If managers always acted on their values, heroic whistle-blowing might never be required. But, research shows, people don't think that doing the right thing is part of their jobs.
Because of high turnover, CFOs have less and less time to learn the ropes--yet they're shouldering more and more responsibility. A reallocation of time is in order.
The most dubious business plans can appear solid, even smart, when illustrated with snappy circle-and-arrow graphics. Look closely, though, and you'll see that many of these diagrams are full of it.
When a crisis forces outside directors to navigate major changes, investors and directors must adopt new roles. The case of Royal Dutch/Shell provides useful lessons.
The best solution to the looming shortage of nurses and doctors may be to move chronic disease monitoring and care out of hospitals and into people's homes.
As surveys highlight, most senior business executives are dissatisfied with the value their organizations are deriving from investments in information technology. What is often forgotten is that IT in itself has no inherent value. This value must be unlocked, and only business executives and users can do this. Although most IT investments are often accompanied by a technology implementation plan, few organizations ever construct a plan focused on realizing the business benefits. Explores how organizations can unlock business value from their IT investments by adopting a two-stage view of implementation. This model distinguishes between "problem-based" interventions and "innovation-based" interventions. Unlocking business value from IT investments is a journey not a destination and this journey requires careful planning.
To manage the business cycle to gain competitive advantage over rivals, firms must develop a "business cycle orientation." Such an orientation must include five important capabilities: the "business cycle literacy" of the top management team; the skillful deployment of various forecasting tools; an organizational structure that facilitates the timely acquisition, processing, and dissemination of macroeconomic information; application of a set of business cycle-sensitive management principles; and an organizational culture that supports business cycle-sensitive management activities. Successfully managing the business cycle does not necessarily depend on the ability to forecast its movements accurately. Rather, all that is required in many cases is for a firm to strategically or tactically respond more swiftly than its rivals.
Major shifts in the business environment can make whole investment strategies obsolete. To anticipate such shifts, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies uses scenario analysis, a method it pioneered three decades ago. Given that most investments are irreversible, scenario planning can be combined with real options analysis to help identify options in the future; help time the decision to exercise a real option; and provide an important input in the process of evaluating real options.
Marketing tends to view technology as a means to meeting customer needs and desires. This view has led some marketers to focus perhaps too exclusively on the customer to the detriment of a deep understanding of technology and its interaction with society. Drawing on the ideas of the philosophers Heidegger and Popper, this article contends that technology is more than a means to the end of satisfying consumer needs and wants--it is an active force that frequently escapes the control of the marketer. Explores the ways in which technologies, firms, customers, and society interact and suggests how firms might adopt different strategies toward technology to take advantage of these emergent interactions.
While many researchers have made contributions to the now extensive literature on service quality, there is much less research on what constitutes delight in service quality and how organizations can delight customers. Examines the differences between customer satisfaction and customer delight, notably the benefits of delighting rather than merely satisfying customers. Describes how to delight customers and outlines how to implement a successful customer delight program as well as how to measure customer delight. Also discusses the potential pitfalls of doing so.
The idea of the garage entrepreneur--who starts businesses in garages (or basements or dorm rooms or kitchens)--is a highly popular contemporary legend, but not quite accurate. Academic research now claims that entrepreneurs are often organizational products: They typically acquire confidence, business knowledge, and social connections via prior experience at existing organizations. These psychological and social resources aid entrepreneurs in forming companies. Although the belief of the garage entrepreneur contributes to the preservation of the American ideals of opportunity and upward social mobility, it offers misleading insights to would-be entrepreneurs because it suggests an undersocialized view of the entrepreneurial process. Individuals, companies, policy makers, and business schools will benefit from recasting the garage as a contemporary legend and focusing instead on the lessons that can be derived from an understanding of entrepreneurs as organizational products.
All companies value leadership--some of them enough to invest dearly in cultivating it. But few management teams seem to value one engine of leadership development that is right under their noses, churning out the kind of talent they need most. It's the complicated, overburdened but very rich lives of their minority managers. Minority professionals--particularly women of color--are called upon inordinately to lend their skills and guidance to activities outside their jobs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who heads the Center for Work-Life Policy, and her co-authors, Carolyn Buck Luce of Ernst & Young and Cornel West of Princeton, present new research on the extent to which minority professionals take on community service and other responsibilities outside the workplace and more than their share of recruiting, mentoring, and committee work within the workplace. These invisible lives, argue the authors, can be a source of competitive strength if companies can learn to recognize and further cultivate the cultural capital they represent. But it's hard to convince minority professionals that their employer respects and values their off-hours responsibilities. A lack of trust keeps many people from revealing much about their personal lives. The authors outline four ways companies can leverage hidden skills: Develop a new level of awareness of minority professionals' invisible lives; appreciate the outsize burdens these professionals carry and try to lighten them; build trust by putting teeth into diversity goals; and, to finish the job of leadership development, help minorities reflect on their off-hours experiences, extract and generalize the lessons, and apply what's been learned in other settings.
Hema Ravichandar, head of human resources, was given a new and aggressive milestone to reach: ensure Infosys is on the Top 10 lists of both Best Performing Companies and Best Employers by 2007. No large organization had ever been able to achieve this distinction because of the tension between the need to control costs for financial performance and the expenditure required for employee satisfaction. Ravichandar was aware of the humbling experiences of the past that made Infosys cognizant of the difficulties ahead as it transitioned from a small to a large company.