This case documents the ongoing efforts by Alaska Airlines to enhance its efforts to become more customer centric by empowering its employees using a service framework. It explores how the airline starts with a completely hands-off approach to empowerment in which employees are encouraged to do whatever it takes to please customers. An economic downturn leads them to swing the pendulum the other way and develop a rules-based framework with strict guidelines. Ultimately, they settle on an intermediate model in which employees are given "freedom within a framework." This forces them to try and shift from a rules-based to a principles-based culture. The case explores not only what they did but also how the framework was rolled out. All this seems to be working until they acquire Virgin America in 2016. Virgin too espouses customer centricity and front-line autonomy but does so in a different way. The dilemma now is blend the two cultures that are both trying to achieve similar goals but do so quite differently.
Don't reject those overqualified applicants out of hand. New research shows that overqualified workers tend to perform better than other employees, and they don't quit any sooner.
Companies shouldn't involve outside firms in their innovation efforts when product complexity is very low or high. When it's somewhere in the middle-that's another story.
Rapid advances in technology and enormously increased numbers of cell phones in use in emerging markets give urgency to Nokia's newly launched effort to expand its worldwide phone-recycling initiatives. Ambrish Bakaya explains, in this interview with HBR associate editor Andrew O'Connell.
The head of Georgia Tech's architecture program predicts that new kinds of retail developments will rise from the ashes of today's dying suburban malls.
The first outsider to become CEO of Lego talks about the different approaches he's used to lead the 76-year-old, family-owned Danish toymaker onto a firm financial footing, then to reorient it toward growth, and now to open it to ideas and feedback from enthusiastic users.
The founder and CEO of BzzAgent, a word-of mouth media company, believes strongly in radical corporate transparency. In practice that can mean frank self-examination in his blogs, publicly posting his company's sales presentations, and rotating an executive office space among employees at every level.
Nokia's chief technology officer is helping the company find growth by going in a radical new direction. Because Nokia has been down the reinvention road before, Iannucci believes it has the mind-set, structure, and strategy in place to realize its "deep future."
Jennifer Daley agreed to take on a dramatic overhaul of Tenet Healthcare's clinical quality under two conditions: She would work only on behalf of the patients, and she would consider every day to be her last.
A detached and impassive executive may seem like the corporate decision-making ideal, but people make better choices when they're experiencing intense emotions, according to new research.
A "reverse logistics" value chain strategy--what you do with goods your customers send back--can strengthen your company's competitiveness according to the authors of a recent article in the "Academy of Management Perspectives." Estee Lauder built a $250-million product line from returned cosmetics.
Chris Van Dyke, the CEO of the outdoor apparel start-up Nau, offers some intriguing ideas about how to engage a generation of customers who are comfortable shopping online and eager to enter into a dialogue with the companies they buy from.
Sometime around the middle of the past century, telephone executive Chester Barnard imported the term "decision making" from public administration into the business world. There it began to replace narrower terms, like "resource allocation" and "policy making," shifting the way managers thought about their role from continuous, Hamlet-like deliberation toward a crisp series of conclusions reached and actions taken. Yet, decision making is, of course, a broad and ancient human pursuit, dating back to a time when people sought guidance from the stars. From those earliest days, we have strived to invent better tools for the purpose, from the Hindu-Arabic systems for numbering and algebra to Aristotle's systematic empiricism to Friar Occam's advances in logic to Francis Bacon's inductive reasoning to Descartes' application of the scientific method. A growing sophistication with managing risk, along with a nuanced understanding of human behavior and advances in technology that support and mimic cognitive processes, has improved decision making in many situations. Even so, the history of decision-making strategies has not marched steadily toward perfect rationalism. Twentieth-century theorists showed that the costs of acquiring information lead executives to make do with only good-enough decisions. Worse, people decide against their own economic interests even when they know better. And in the absence of emotion, it's impossible to make any decisions at all. Erroneous framing, bounded awareness, excessive optimism: The debunking of Descartes' rational man threatens to swamp our confidence in our choices. Is it really surprising, then, that even as technology dramatically increases our access to information, Malcolm Gladwell extols the virtues of gut decisions made, literally, in the blink of an eye?