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Many minority members fail to understand that their career mobility can be affected by their colleagues' feelings of familiarity or closeness with them. Even those who do understand this can find building workplace relationships across racial boundaries difficult. Being one's true self, disclosing elements of one's personal life, and forming social connections are harder when attempted across a demographic boundary such as racial background. Helping workplace relationships flourish among people of differing races may require special effort. The authors suggest several strategies that organizations can use to make employees from varied demographic groups feel comfortable engaging with one another: (1) Recognize the role that structure--such as formal icebreaker games or having a leader introduce everyone at a gathering--can play in easing the discomfort of free-form socializing. (2) Adopt a learning orientation by asking open and curious questions that demonstrate that being different makes someone more valuable. (3) Consider creating a buddy system of informal mentorship, in which more-experienced employees help facilitate social relationships for new hires.

Approximately 150 million people in North America and Western Europe now work as independent contractors, most of them in knowledge-intensive industries and creative occupations. The authors studied 65 of them in depth and learned that although they feel a host of personal, social, and economic anxieties without the cover and support of a traditional employer, they also say they chose independence and wouldn't give up the benefits that come with it. Many of these workers have created a "holding environment" for themselves by establishing four connections: (1) place, in the form of idiosyncratic, dedicated workspaces that allow easy access to the tools of their owners' trade; (2) routines that streamline workflow and incorporate personal care; (3) purpose, to create a bridge between personal interests and motivations and a need in the world; and (4) people to whom they turn for reassurance and encouragement. These connections help independent workers sustain productivity, endure their anxieties, and even turn those feelings into sources of creativity and growth.

The actress turned activist discusses her early career, how she dealt with sexism, and the importance of resilience.

Design firms have long claimed that workspace reorganizations promote collaboration and creativity, and research studies back up those claims. But the financial return has been hard to prove--until now. Research at a South Korean e-commerce firm finds that relocating "merchandisers"--employees who source product deals--near employees they hadn't previously had much contact with boosted creativity among those with high deal-sourcing ability and significantly increased revenue per worker. Companies competing on knowledge sharing and innovation could find payoffs from periodic workspace reconfigurations, the researchers say.

Throughout history people have made claims about the health benefits of cold baths. Now a new study from the Netherlands finds that people who douse themselves with an icy blast of water daily are out sick nearly a third less than people who don't.

Committing yourself romantically to another ambitious person requires committing to their career as well as your own—which creates challenges that must be overcome to benefit from the partnership. After all, committing to two careers often requires one partner to take a time-out from ambition. Lost in most discussions of “power couples” is the fact that the real power of these couples is only tapped when both members of the partnership are focused on the same goals. When two people share the same career objective, the pair’s combined energy, skills, wits, and actions are enhanced. Two founders working toward a common goal will often fare better than one working alone. Like everything else in business, making a power couple business partnership work requires strategic planning, and many leadership teams can benefit from having a combination of technical and creative partners. The author recommends the following three key practices: First, one spouse must not report to the other. This will help mitigate the risk of casual dinner-table conversation turning into a performance review. Second, leadership roles should be defined. To help do this, both partners should consider taking a personality test to identify similarities and differences. Third, celebrate your business successes as a couple.

Crisis contagion, or how a crisis spreads from one company to another, has received very little attention from researchers. This is surprising as the negative consequences of crisis contagion can be significant when customers make assumptions of guilt by association. This article focuses on this important issue and describes four risk factors-country of origin, industry, organizational type, and positioning strategy-that increase the likelihood of crisis contagion. Valuable guidance is also provided on whether a company should issue a denial or remain silent if it faces the risk of crisis contagion.

When deciding where to locate a new facility, a firm needs to consider the financial health of the municipality where its activities will take place. Unless it sites its facility in a financially viable community, a firm is putting a substantial investment at risk. Despite the importance of this issue, many firms pay insufficient attention to a municipality's financial condition. Instead, they focus on matters such as the tax rate, the quality of the school system, or the absence of regulatory constraints. All of these features are important, but unless a municipality is financially healthy, they can evaporate before a company has attained its expected return on investment. There are 5 financial statements and 10 financial ratios that can be used to create a financial health template, which can help a firm to assess a municipality's financial strength, or its counterpart financial weakness. The template goes beyond the debt-repayment focus of credit rating agencies to matters such as financial autonomy, cash flows, and borrowing capacity. We use data from three cities-Barcelona, Dublin, and Detroit (pre- and post-bankruptcy)-to demonstrate the template's ability to facilitate comparisons among cities that are in different countries and that use different accounting systems.

Managers need to think creatively about ways to improve organizational performance. We explore one such tool. Popular business books that offer unique takes on important topics can serve as an effective tool to engage workers and lead them to new understandings. In particular, we discuss the key insights for organizations offered by ten classic and popular bestselling business books. Each one offers enduring lessons of value for employees interested in helping their organizations become more successful.

This article provides an overview of social media analytics for managers that seek to utilize the practice for social media intelligence. Currently, managers are challenged to analyze an abundance of social media data but lack a framework within which to do so. Toward this end, this article presents a simple typology of social media analytics for enterprises. It also discusses various analytics methods for social media data. Then, this article discusses management processes of social media analytics for enterprises. An illustration of social media analytics is provided with real-world consumer review data. Finally, four challenges are discussed.

Companies face increasing pressure to compete in the practice of analytics and strive for analytics maturity to sustain their competitive advantage. A single-minded, narrow focus on gaining analytics maturity, however, leads to analytics maturity myopia. Based on our studies of analytical capabilities and numerous conversations with executives and managers, we offer a scorecard for organizations to identify the presence of analytics maturity myopia and propose a framework for organizations to correct this issue. The proposed framework partially explains the mixed and conflicting results regarding the relationship between analytics maturity and business value found in the literature. Specifically, we recommend that companies focus on three factors that are critical to realizing value from analytics initiatives: (1) a balanced view of value to different stakeholders, (2) a continuous expansion of the business ecosystem beyond current stakeholders to identify and pursue new opportunities, and (3) use of an emergent strategy to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and develop organizational agility.

One of the most important goals in healthcare today is reducing costs while maintaining high-quality care. This article focuses on a triadic relationship that is responsible for a significant amount of nonlabor spending in hospitals: physician preference items. The triadic relationship among salespeople, physicians, and hospitals' supply managers has a direct influence on costs. Regarding some key purchases, the physician-salesperson relationship is closer than the physician-supply manager relationship-even though the latter two entities work for and within the same company and strive for the same mission. This reality creates a type of conflict that is perplexing to solve and costly to ignore. To better understand the sources of friction and opportunities for collaboration in this triad, personnel across hospitals, suppliers, and healthcare consortiums were interviewed. Herein, we introduce strategies to help resolve the conflict. It is essential that hospital supply managers continually negotiate for best solutions that consider both long-run costs and quality of patient care. Yet, salesperson motivations and close salesperson-physician relationships place barriers that prevent negotiations more common to other areas of spending. The strategies offered in this article highlight ways to mute negative and amplify positive effects of the physician-salesperson relationship.

Imitation goods are widely spread throughout the global business world. Shanzhai imitation (山寨) represents a type of imitation that mimics the original brand through surface or functional similarities but often provides enhanced or innovative features adapted to local market needs. Although both practitioners and academia have studied and provided solutions to combat counterfeits, solutions for original brand manufacturers to address threats from Shanzhai products are lacking. In this article, we first differentiate Shanzhai products from counterfeits. Using a mixed-method approach that combines interviews and laboratory experiment results, we then identify social, individual, functional, and financial (SIFF) factors as driving forces behind consumers' purchasing of Shanzhai products. Shanzhai buyers place more weight on functional value and price/quality ratio than do counterfeit buyers, who in turn favor social value and materialism more than Shanzhai buyers. Finally, we provide several recommendations to original manufacturers from both the demand and supply sides.

Leader character is foundational to good leadership. We define character as an amalgam of virtues, values, and personality traits that influence how leaders behave in various contexts. Our research identified 11 dimensions of leader character and 60-plus character elements that are illustrative of those dimensions. We integrate two frameworks: John Kotter's eight-step model of leading change and our framework of leader character dimensions and associated elements. Specifically, the objective of this article is to illustrate which dimensions of leader character come into play at various points in the organizational change process and how their presence or absence affects the outcomes of the change process. Beyond that, we draw inferences about how organizations might develop character among all leaders but especially those younger, less experienced leaders who will become tomorrow's leaders of change projects.

From security cameras to GPS tracking systems, nearly 80% of organizations use some type of electronic performance monitoring (EPM). EPM uses technology to gather, store, analyze, and report employee behavior data to assess performance and observe actions on the job (i.e., productivity, use of company time, incivility). The objective, real-time data that EPM systems collect can be used for performance appraisal, training and development, logistical tracking, wellness programs, employee safety, and more. Despite the organizational benefits of EPM, these systems can have adverse effects on employee satisfaction, organizational commitment, fairness perceptions, and employee behavior. Research provides evidence, however, that these downfalls can be mitigated by implementing these systems with employee attitudes and privacy perceptions in mind. Using theory and empirical research evidence, we offer five recommendations for maximizing the positive effects and minimizing the negative effects of EPM: (1) Be transparent with employees about EPM use, (2) be aware of all potential employee reactions to being monitored, (3) use EPM for learning and development rather than deterrence, (4) restrict EPM to only work-related behaviors, and (5) consider organizational makeup when implementing an EPM system.

Growing up with the internet and unparalleled access to technology, millennials (individuals born during 1981-1995, also known as Gen Y and Gen Me) extensively use various technologies for non-work-related reasons while at work. Both popular media and scholarly research have portrayed this issue negatively and have supported monitoring and restricting personal use of technology. However, if organizations are to attract and retain millennials-now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce-it is crucial to understand their characteristics and what drives them. Drawing on research on generational differences, organizational control, and cyberloafing, this article explains how unique characteristics of millennials lead them to engage in personal use of technology at work and how organizations might address this issue. Specifically, I contrast two one-sided approaches (deterrence and laissez-faire) that can lead to dysfunctional outcomes when used in excess and recommend more viable solutions. These solutions include establishing a workplace technology use policy based on shared understanding, fostering both relaxation and urgency mentalities, and training both millennials and their managers.

Corporate entrepreneurship is a process of strategic renewal and development of an existing business through the creation of new products, services, and activities, as well as new competitive postures and independent ventures. The performance of this process, which leverages the creativity and the initiative spirit of employees and managers, is thus relying on the capacity of the organization to create favorable conditions for the emergence of such latent entrepreneurial potential. The development of participatory innovation models and collective intelligence offer new insights for conducting research on factors enabling corporate entrepreneurship. In particular, the internal company 'crowd' can be investigated with the purpose to study the conditions under which the corporate entrepreneurship process can be successfully nurtured and conducted. In such view, this article moves from an extended review of corporate entrepreneurship and organizational innovation literature to define the concept of crowdventuring and to present an assessment tool aimed to evaluate the maturity of the crowdventuring process within an organization. The tool, which captures both individual and organization-related factors, is also used for an illustrative application into a multinational IT company. Some implications are also drawn at theory and practitioner levels.

This article offers an innovative graphical approach to facilitating an interactive discussion about identifying and assessing potential growth opportunities. Our approach, circle mapping, visually conceptualizes growth as occupying space, where market space is defined by a set of concentric circles. The circle presently occupied by the firm is defined by its current set of customers and the value proposition offered to them, while the outer concentric circles represent growth opportunities that are defined by new customers and value propositions. The process of circle mapping prompts leadership teams to formulate a growth strategy by visually mapping the value proposition for future customers in relation to the firm's capacity to access the resources and capabilities needed to successfully occupy those spaces. The model allows leaders to conceptualize growth strategies, such as leveraging success in one circle to target consumers in another. It can also allow leaders to evaluate the rewards and risks associated with different growth opportunities, while the visual aspect of the model assists with overcoming some common challenges of applying strategy frameworks to develop new strategies. By having leaders visually depict and justify where and why they want to grow, circle mapping helps firms conceptualize a profitable future and then confidently move toward that space.

When employees are empowered to continuously record their employment-related frustrations- doing so on accessible, visually prominent media-process improvement becomes upgraded to operate in a truly continuous mode. Frustrations are a superior target of process improvement in that they get at deep-seated concerns of people who have first-order process awareness and are most directly impacted by process failings. Recording frustrations not only provides a sound basis for pressing on to solutions, but it is also cathartic. The act of recording frustrations prominently on company-sanctioned media provides a positive outlet for the frustrations themselves.

Innovation has become a universal feature of corporate life. Almost no company can survive without innovation. However, when it comes to developing innovation strategies, managers often are left alone to decide which innovation types to pursue, how to balance them in an overall portfolio, how to allocate resources, and how to implement them. In short, managers face a variety of innovation dilemmas. One of the most pertinent problems is how to distinguish innovation types in a meaningful way. In this article, we introduce the innovation cube, a tool that helps position innovation types in a managerially meaningful way. Once managers know how to relate and compare their innovation types to those of other companies, the cube helps them to better formulate their innovation strategy.