that enable more thriving. The authors describe three individual and three organizational enablers of thriving, including providing decision making discretion and minimizing incivility.
The search for the secrets of high performance organizations has been intense, yielding countless best-selling books and imitators in the process. However, a newer quest has emerged on the organizational front, for something that cannot be as easily imitated: high integrity. Before you can increase integrity in your organization, the author argues, you must familiarize yourself with the obstacles in your way. These obstacles include greed, fear and rationalization. Once all of this is taken into account, he provides four concrete steps for leaders to take.
It's a fact of organizational life: some employees are more talented than others. Douglas Ready explains how to retain your 'high-potentials' (HiPos), who represent the top three-to- five per cent of your organization's workforce on two key dimensions: performance and living the company's values. He also discusses some of the downsides of being labeled a HiPo.
The good news is, more and more workplaces are embracing flexible work arrangements. The bad news is, employees aren't. The authors explain why this is, and delve into the 'class' issues associated with workplace flexibility. They also show that employees classified as 'professionals', 'the working poor' and the 'missing middle' face significantly-different challenges in their quest for work/life balance.
All day long, we are creating frames for what we see, hear, and experience, and those frames both inform and limit the way we think. In most cases, we don't even consider these frames-we just assume we are looking at the world with the proper set of lenses. The author shows how mastering the ability to reframe problems can unlock a vast array of solutions to problems big and small.
Levels of stress, exhaustion, and burnout have become increasingly problematic for employees and organizations alike. Understanding how employees recover from the demands of work is therefore increasingly important. The author focuses on a little-discussed area of resource renewal: within-workday breaks. He argues that not all work breaks are created equal: an individual's personality and job design determine whether a break will lead to increased productivity or not.
Harvard Professor and Thinkers50 member Amy Edmondson introduces the concept of 'teaming' and discusses the critical importance of embracing it and adopting a mindset of 'execution as learning'. She defines teaming and also indicates the importance of continuous learning to effective teaming.
Repatriation of the previously off-shored call center operations of the US Airlines was being completed in the summer of 2011. Reservation Director of the East Region considered this to be an opportunity to high quality and faster service to the "preferred customers" by establishing a preferred customer desk at the Winston-Salem Center. The headquarters has asked the director to provide an in-depth analysis of the proposal's costs and benefits before it can be approved. The wider question of the case is to cogitate whether this initiative has merit. Is it likely to provide enough advantages (both quantifiable such as shorter average wait times and non-quantifiable such as the perception by the customers of the service quality) to justify any additional personnel costs? The call centers operate 24/7 and experience varying call volumes. This causes the required number of agents to economically achieve some targeted average wait times to greatly fluctuate during each time increment (e.g., each hour). Therefore the case, more narrowly, focuses on the challenges of (1) the fundamental trade-off between wait times and agent utilization; and (2) scheduling of the start times of the standard 8-hour shifts to provide adequate coverage during each period. The Instructor's manual provides extensive analyses based on multiserver queuing models and linear programming of these technical issues. In addition, the case provides rich opportunities to discuss human resource strategies and their role in securing competitive advantage.
The belief that leaders should find the "best" industries and move their company into them is misguided; in almost every case, a bigger opportunity lies in rising to the top of the industry you're in.
New research concludes that publicly traded Chinese companies in safety-regulated industries with C-suite executives who previously served in a high-level government position suffer worker fatalities at five times the rate of "unconnected" companies.
The traditional marketing mix--product, place, price, promotion--yields narrow strategies that are increasingly at odds with the imperative to deliver solutions. Marketers need to adopt a new framework focused on solutions, access, value, and education--SAVE.
New research from the UK shows that people are less likely to choose the highest-rated option in a quality ranking when it appears first on the list. So which option will they probably be drawn to? One that falls in the middle.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on his deep conviction that business leadership should not be only about maximizing profits for shareholders, but also about deliberately pursuing the many other positive impacts good businesses can have on their stakeholders.
Robert B. Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank Group who has held senior posts at the State and Treasury departments and the White House, offers seven points of advice for private sector executives who are invited to take high-level government posts.
A study from BBDO and AOL offers important insights to advertisers hoping to reach consumers through their smartphones. For starters, "mobile" doesn't always mean on the go; most smartphone use happens at home. And users' number one activity isn't shopping or socializing but relaxing.