How many companies in Africa earn annual revenues of $1 billion or more? Most global executives guess there are fewer than a hundred; many answer "zero." The reality? Four hundred such companies exist--and they are, on average, faster growing and more profitable than their global peers. There's an unexpected side effect of this growth burst: Africa has become a test lab for global innovation. If your offering is cost-effective and robust enough to succeed on the continent, chances are it will be competitive elsewhere. The authors offer a taxonomy of six innovation types: moves to build financial inclusion; partnerships for infrastructure development; smart approaches to industrialization; new models of food production; consumer products aimed at the low end of the market; and future-focused capability building, from job-readiness boot camps to world-class universities. Technology is the golden thread running throughout: Africa has become a proving ground for digitally enabled breakthroughs that can leapfrog entrenched barriers and unlock exponential progress.
In many stories we hear about workplace courage, the people who fight for positive change end up ostracized or lose their jobs. Most acts of courage don't come from whistle-blowers or organizational martyrs, however. They come from respected insiders at all levels who take action because they believe it's the right thing to do. And when they manage the process well, they don't necessarily pay a high price; indeed, they may see their status rise. People who succeed in their courageous acts, or suffer fewer negative consequences, tend to exhibit certain behaviors: They lay the groundwork for action; they carefully choose their battles; they manage messaging and emotions; and they follow up afterward.
Motivating yourself is one of the main things that sets high achievers apart, and it's hard. How do you keep pushing onward when your heart isn't in it? In her research, Fishbach has identified some simple tactics: Set goals that are intrinsically rewarding, and make them very specific. If a task isn't satisfying, focus on aspects of it that are or combine it with pleasant activities. Reward yourself in the right way for getting things done. To avoid slumps, break objectives into subgoals; look at how much you've accomplished until you're halfway there; and then count down what you have left to do. And use social influence: Let high performers inspire you, boost your get-up-and-go by giving advice, and keep the people you want to succeed for front of mind.
FB Holdings had made it through the financial crisis of 2008 without losing money, but Franklin, its automotive climate control systems division, had not fared as well. It had the unfortunate distinction of having been the group's poorest-performing unit for nearly a decade. As CFO, Noelle Freeman was, of course, concerned about the numbers. But after spending time in Little Rock, she worried they might be facing a bigger problem. She knew the plant had been through years of belt-tightening and turnover, so she hadn't expected a warm welcome, but the negative vibe she'd felt from the employees had been even worse than she'd expected. The word that kept popping into her mind was "toxic." A numbers person, Noelle had assumed that once the division was out of the red, the people problems would go away. Now she wondered if the low morale and disengagement was a problem a spreadsheet just couldn't fix. This fictional case study by Francesca Gino features expert commentary by Philipp Schramm and Jeremy Andrus.
The former U.S. senator and secretary of state talks about a leader's first day on the job, finding common ground to fix problems, assembling effective teams, and more.
FB Holdings had made it through the financial crisis of 2008 without losing money, but Franklin, its automotive climate control systems division, had not fared as well. It had the unfortunate distinction of having been the group's poorest-performing unit for nearly a decade. As CFO, Noelle Freeman was, of course, concerned about the numbers. But after spending time in Little Rock, she worried they might be facing a bigger problem. She knew the plant had been through years of belt-tightening and turnover, so she hadn't expected a warm welcome, but the negative vibe she'd felt from the employees had been even worse than she'd expected. The word that kept popping into her mind was "toxic." A numbers person, Noelle had assumed that once the division was out of the red, the people problems would go away. Now she wondered if the low morale and disengagement was a problem a spreadsheet just couldn't fix. This fictional case study by Francesca Gino features expert commentary by Philipp Schramm and Jeremy Andrus.
FB Holdings had made it through the financial crisis of 2008 without losing money, but Franklin, its automotive climate control systems division, had not fared as well. It had the unfortunate distinction of having been the group's poorest-performing unit for nearly a decade. As CFO, Noelle Freeman was, of course, concerned about the numbers. But after spending time in Little Rock, she worried they might be facing a bigger problem. She knew the plant had been through years of belt-tightening and turnover, so she hadn't expected a warm welcome, but the negative vibe she'd felt from the employees had been even worse than she'd expected. The word that kept popping into her mind was "toxic." A numbers person, Noelle had assumed that once the division was out of the red, the people problems would go away. Now she wondered if the low morale and disengagement was a problem a spreadsheet just couldn't fix. This fictional case study by Francesca Gino features expert commentary by Philipp Schramm and Jeremy Andrus.
The popular perception of Twitter as a social media "echo chamber" where people only receive and retweet opinions that match their own, does not reflect the data about users' actual engagement. The average Twitter user propagates more mainstream content and follows a diverse group of users - and this has implications for social media marketing.
Many B2B companies seek to grow beyond traditional product lines by venturing into new services. Yet they often overlook the opportunity to capture sales from free services they provide. This article outlines the free-to-fee, or F2F, service transition. It shows how to inventory free services (categorizing them as profit drains, distributor delights, competitive weapons, or gold nuggets) and lays out a path for profitably generating revenues.
Digital customer service is becoming more widely adopted, but one place it falls short is in the language and phrases it uses. Many digital service platforms use words that alienate customers rather than engage them; selecting customer-centric language for chatbots and service platforms can make a significant difference in customer satisfaction.
Blockchain is poised to help media and entertainment companies build innovative business models that offer new monetization strategies for their digital assets and streamline critical business activities.
If you think sophisticated communication technologies are the ticket to your virtual team's success, think again. It's not the tech that matters -it's how people use it. New research reveals five strategies for conquering distance and improving communication and performance in dispersed teams. The same strategies can help co-located teams, which depend increasingly on virtual [...]
Organizations need to focus on how blockchain can be used to support their unique strategies. Without this focus, they risk investing in initiatives that don't provide meaningful value.
Retail customers may accept different prices on different channels -but retailers need to manage new complexities to make it work. These include understanding what customers value in each channel and how that affects what they will pay, giving store employees the right language for talking about price differences, and working out operational challenges. Getting it right has a real payoff: Retailers that effectively price differently across all channels see bottom-line growth of 2 to 5%.
The robots are coming! But counter to popular belief, it's not just low-paying jobs that are at risk of automation. According to research by Scott Latham and Beth Humberd, predicting which jobs are vulnerable requires analyzing the type of value job holders deliver and the skills they use to deliver it. Workers must understand four paths of job evolution -and factors behind each path -if they hope to adapt.
Despite the well-documented costs of overload, many leaders still think organizations thrive under pressure. They have a lot to learn from manufacturing, where managers have adopted a "pull" system to manage task flow, improving productivity and performance. This concept can be used to prevent overload in knowledge work, too. And "visual management" techniques make it easier to apply pull thinking to a portfolio of projects by rendering nonphysical tasks tangible. Two recent changes at the Broad Institute, an MIT-affiliated biomedical and genomic research center, illustrate how.
Modest questions about how today's problems could be solved more effectively lead to applications of technology with easily foreseeable gains. But when people start asking bigger, bolder questions that challenge basic assumptions about how a problem has been framed, they open up space for breakthrough innovations. That's been the pattern in many digital realms, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things.
Data reveals the C-suite recognizes that technical debt -the "price" companies pay for short-term technological fixes -hinders their ability to innovate and adapt in the digital age. One strategy to combat technical debt? Digital decoupling.
With the rise of blockchain and adoption of cryptocurrencies, companies across different industries can benefit from the increased trust and transparency these emerging technologies provide. Most executives recognize the need to prioritize blockchain as part of their business strategy, but the question of how to adopt and reskill can be daunting.
In both practice and research, we are doing a better job at bringing attention to the problem of gender bias. But we haven't established enough tangible suggestions for how to challenge it. New research has begun to investigate the efficacy of "scripts" -a set of words or phrases such as "Can you repeat what you just said?" that would signal to a peer that he has crossed a line, whether knowingly or unknowingly.