A few Chinese companies recently have challenged the R&D strategies of foreign companies and offered lessons on how to make ideas commercially viable. But another, less obvious force to be reckoned with in China are the thousands of innovative companies that are quietly disrupting numerous industries and developing new products and new business models.
Findings don't have to be earth-shattering to be useful. In fact, obvious insights can help you overcome three barriers to change in your organization: resistance to new data ("But that's not what my experience has shown"), resistance to change itself ("But that's the way we've always done it"), and organizational uniqueness bias ("That will never work here"). You can also gain trust by confirming what people already believe.
A good psychometric test can easily outperform a räsumäscan and interview at predicting job performance and retention. Yet personality testing and other ways of analyzing potential present some significant challenges: For instance, not all assessments are accurate, and people's personalities vary from moment to moment, often depending on the challenge at hand. We need a finer-grained understanding of human potential.
Asking people to rate themselves has obvious disadvantages: They could fake their way to a higher score, or they might lack self-awareness. But self-report surveys make data collection efficient and offers access to respondents' thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Another benefit many people don't consider: The act of answering the questions can promote greater self-awareness, opening the door to self-development.
Now that companies have replaced rigid hierarchies with flatter, more fluid structures to promote agile ways of working, they have also made it harder for employees to chart a path for growth and advancement. This challenge is also a concern for employers,who must - for the sake of engagement and retention - show high performers how they can progress within the organization. Analytics can help highlight opportunities for getting ahead.
In the messy real world of ambiguous evidence and contentious objectives, organizational decisions - especially those about the people you're hiring, developing, managing, and trying to retain - usually hinge on relationships and trust. So, if you work in people analytics, you must learn to traffic in that currency to make an impact. It's not enough to be right. You also have to sell your model or idea. These tactics can help.
Many of us assume that the leadership handbook must be completely rewritten for the digital age. Is this true? Or are we overly focused on what's changing and thus neglecting the fundamentals? There is something to be said for both arguments. While many core leadership skills remain the same, the demands of digital disruption call for certain new ones, as well. This article explores which are which and what we can learn from organizations that are digitally maturing.
Companies whose boards of directors have digital savvy outperform companies whose boards lack it: Among companies with over $1 billion of revenues, 24% had digitally savvy boards, and those businesses significantly outperformed others on key metrics such as revenue growth, ROA, and market cap growth. Companies can improve their boards by knowing what characteristics to look for in existing and new board members, managing board agendas differently, and cultivating new learning opportunities.
Judgment bias has long been recognized and studied, particularly in the context of decision-making about hiring. Whether it's a one-time decision or something that recurs, limiting decision-making bias is a clear benefit to the outcome. The authors suggest a practical, broadly applicable approach to reducing errors in strategic decision-making: the Mediating Assessments Protocol (MAP).
Many decisions about strategy require that senior executives make evaluative judgments on the basis of extensive, complex information. A disciplined, sequential approach can mitigate common errors and improve the quality of both one-off and recurrent decisions in an array of business domains. The process described in this article is easy to learn, involves little additional work, and (within limits) leaves room for intuition.
High-skilled immigration is dramatically transforming the tech sector in the United States. U.S. tech workers over age 40 have good reasons to be concerned. In addition to competing with greater numbers of skilled foreign workers, older tech workers are now also more likely than younger workers to lose their jobs when technical work moves overseas.
Prioritizing process improvement, redefining performance, and committing to digitization, DBS Bank revitalized its performance management strategy and turned itself into one of the world's most successful global digital banks.
Although most manufacturers are beginning to flirt with digital technologies, not one has successfully pulled off a digital transformation. CEOs still have to figure out its art - and science - forcing them to draw up their game plans on the fly, which inevitably leads to tension and trauma. But they are learning. Here's how GE has navigated its own digital transformation process.
When a business is growing fast, decisions can get lost in the fray - especially if it's unclear that a decision even needs to be made. People in the workplace bring recommendations to four audiences: a manager or top executive (those who approve a recommendation), and peers or a broader set of stakeholders (those who execute a recommendation). To sell an idea and get others to take action, you have to understand what your particular audience needs to hear.
Many people have come to view disruption as a synonym for innovation. This single-minded focus leads companies to overlook an alternative path to growth: the nondisruptive creation of brand-new markets where none existed before. It's time to embrace the idea that companies can create without destroying - and expand the conversation about the problems they can solve and the opportunities they can seize.
In 2011, the Rhode Island (RI) legislature established the Commission on Health Equity and charged this group with writing a report on health disparities every two years. The case protagonist, Dr. Harper Avery, Director of Minority Health at the RI Department of Health, has recently assumed the co-chair position on the Commission of Health Advocacy and Equity in RI. Through the experiences of Dr. Avery, the reader sees the issues involved when a multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral group must work together to create the health disparities/health equity report. Such issues include how to define "health disparities" and related terms, what health outcomes and behaviors to choose to report, where to get the data required for the report, and how to measure disparities with the data obtained. Additionally, the reader is encouraged to consider the multiple perspectives of the Commission members and the various constituencies they represent. This case study takes the students through the process of developing a state-level health disparities report.
In 2011, the Rhode Island (RI) legislature established the Commission on Health Equity and charged this group with writing a report on health disparities every two years. The case protagonist, Dr. Harper Avery, Director of Minority Health at the RI Department of Health, has recently assumed the co-chair position on the Commission of Health Advocacy and Equity in RI. Through the experiences of Dr. Avery, the reader sees the issues involved when a multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral group must work together to create the health disparities/health equity report. Such issues include how to define "health disparities" and related terms, what health outcomes and behaviors to choose to report, where to get the data required for the report, and how to measure disparities with the data obtained. Additionally, the reader is encouraged to consider the multiple perspectives of the Commission members and the various constituencies they represent. This case study takes the students through the process of developing a state-level health disparities report.
In 2011, the Rhode Island (RI) legislature established the Commission on Health Equity and charged this group with writing a report on health disparities every two years. The case protagonist, Dr. Harper Avery, Director of Minority Health at the RI Department of Health, has recently assumed the co-chair position on the Commission of Health Advocacy and Equity in RI. Through the experiences of Dr. Avery, the reader sees the issues involved when a multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral group must work together to create the health disparities/health equity report. Such issues include how to define "health disparities" and related terms, what health outcomes and behaviors to choose to report, where to get the data required for the report, and how to measure disparities with the data obtained. Additionally, the reader is encouraged to consider the multiple perspectives of the Commission members and the various constituencies they represent. This case study takes the students through the process of developing a state-level health disparities report.
In June 2018, subsequent to the widespread reporting around a privacy breach, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 33-year-old founder, Chairman and CEO, was under pressure from the lawmakers to act on protecting the privacy rights of individuals. Facebook's lax policies allegedly allowed an app developer to sell Facebook users' data to Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm. Cambridge Analytica was accused of using Facebook users' data to profile and influence the voting intentions of British and American people. The disclosure of this news left Facebook tremendously vulnerable to criticism from the general public, media, and lawmakers. This resulted in an 18% drop in the company's stock prices. After two rounds of intense testimonies before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, lawmakers were still baffled by how Facebook was planning to address privacy issue given their business model that sacrificed user data for making the profit. Zuckerberg faced the difficult task of deciding how best to protect the privacy of users to prevent similar adverse events in the future, while maintaining profit. His options included (1) making some fundamental, and perhaps philosophical, changes in firm's value proposition (2) imposing stronger privacy protection measures, and (3) improving ethical decision-making in privacy protection through the governance adjustments.
This case comes in two parts, the first part is the written case and it paints a picture of a current business situation (December 2015) in the emerging industry of recycling - ripe with quality issues, some defined, many not. It challenges the student to come up with a quality-based plan of attack specifically for the purpose establishing a sustainable position in the community for the WM MRF. The detail in the case describes residential single-stream recycling supply chain from its mixed-material collection through sorted and bailed-delivery to recycling customers. The second part of the case is a data set to compliment the detail of the written case. It includes a spreadsheet of over 390 sampled receipts over a two-year period and includes over 5000 lines of detail. The student is challenged to explore this data and characterize and consider it managerially using statistically sound methods. How might insights from that analysis support the MRF's plans for improvements?