Eric Jacobson

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Workplaces will become more agile, so how we work will become less formal, organized, and clear-cut. We can no longer afford to believe that to survive the dog-eat-dog world of corporate bureaucracy, we need to coerce, control, and persuade others to get them to do what you want them to do—even if it isn’t in their own best interests.

Real Estate 91

Real Estate Self-aware Open-book Learning-by-Doing 91

The Practical Leader

AUGUST 16, 2023

I’ve missed only a few days in decades of work. ” Decades of research on the powerful links between leadership and emotional intelligence reinforce the energy connection.

Energy 52

Energy Crisis Absenteeism Leadership 52

Eric Jacobson

FEBRUARY 7, 2021

Phoenix Attitude Leaders are : Dreamers and doers Decisive with agility Self-aware with humility Confident to overcome fears and unleash change drivers Courageous to bust through bias, blockers, and bureaucracy This week, the authors shared these additional insights with me: Question: How can leaders embrace the Phoenix Attitude?

Leadership 65

Leadership Charan Bureaucracy Micromanagement 65

Eric Jacobson

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

Phoenix Attitude Leaders are : Dreamers and doers Decisive with agility Self-aware with humility Confident to overcome fears and unleash change drivers Courageous to bust through bias, blockers, and bureaucracy This week, the authors shared these additional insights with me: Question: How can leaders embrace the Phoenix Attitude?

Charan 65

Charan Bureaucracy Books Micromanagement 65

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

We are delighted to announce the winners of the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge , the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. We asked some big questions in our quest to bust bureaucracy: What does it mean to build an organization in which everyone is aligned and inspired by a deeply-felt sense of purpose?

Bureaucracy 12

Bureaucracy Company Agility CIO 12

Harvard Business Review

JULY 19, 2017

Many companies are attempting a radical — and often rapid — shift from hierarchical structures to more agile environments, in order to operate at the speed required by today’s competitive marketplace. At Bain & Company, we do not believe that companies should try to use agile methods everywhere. This takes time.

Agility 8

Agility White Paper How To Metrics 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

Leaders recognize that lean and agile business strategies require new ways of accessing talent to fill critical gaps — without necessarily bringing on more full-time employees. Studies of the global agile-talent community vary in their estimates of the size of the population. One of the main problems is decision making.

Agility 8

Agility Organization Resources Fixed Costs 8

Coaching Tip

APRIL 29, 2011

Size doesn’t have to mean bureaucracy, but it takes fresh organizational thinking. Companies worry about losing talent – Google is losing talent to Facebook as it becomes bigger, slower and less agile.”. . Talented people get frustrated, and they look for opportunities elsewhere so they can get more traction.

Development 112

Development Bureaucracy Globalization Middle Management 112

Skip Prichard

JANUARY 10, 2022

Methodologies such Lean Startup and Agile have taught us to innovate faster by harnessing the power of iteration. Examples include: Dealing with bureaucracy and writing standard reports. In a growing economy where credit was plentiful, the tech industry has repeatedly chanted the innovation mantra “Fail fast, learn fast.”

Productivity 106

Productivity Products Development Short-term 106

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2016

Organizations in every industry and geography are increasingly indebted to external talent, whom we term agile talent , to augment their resources in strategic areas. The benefits are substantial: Agile talent provides organizations with greater flexibility, speed, and competitive insight. Here’s the problem. Some are excellent.

CTO 8

CTO Agility Management Chief Technology Officer 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 21, 2017

That means retailers must learn to compete head-on with Amazon in two fundamental capabilities: agile innovation and expense management. This innovation in innovation requires moving from predictive plans (based on increasingly unpredictable market conditions) to adaptive, agile innovation teams. Agile innovation teams are small.

Retail 8

Retail Planning Agility Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 13, 2015

Given these shifts, organizations have to be agile, simple, and responsive. In a hyper-speed world with multiple divergences, a vertical chain of command with annual rituals creates isolation, sluggishness, and bureaucracy. This is what is likely to make it more agile and responsive.

Agility 8

Agility Bureaucracy Competitive Advantage Software 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 12, 2014

It is the ad hoc nature of the project that enables the flexibility and agility required to capture the first real customer. Most entrepreneurs understand that they need to be flexible and agile in order to figure out how and what potential customers will buy from them.

Project 9

Project Process Entrepreneur Agility 9

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 12, 2017

” It’s a familiar idea: A SWAT innovation team is created, ready to inject new thinking into a burdensome bureaucracy. In fact, we’re not even sure you can legally do Agile! They could teach us about the bureaucracy, and together we came up with a new way that was built upon what they had started.

Advice 11

Advice Bureaucracy Innovation Chief Technology Officer 11

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 21, 2016

” It might be hard for people in HR to hear, but only 20% of those who responded said that their HR function was enabling them to transform, ranking them even lower than finance — an area not exactly known for its agility. First, low barriers to entry into these sectors lead to more agile competition.

Industry 8

Industry B2C Agility Bureaucracy 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 4, 2013

Drawing on the software development practices known as Agile, Scrum, and XP, the teams work in short, iterative cycles of test-driven development with direct customer feedback as the work proceeds.). In the 20th Century, their organizations competed on scale efficiency and relied on hierarchical bureaucracies to run tight ships.

Management 9

Management Bureaucracy Self-aware Agility 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 22, 2016

Convinced that they have a sustainable competitive advantage (always a risky way to think about your business), executives allow bureaucracy to take over and decision-making to become sclerotic. Eliminate bureaucracy. The difficulty here is that this doesn’t happen overnight. Rediscover the mission.

Company 8

Company Competitive Advantage Bureaucracy Retail 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

As such, digital companies are able to bypass some of the traditional blockers to growth — such as expanding org charts, bloated layers of management, proliferation of systems and processes, and burgeoning bureaucracy — that used to bog down legacy companies. Insight Center. Corporate Culture for a Digital World.

Company 8

Company Engineering Technology Bureaucracy 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 11, 2014

Isn’t it better to hasten Joseph Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction and move capital and employment from inefficient dinosaurs to more vibrant and agile upstarts? Certainly, those transaction costs have to be balanced against the drag created by bloated bureaucracy, and the soul-crushing work that characterizes too many companies.

Innovation 8

Innovation Venture Capitalist Company Supply Chain 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 16, 2014

Airbnb is not only challenging the biggest hotel chains but also challenging the bureaucracy, going after the New York City housing and tax laws that stand it its way. As discussed, open-system species are agile in part because they see opportunities and create new models to go after them. Take more control.

Marketing 8

Marketing Disintermediation Hotels Brand 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 25, 2016

Agile methods and Scrum are creating space for individuals to self-organize and work in iterative processes. It is questionable, for example, whether many thousands of pages of regulations have enhanced the banks’ ability to carry out their core mission of funding the real economy of goods and services for real human beings.

Drucker 8

Drucker Long-term Short-term Christensen 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 31, 2016

Originating from agile software development, the sprint has entered the business mainstream as an increasingly popular means to accelerate business model, product, or service innovation. As Google Ventures’ five-day method has shown, sprints help bypass bureaucracy, “analysis paralysis,” and endless debate cycles.

Agility 8

Agility Strategy Short-term Long-term 8

Ask Atma

MAY 5, 2012

model, startups will have more success if they adopt lean and agile business development principles, where failing fast is the premium strategy and the lean business model reigns supreme. Programmers, UX/AI, MBA, agile product/project manager, other specialists…. Although this one is especially suited for agile development.

Business Model 93

Business Model Ries Agility Entrepreneur 93

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2017

The Pentagon used to lose too many talented college graduates to more agile competitors, even though we were their first choice, because of the time it took to get an offer through the cumbersome bureaucracy.

Talent Management 10

Talent Management Learning-by-Doing Advertising Training 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 17, 2015

In response to the rapid advance of cloud computing, IBM’s software engineering groups embraced the Agile development method – with teams focused on incremental delivery of new capabilities every few weeks or months. But as Intuit grew, informality and entrepreneurship began to morph into procedure and bureaucracy.

Productivity 8

Productivity Products Customer Intimacy Software 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 18, 2016

This lack of trust prevented him from attacking challenges with speed and agility because his peers constantly questioned his decisions. Often, in poor-performing cultures, the virus that is infecting the organization is low trust and the symptoms are wide-ranging dysfunction, redundancy, turnover, bureaucracy, disengagement, and fraud.

Supply Chain 8

Supply Chain Commitment Report Skills 8

HR Digest

APRIL 30, 2019

While the military is arguably the biggest bureaucracy, the Special Operations Forces’ success hinge on their ability to make and execute decisions in real-time. Leadership expert and best-selling author David Silverman has paved the way in transforming groups into high-performing, agile, and adaptive teams that drive success.

Silverman 51

Silverman Self-aware Learning-by-Doing Objective 51

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

As “better, cheaper, faster, smaller, more convenient, and more personalized” became the new norm, the ability to innovate with committed employees and agile processes became critical. Enabled firms to create huge ecosystems of suppliers and customers that could achieve enormous scale without the sclerosis of big hierarchical bureaucracy.

Supply Chain 13

Supply Chain Bureaucracy Short-term Agility 13

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 8, 2016

Remember: No matter how large Contect gets, it will stay agile and motivated. You have to admit that it would be a far more efficient approach, whether you call it holacracy or not: Faster decisions, made by the people who are most affected by them and know the ins and outs of the specific project, will make us much more agile.

Case Study 8

Case Study Decentralization CFO Construction 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 15, 2015

Instead of leading a top-down, highly efficient bureaucracy, we began to lead ourselves as a network. After several years of change, we could apply the force of a global enterprise with the speed and agility of a distributed network. Boost your group’s performance.

Team 8

Team Efficiency Bureaucracy Operations 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 16, 2011

Can you turn an organizational choice "either/or" such as freedom or discipline, short-term earnings obsession or investment in and exploration of new ideas, scale or agility into a transformational "and"? Some ways in to the truly juicy challenges: Look for the intractable tradeoffs. Turn an organizational "can't do" into a "can do."

Management 12

Management Short-term Strategic Planning How To 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

In this context, "corporate catalysts" — entrepreneurially-minded people inside corporates — are working with corporations' resources, scale, and growing agility to develop innovative solutions to global challenges. It's easy to bemoan the stifling bureaucracies that characterize some large companies.

Innovation 8

Innovation Company Venture Capitalist Health Care 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

As important as it is for employees to feel heard and respected by their leaders, it's the relationship between peers that generates the agility, inventiveness, and engagement at the heart of a truly social organization. Maximize peer connections. Sometimes the simplest lever can crack open the biggest opportunity for change.

Management 8

Management How To Innovation Bureaucracy 8

Mark Sanborn

MARCH 22, 2022

Planning and process to agility and experimentation. Experimentation and agility trump planning and process. Don’t let bureaucracy, slow decision making and outdated rules slow the process. Agility is about flexibility and speed, and adapting quickly. These are the things that develop practical confidence.

Agility 100

Agility Contingency Plans Crisis Learning-by-Doing 100

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 27, 2017

That way, you minimize bureaucracy, explore ideas, take appropriate risks, prioritize work, ensure accountability, and focus on delivering value through your strategic initiatives. In today’s business environment, strategy planning cycles must be more rapid, dynamic, and agile than in the past.

Strategy 8

Strategy Content Cooper Learning-by-Doing 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2016

Leaders with a strong founder’s mentality also have what we call an owner’s mindset: They think about every expense as if it were their own money (which it often is) and hate any sort of bureaucracy that slows the company down. “If our team thinks like owners, we know we can retain our speed and agility,” he says.

Company 8

Company Hotels Supply Chain Long-term 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 3, 2018

But even if an AI system gives an employee super-powered intelligence, it won’t be enough to make a timely decision if the company’s internal bureaucracy requires time-consuming pre-authorization from senior managers before acting on the decision.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Tools Marketing Agility 8