The globalization of the field of human resource management (HRM) has led to some common changes in international HRM practices. On the surface, this indicates a degree of convergence. Deeper examination, however, reveals a different picture. Many differences in HRM remain due to a variety of limiting factors, ranging from economic stages of development to business strategies, national culture, and fixed enterprise mindsets. Using evidence from a selection of diverse economies in Asia, this article explores and maps out these patterns and discusses the challenges for research and management practice.
The practice of corporate philanthropy has evolved significantly over the past several decades and has now become an integral part of corporate strategy. This article identifies an emerging form of corporate community involvement called "Corporate Social Initiatives" (CSI). These programs differ from their predecessors in that they are connected to the firm's core values, responsive to moral pressures, based on the firm's core competencies, and have clear objectives and means of measurement. Firms are adopting these initiatives as part of a strategy that seeks competitive advantage through reputation assets or as a response to perceived pressures from the moral marketplace. This article explicates the drivers behind the increased interest in CSI, relates CSI to changes in the environment of social expectations for business, reviews potential challenges to CSI programs, and suggests critical factors in the design of successful CSI programs.
Almost every call center strives to process inquiries and complaints quickly. But by stressing speed over service, centers usually end up annoying customers instead of helping them. Here's how to change that.
Although CEOs are cast as the bad guys when they lay off staff or move operations overseas, they are simply serving their masters--the shareholders. This article contends that giving primary concern to the interests of shareholders has become a form of entitlement.
In the 2000-2001 season, the men's basketball team at Boston College rebounded from last place to first--with essentially the same five starters. Coach Al Skinner discusses the two principles he used to turn his team around.
To thrive in a connected world, businesses need common standards. But industry consortia require collaboration from competitors, making these consortia difficult to set up and keep on track. Learn five practices that will help cross-industry groups succeed.
In turbulent times, some leaders make tough choices with courage and conviction. Others, however, remain indecisive. But most executives find ways to cope with uncertainty, ways that enable them to make sense of a confusing situation. In this article, the author describes seven strategies that leaders can use to cope with ambiguity and complexity when making decisions. He also points out their drawbacks, underlining the need to take great care when deploying these strategies.
The CEO of a rapid-growth firm has a particular set of challenges, and as these authors point out, how a CEO manages each challenge will have an impact on a critical component of their firm's growth, information technology. The authors identify 12 challenges, from managing cash flow and choosing partners for alliances to fostering an open work environment and obtaining employee buy in. They also recommend tactics that will help managers meet each of the challenges.
Annette Innella is just coming into the lunchroom at Concord Machines when Bob Dunn starts screaming at her. After throwing his lunch tray against the wall, he stomps out, leaving Annette stunned. Naturally, Annette, the new senior VP for knowledge management, is beside herself. She knows her proposal to establish a cross-functional knowledge management committee is progressive thinking for this old-line manufacturer, but Bob's reaction is totally over the line. If Bob stays, she goes--that's all there is to it. Bob is contrite, but he's under a lot of pressure. The general manager of the Services Group, he's just returned from a two-week trip around the globe to gear up his troops to beat revenue targets again, despite shrinking budgets and hiring freezes. Now an e-mail from Annette requests that two of his best people devote half their time to what he calls her "idiotic" Knowledge Protocols Group. CEO Jay Nguyen is in a bind. Bob is his top manager--he brings in all the money. And even though future revenues are going to have to come from somewhere else, Jay is not totally behind Annette's initiative in the current business climate. He can't afford to lose Bob. But if he reins in Annette, it will look like he's condoning Bob's outburst. What should he do? In R0201A and R0201Z, four commentators offer advice in this fictional case study.
When Renault and Nissan entered into a strategic alliance in March 1999, Nissan was in trouble. The Japanese automaker had struggled for 8 years to turn a profit. Its margins were notoriously low, and purchasing costs were 15% to 25% higher at Nissan than at Renault. Adding to the cost burden was a plant capacity far in excess of the company's needs. And the company's debts, even after the Renault investment, amounted to more than $11 billion. Either Nissan would turn the business around, or it would cease to exist. A veteran of turnarounds at Renault and Michelin, Carlos Ghosn was asked by Renault's CEO to go to Tokyo to save Nissan. He faced an uphill battle as a non-Japanese, non-Nissan outsider--and he knew it. In this first-person account, Ghosn tells the story of Nissan's turnaround. He explains how he relied on cross-functional teams. Ghosn also contends that success is not simply a matter of making fundamental changes to a company's organization and operations; the company's identity and the self-esteem of its people must also be protected. But making changes and safeguarding identity is sometimes a precarious balancing act. The key, he says, is to nurture a strong corporate culture that taps into the productive aspects of a country's culture.
In 1993, Quaker Oats paid $1.7 billion for the rapidly growing Snapple brand. In 1997, it sold the brand to Triarc for a mere $300 million. In 2000, Triarc sold it to Cadbury Schweppes for an estimated $1 billion. How could so much value be lost and regained so quickly? John Deighton's answer to these questions is one that many marketing professionals are likely to resist: There is a vital interplay, he says, between the challenges that a brand faces and the culture of the corporation that owns it. Quaker's textbook marketing approach backfired, whereas Triarc's revival of Snapple's original anything-goes attitude worked. Success in brand management stems from the quality of strategy execution, and successful execution is a matter of temperament. Some strategies are best entrusted to managers with cautious, prudent temperaments; others flourish in the hands of risk takers. So before you commit to a deal, don't just consider a brand's sales. Also give some thought to its soul and how it fits with yours.
An employee is diagnosed with cancer or loses a family member unexpectedly. An earthquake destroys an entire section of a city, leaving hundreds dead, injured, or homeless. At times like these, managerial handbooks fail us. After all, leaders can't eliminate personal suffering, nor can they ask employees who are dealing with these crises to check their emotions at the door. But compassionate leadership can facilitate personal as well as organizational healing. Based on research the authors conducted at the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia's CompassionLab, this article describes what leaders can do to foster organizational compassion in times of trauma. They recount real-world examples, including a story of personal tragedy at Newsweek, natural disasters that affected Macy's and Malden Mills, and the events of September 11, 2001. The authors say compassionate leaders uniformly provide two things: a "context for meaning"--creating an environment in which people can freely express and discuss how they feel--and a "context for action"--creating an environment in which those who experience or witness pain can find ways to alleviate their own and others' suffering.
Once a business performs a complex activity well, the parent organization often wants to replicate that success. But doing that is surprisingly difficult, and businesses nearly always fail when they try to reproduce a best practice. The reason? People approaching best-practice replication are overly optimistic and overconfident. Getting it right the second time (and all the times after that) involves adjusting for overconfidence in your own abilities and imposing strict discipline on the process and the organization. The authors studied numerous business settings to find out how organizational routines were successfully reproduced, and they identified five steps for successful replication. First, make sure you've got something that can be copied and that's worth copying. Second, work from a single template. It provides proof of success, performance measurements, a tactical approach, and a reference for when problems arise. Third, copy the example exactly, and fourth, make changes only after you achieve acceptable results. Fifth, don't throw away the template. If your copy doesn't work, you can use the template to identify and solve problems. Best-practice replication, while less glamorous than pure innovation, contributes enormously to the bottom line of most companies. The article's examples--Banc One, Rank Xerox, Intel, Starbucks, and Re/Max Israel--prove that exact copying is a nontrivial, challenging accomplishment.
When Robert Herbold came to Microsoft from Procter & Gamble in 1994, he saw firsthand why Bill Gates had hired him as chief operating officer: Although certain practices promoted the company's innovative culture and ability to turn on a dime, others created chaos rather than creativity and actually impeded quick course corrections. The operational mess resulted from divergent practices and incompatible systems. Herbold's mission was to bring discipline to the organization without undermining the very characteristics that had made Microsoft successful. Herbold created central systems that gave managers instant access to standardized data on each business and geographical unit. Imposing this operational discipline not only slashed operating costs as a percentage of revenue but, somewhat counterintuitively, also made the company more flexible and more responsive to business changes. The article contains useful lessons for any large company attempting to improve profitability by balancing centralized discipline and individual innovation.
It's a big driver of business success, but one that executives are loath to talk about: upgrading the management talent pool by weeding out "C" players--those who deliver results that are acceptable but who fail to innovate or inspire the people they lead. In this article, the authors of The War for Talent explore the hidden costs of tolerating underperformance and acknowledge the reasons why executives may shy away from dealing decisively with C players. They recommend that organizations establish rigorous, disciplined processes for assessing and dealing with low-performing managers but still treat them with respect. The authors outline three ironhanded step for executives to take. First, identify C players by evaluating their talents and distributing employee performances along an assessment curve. Second, agree on explicit action plans that articulate the improvements or changes that C performers must achieve within 6 to 12 months. And third, hold managers accountable for carrying out the action plans. The authors also emphasize the need for executives to ensure that low performers are treated with dignity--offer candid feedback, instructive coaching, and generous severance packages and outplacement support. The authors' approach isn't about being tough on people; it's about being relentlessly focused on performance.
It's difficult to find a company these days that doesn't strive to be customer driven. Too bad, then, that most companies go about the process of listening to customers all wrong. What usually happens is this: Companies ask their customers what they want. Customers offer solutions in the form of products or services. Companies then deliver these tangibles, and customers just don't buy. The reason is simple--customers aren't expert or informed enough to come up with solutions. That's what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes--what they want a new product or service to do for them. The form the solutions take should be up to you. Using Cordis Corp. as an example, this article describes a series of effective steps for capturing, analyzing, and utilizing customer input. First come in-depth interviews, in which a moderator works with customers to deconstruct a process or activity to unearth "desired outcomes." Researchers then compile a comprehensive list of outcomes that participants rank in order of importance and degree to which they are satisfied by existing products. Finally, using a simple mathematical formula called the "opportunity calculation," researchers can learn the relative attractiveness of key opportunity areas. These data can be used to uncover opportunities for product development, to segment markets properly, and to conduct competitive analysis.
When you think of marketing, chances are your mind goes right to your customers--how can you persuade more people to buy whatever it is you sell? But there's another "market" that's equally important: your employees. Author Colin Mitchell argues that executives by and large ignore this critical internal audience when developing and executing branding campaigns. As a result, employees end up undermining the expectations set by the company's advertising--either because they don't understand what the ads have promised or because they don't believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. Mitchell offers three principles for executing internal branding campaigns. First, companies need to market to employees at times when the company is experiencing a fundamental challenge or change. Second, companies must link their internal and external marketing campaigns. And, third, internal branding campaigns should bring the brand alive for employees, creating an emotional connection to the company that transcends any one experience. It is a fact of business, writes Mitchell, that if employees do not care about or understand their company's brands, they will ultimately weaken their organizations.
Annette Innella is just coming into the lunchroom at Concord Machines when Bob Dunn starts screaming at her. After throwing his lunch tray against the wall, he stomps out, leaving Annette stunned. Naturally, Annette, the new senior VP for knowledge management, is beside herself. She knows her proposal to establish a cross-functional knowledge management committee is progressive thinking for this old-line manufacturer, but Bob's reaction is totally over the line. If Bob stays, she goes--that's all there is to it. Bob is contrite, but he's under a lot of pressure. The general manager of the Services Group, he's just returned from a two-week trip around the globe to gear up his troops to beat revenue targets again, despite shrinking budgets and hiring freezes. Now an e-mail from Annette requests that two of his best people devote half their time to what he calls her "idiotic" Knowledge Protocols Group. CEO Jay Nguyen is in a bind. Bob is his top manager--he brings in all the money. And even though future revenues are going to have to come from somewhere else, Jay is not totally behind Annette's initiative in the current business climate. He can't afford to lose Bob. But if he reins in Annette, it will look like he's condoning Bob's outburst. What should he do? In R0201A and R0201Z, four commentators offer advice on this fictional case study.
Annette Innella is just coming into the lunchroom at Concord Machines when Bob Dunn starts screaming at her. After throwing his lunch tray against the wall, he stomps out, leaving Annette stunned. Naturally, Annette, the new senior VP for knowledge management, is beside herself. She knows her proposal to establish a cross-functional knowledge management committee is progressive thinking for this old-line manufacturer, but Bob's reaction is totally over the line. If Bob stays, she goes--that's all there is to it. Bob is contrite, but he's under a lot of pressure. The general manager of the Services Group, he's just returned from a two-week trip around the globe to gear up his troops to beat revenue targets again, despite shrinking budgets and hiring freezes. Now an e-mail from Annette requests that two of his best people devote half their time to what he calls her "idiotic" Knowledge Protocols Group. CEO Jay Nguyen is in a bind. Bob is his top manager--he brings in all the money. And even though future revenues are going to have to come from somewhere else, Jay is not totally behind Annette's initiative in the current business climate. He can't afford to lose Bob. But if he reins in Annette, it will look like he's condoning Bob's outburst. What should he do? In R0201A and R0201Z, four commentators offer advice on this fictional case study.