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Defining a perfect day is a powerful way of getting employees focused so that they can achieve profoundly new performance. This article examines this simple, practical approach to improving performance and helping organizations clarify what needs to happen to prepare for sustained, long-term change. Companies that have succeeded with the perfect-day approach have taken four steps. First, leaders have aligned senior management around a definition and measures of the perfect day. Next, leaders have worked with managers to generate area- and team-level goals that, if met, would produce the desired improvements. The third step is honing in on the workforce behaviours critical to attaining the perfect day. The fourth step is aligning leadership behaviours across the organization to ensure that the right consequences exist to help motivate the desired behaviours. <br><br> Focused as they are on long-term strategies and short-term operational plans, leaders often think it’s enough to train people, tell them what to do, and give them some tools — but it isn’t. Decades of research in behavioural science have shown that nothing really changes until behaviour changes, and the right kind of behaviour change doesn’t happen on its own. To achieve sustained performance, leaders often look to the latest trend, methodology or technology. Yet the most effective path to superior execution is simpler. Focus employees on a few key good behaviours, and align the organization around performing them. Over time, as you increase the number of perfect days, you’ll become more skilled at aligning your employees to improve their execution. You’ll come to master what lies at the core of any successful change in an organization’s operations: behaviour.

In this Ivey Business Journal Q&A, Monica Lewinsky — former White House intern and “patient zero” of online harassment — talks with Ivey Professor Gerard Seijts about what it takes to survive shame and bullying on a global scale. She offers two important considerations for victims of public humiliation. First, many people — those bullied and otherwise — suffer from shame or some form of public humiliation, and there is no reason to suffer in silence. Second, victims should know that they can survive the shaming. Resilience, she says, is like a muscle that can be built up. It may be safer to remain silent in the short term, but allowing others to define you exacts too high a price — both psychologically and socially. In her time of need, Lewinsky had a network of support, including family, close friends and professionals. Such a core group of people in one’s real life is the best defense against being humiliated online. Finally, she says, we need a cultural revolution when it comes to empathy and compassion in our society. More people need to click with compassion. When content providers earn advertising dollars from clickbait, they are encouraged to offer more articles rooted in shame and public exposure. Every time people click on gossip, or an article celebrating a public shaming, they are “feeding the beast.”

New research reveals that when people don't examine the ethical practices of the companies making the products they buy, they feel hostile toward consumers who do.

Many companies want to raise their level of customer service--but how? The typical response is to rewrite frontline employees' scripts and conduct pilot projects. Those tactics may be fine for a company whose service operation is functioning reasonably well. But if the operation is badly broken, or the industry is being disrupted and customers suddenly have many more choices, argue Singapore-based researchers and consultants Jochen Wirtz and Ron Kaufman, deeper cultural change may be needed. On the basis of 25 years of work with global customer service operations, the researchers recommend jettisoning four conventional practices, singly or in combination: (1) Don't start with customer-facing employees. Instead, make sure they're getting the right support. (2) Don't focus on specific skills or scripts. Educate people more generally about what "service excellence" means. (3) Don't pilot changes. Go company-wide to create momentum fast. (4) Don't worry about traditional metrics, such as share of wallet and NPS. Track the number of new value-adding actions put into practice. For companies looking to differentiate on service, these strategies can make the difference between slow, fleeting progress and rapid, sustainable success.

Today, the author writes, business can be conducted in English almost anywhere in the developed world, possibly excepting Japan. But when you build or grow a global consumer-facing business, you must speak the language of your customers, wherever they are. Booking.com, the Priceline Group's largest global business, strives to meet that goal by employing people who can answer calls in 42 languages. Although Booking.com is a digital company that facilitates online reservations, about 20% of its customers wind up calling for some other reason. Even though many of them are multilingual, when it comes to their personal travel, they want to speak in their native language. When Huston took the reins, in 2011, the company was relatively small, with a hard-to-find customer service number. Now it has 6,000 full-time customer service employees, all of whom speak fluent English plus at least one other language; many speak three or four. When planning how to staff call centers, the company must consider cultural factors (for instance, people in emerging markets such as Brazil and China tend to call more frequently) and nuances (Americans tend to not like speaking with a rep who has a British accent, and vice versa). For future centers, it has prioritized major cities for either their depth in major languages (Tokyo, Shanghai) or their breadth of languages (London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona). Booking.com is now, the author writes, "the largest online accommodations platform in the world, by almost any measure," and has been rated "one of the most international websites on the planet."

Reid Hoffman is one of Silicon Valley's grown-ups. After helping to found PayPal, he moved on to launch LinkedIn in 2002--an endeavor that turned him into a billionaire. He was an early investor in Facebook and now serves as a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock. In this edited interview with Tim Sullivan, of HBR Press, Hoffman explores his idea of "blitzscaling"--the discipline of getting very big very fast. In today's networked landscape, the path to high-growth, high-impact entrepreneurship can be chaotic and grueling. It involves rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. And there's no playbook to guide you, Hoffman notes. "You throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down." Hoffman emphasizes that blitzscaling is not just about growing revenues and the customer base but also about scaling the organization. People naturally focus on the first two, and "if you don't get those right, then nothing else matters." But very few businesses can succeed on those fronts without also building an organization that has the capability and the capacity to execute at a high level in the face of extremely rapid growth. The challenges, risks, and headaches of blitzscaling go beyond the operational; they can take a toll on organizational happiness. "But the thing that keeps these companies together--whether it's PayPal, Google, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter," Hoffman says, "is the sense of excitement about what's happening and the vision of a great future."

For decades, the five-forces model of competition has dominated the thinking about strategy. But it describes competition among traditional "pipeline" businesses, which succeed by optimizing the activities in their value chains--most of which they own or control. "Platform" businesses that bring together consumers and producers, as Uber, Alibaba, and Airbnb do, require a different approach to strategy. The critical asset of a platform is external--the community of members. The focus shifts from controlling resources to orchestrating them, and firms win by facilitating more external interactions and creating "network effects" that increase the value provided to all participants. In this new world, competition can emerge from seemingly unrelated industries and even from within the platform itself. The authors, three platform strategists, walk executives through the choices they must make when building platforms, outlining the different metrics needed to manage them. Businesses that fail to learn the new rules will struggle, they argue. When a platform enters the marketplace of a pure pipeline business, the platform nearly always wins. That's exactly what happened when the iPhone came on the scene in 2007. By 2015, it accounted for 92% of global profits in mobile phones, while most of the giants that once ruled the industry made no profit at all.

In many ways, online marketplaces are the perfect business model. Since they facilitate transactions between independent suppliers and customers rather than take possession of and responsibility for the products or services in question, they have inherently low cost structures and fat gross margins. They are highly defensible once established, owing to network effects. Yet online marketplaces remain extremely difficult to build, say Andrei Hagiu of Harvard Business School and venture capitalist Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners. Most entrepreneurs and investors attribute this to the challenge of quickly attracting a critical mass of buyers and suppliers. But it is wrong to assume that once a marketplace has overcome this hurdle, the sailing will be smooth. Several other important pitfalls can threaten marketplaces: growing too fast too early; failing to foster sufficient trust and safety; resorting to sticks, rather than carrots, to deter user disintermediation; and ignoring the risks of regulation. This article draws on company examples such as eBay, Lending Club, and Airbnb to offer practical advice for avoiding those hazards.

Following the path of companies such as Apple and Amazon, more and more firms are trying to become not just product purveyors but also platform providers, facilitating direct connections between customers and other groups. Although launching a platform can generate new revenue, success is not automatic. After studying more than 20 companies that have tried to move from products to platforms, the authors point to four practices that can separate winners from losers: (1) Start with a defensible product and a critical mass of users. A strong product and a loyal customer base will attract third parties to your platform. (2) Apply a hybrid business model. Instead of operating with a "product mindset" or a "platform mindset" alone, combine the two in order to discover new opportunities for creating value. (3) Drive rapid conversion to the platform. Existing customers are likely to flock to a platform if it provides enough new value, if the additional products and services offered are consistent with your brand, and if users have opportunities to improve both the products and the platform. (4) Deter competitive imitation. Make it tough for rivals to copy your product-to-platform strategy: Consider creating proprietary standards, using exclusivity contracts, and erecting other barriers to competition.

Platform businesses such as Airbnb and Uber have risen to success partly by sidestepping laws and regulations that encumber their traditional competitors. Such rule flouting is what the authors call "spontaneous private deregulation," and it's happening in a growing number of industries. The authors explain that businesses are most vulnerable to spontaneous deregulation when certain conditions hold. One, for example, is when regulations are excessive or outdated, protecting consumers against unlikely risks--and when platform providers offer other means of shielding consumers from harm. Incumbents facing threats from private deregulation can respond by taking legal action to press for enforcement of existing laws. Alternatively, they can embrace aspects of a new entrant's approach--taxi operators, for example, have developed Uber-style apps for ordering rides. Incumbents can also leverage their own strengths to set themselves apart from upstart competitors--that's the tactic that CitizenM, the Pod Hotel, and Yotel are using to woo guests who might otherwise book with Airbnb. If all else fails, incumbents may have to cease operation. But they stand a good chance of avoiding that fate if they address their vulnerabilities early.

In the knowledge economy, skilled employees are the assets that drive organizational success. Thus companies must learn from them--why they stay, why they leave, and how the organization needs to change. A thoughtful exit interview--whether it be a face-to-face conversation, a questionnaire, a survey, or a combination--can catalyze leaders' listening skills, reveal what does or doesn't work inside the organization, highlight hidden challenges and opportunities, and generate essential competitive intelligence. It can promote engagement and enhance retention by signaling to employees that their views matter. And it can turn departing employees into corporate ambassadors for years to come. Unfortunately, too few leaders pay attention to this tool; their programs fail to either improve retention or produce useful information. The authors believe this is owing to poor data quality and a lack of consensus on best practices. They suggest six overall goals for a strategic exit interview process and describe tactics and techniques to make it successful. Among their recommendations: Have interviews conducted by second- or third-line managers. Make exit interviews mandatory for at least some employees. And because standard interviews enable you to spot trends, but unstructured ones elicit unexpected insights, consider combining the two approaches in semistructured interviews.

When organizations get into big trouble, fixing the culture is usually the prescription. That's what most everyone said GM needed to do after its 2014 recall crisis. Cultural reform has likewise been proposed as the solution to the corrosive bureaucracy at the Veterans' Administration, unethical behavior in banks, and the excessive use of force by police. But interviews with successful change makers, conducted by Harvard Business School's Jay W. Lorsch and Emily McTague, suggest that culture isn't something you "fix." Rather, cultural change is what you get when you put new processes or structures in place to tackle tough business challenges. Organizations are complex systems with many ripple effects--and reworking fundamental practices will inevitably lead to new values and behaviors. In this article, the authors explain how this played out during four major transformations: the remake of Ecolab into a diversified corporation three times its original size; the postbankruptcy merger of Delta and Northwest; the turnaround of Ford; and Novartis's shift to a diversified health care portfolio. Each firm's CEO took a different approach for a different end. Ecolab's Doug Baker pushed decisions down to the front lines to strengthen customer relationships. Delta's Richard Anderson got airline workers on board by focusing on meeting their needs. Ford's Alan Mulally broke down barriers between units to improve collaboration and efficiency. Novartis's Daniel Vasella decentralized to unleash creative energy. But in every case, when the executives used tools such as decision rights, performance measurement, and reward systems to address their particular business challenges, organizational culture evolved as a result, reinforcing the new direction.

"It is almost impossible to progress through a career untouched by incivility," the author writes. Over the past 20 years she has polled thousands of workers: 98% have experienced uncivil behavior, and 99% have witnessed it. In 2011 half said they were treated rudely at least once a week--up from a quarter in 1998. Rude behavior ranged from outright nastiness and undermining to ignoring people's opinions to checking e-mail during meetings. Observing or experiencing rude behavior impairs short-term memory and thus cognitive ability, and has been shown to damage the immune system, put a strain on families, and produce other deleterious effects. Porath has identified some tactics to minimize the effects of rudeness on performance and health. The most effective remedy, she says, is to work holistically on your well-being, rather than trying to change the perpetrator or the relationship. She suggests a two-pronged approach: Take steps to thrive "cognitively," which includes growth, momentum, and continual learning; and take steps to thrive "affectively," which means experiencing passion, excitement, and vitality at work.

The celebrity sex therapist of the 1980s discusses transitioning to a public career, adapting to many different cultures, and "rewiring" rather than retiring.

Social media success stories have highlighted the impact social media can have on companies'fortunes. Yet the authors argue that there is a significant opportunity that isn't being realized: utilizing social media to support innovation and new product development. Consultants and academics alike have touted social media as a vehicle for developing customer insights, accessing knowledge, cocreating ideas and concepts with users, and supporting new product launches. Yet despite this promise, the authors have found that the expected positive results are frequently not realized in practice. Although some companies have been able to use social media to develop new insights that lead to successful new products, many others simply do not know how to utilize social media for innovation. Some get distracted by the diversity of input and listen to the "wrong audience."Nevertheless, the authors believe that social media provides a game-changing opportunity for companies that learn how to develop clear strategies and objectives. Analyzing data on the social media practices of large global companies as they relate to new product development, the authors found that for the companies that jumped on the bandwagon and invested in social media initiatives without having a clear strategy, the right skills, or sufficient knowledge frequently did not achieve the results they were looking for. Those that utilized social media sources exclusively to search for technical information saw no improvements in new product development performance; in fact, the effect on performance for these companies was often negative (due to information overload and the complexity of processing such information). The companies that benefited the most from using social media for new product development were companies that used social media in every stage of the new product development processes; they built organizational processes and structures to support new product development activity.

Author Joshua S. Gans concedes that disruption is a possibility, but he contends that the link between disruption and failure may not be as strong as many managers believe. In particular, Gans argues that disruption can be averted. "Many businesses find ways of managing through it, and this can weaken any relationship between a disruptive event and the actual disruption,"he writes. The question, Gans says, is whether companies facing disruption are able to counter its effects. He describes three approaches to dealing with market entrants: beating them; joining them; and waiting them out. Beating Them: The first approach involves investing aggressively in new innovations after entrants bring them to market. Although Gans says managers may not know right away whether an entrant's innovation will become a threat, when the situation becomes clear, they must act to protect their market position. He uses the example of Microsoft Corp., which introduced its Internet Explorer in the mid-1990s to compete against Netscape Navigator, which at the time was the dominant product in the browser market. Microsoft created a new division dedicated to defusing the Netscape threat. Joining Them: The idea here is for established businesses to "wait and see"whether a market entrant's innovation improves and becomes a competitive threat. Then, instead of waging war, the existing player can acquire the entrant's business and its products, thereby averting disruption. When disruption is upon them, Gans explains, incumbents realize they will face stiffer competition in the future, so they have an incentive to neutralize the threat. But there are also advantages to disrupters in avoiding a long period of intense competition with an established incumbent. Waiting Them Out: Gans suggests that established players should assess what they have that entrants lack -- entrants rarely have every element of a value chain.

market share, net promoter score, the value of a "like,"customer lifetime value, and return on investment. They conducted interviews with marketers and administered formal surveys to managers. They found that popular marketing metrics are regularly misunderstood and misused. The authors'goal is to encourage appropriate and consistent use of popular marketing metrics. Market Share: If the aim is to maximize the returns to shareholders, the authors argue, increased market share offers no benefit unless it eventually generates profits. Still, in a survey the authors conducted, they found that more marketing managers prioritized maximizing market share than prioritized maximizing profitability. Although, they note, companies with superior products tend to have high market share and high profitability, this does not necessarily mean that increasing market share will increase profits. Using market share as a metric of success simply because other marketers do it can be counterproductive. Net Promoter Score: Companies in a variety of industries have embraced net promoter score as a way to monitor their customer service operations. One of NPS's strongest selling points, the authors write, is its simplicity: It's easy for managers and employees to understand the goal of having more promoters and fewer detractors. However, they note weaknesses in how the theory has been presented to managers. Value of a "Like"The authors caution that managers shouldn't automatically assume that differences in value between social media fans and nonfans are caused by social media marketing activity. When there are differences, managers need to investigate whether they existed prior to the social media marketing effort. Customer Lifetime Value: Marketers often use CLV to help them decide whom to target in acquisition campaigns.

What's important in product development, the authors say, isn't just following the right steps -- it's how the work is done. Until organizations fundamentally view people as central and leaders act accordingly, the risk of development process improvement efforts not actually improving anything is frighteningly high. In practice, the authors contend, most companies invest very little in people development in comparison to other investments they make. The underlying concepts of lean product development have been around since the 1980s, the authors note, when an MIT study found that Japanese automotive companies followed practices that were profoundly different from those of other auto manufacturers. In new product development, lean is about advancing the skills of individuals through technical training and methods of collaboration so that each developer is able to design, develop, and deliver better products and services. Companies can promote individual mastery, in the authors'view, by asking three questions: (1) What do we need to learn about our customers, products, and production processes to design better products? (2) How do we learn this? (3) And what kinds of organizational structures and routines will best support learning? The authors outline several steps companies should take to advance the development of their people. These include making technical mastery an expectation and building it into the reward system and how people work every day, and developing standards and using them.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For more than a decade, multinational enterprises from developed countries have moved a substantial part of their R&D activity to emerging markets such as India and China. The location of R&D in developing countries was initially driven largely by the availability of skilled personnel at low cost. At first, these R&D centers in emerging markets operated primarily as extended arms of R&D in the home country, executing well-defined projects under close supervision from headquarters. However, the dynamics of multinationals'R&D centers are rapidly changing. Emerging markets are new growth drivers of the global economy, and their unique bundle of opportunities and challenges can be a wellspring of innovation for a multinational company. Simultaneously, many R&D centers in emerging markets have evolved to accumulate advanced technical capabilities, leading their employees to clamor for higher-value-added work and to seek responsibility for a complete product or technology. Given these trends, R&D subsidiaries in emerging markets are uniquely positioned to play an important role in multinational companies'innovation strategy. However, this thinking is often at odds with the dominant innovation mindset, structures, and processes within multinational companies based in developed countries. This article advances a framework that can be used by managers in multinational companies to support the key decisions on innovating for emerging markets. The framework is based on learnings gleaned from the successful development of the ASR 901 aggregation services routers, a product family that was conceptualized and developed by Cisco's India R&D center for emerging-market customers but was also adopted by global customers.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Too often, great products fail because customers do not recognize the value that they create. Although we now have ample insight into how customers evaluate new products, many companies focus primarily on creating value -- without enough regard to how customers recognize innovations and evaluate new products. There are only two ways consumers can collect information, the author notes: They can search, or they can infer. Knowing when consumers will search or infer will help you determine which of your innovations customers will recognize. The Internet has had a profound impact on the way customers evaluate many products. First, it has lowered the cost of search by making information more accessible. Second, the Internet has broadened what is searchable by including customer reviews as well as product features on standard spec sheets. To ensure that customers will recognize the value your products offer, the author recommends focusing on three questions: Are customers motivated to search? Are they able to search effectively? What cues will customers use to infer value?