Remove Cost Center Remove Innovation Remove Marketing Remove Power
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Why Leaders Need To Stop Using Performance Reviews

Tanveer Naseer

They make the workplace more political, needlessly enforcing nerve-wracking centers of power. One of your most promising managers has just led a two-year late-to-market death march on a brand extension that has launched and failed. You have lost market share, customer service complaints are up, and your own boss is pissed off.

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Shadow IT Is Out of the Closet

Harvard Business Review

An impatient marketing or finance manager would, on the sly, secure some extra budget money and hire a contractor to build a little database that tracked mailing addresses or top-line financials. Slowly but surely, as the little database grew bigger and bigger, the manager would wedge the cost into her operating budget.

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Obama and Romney Are Ignoring Hispanic Voters

Harvard Business Review

As founder of the Center for Hispanic Leadership, I can attest to the fact that the U.S. For example, many brands that have made unsuccessful and unprofitable attempts to market to Hispanic consumers using inauthentic tactics have now decided to lump Hispanics into what they call " total market " strategies.

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Social Means Freedom, for Better or for Worse

Harvard Business Review

He, like others , has discovered the power of teaching online; in his case, he reached 160,000 students in a single online course on artificial intelligence. While social stuff is often associated with marketing or customer service, social can affect every part of the business model , including how we organize.

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How One Company Made Its Analytics Investment Pay Off

Harvard Business Review

The ABU was set up as a centralized profit center with ambitious targets and with direct reporting to the chief operations officer; most often, similar units are organized as cost centers with no specific targets. This setup fosters focus on high-yield projects, actionable analytics, and speed of execution. Support from the top.

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A Kodak Moment to Reconsider the Value of IT

Harvard Business Review

With Kodak balancing on the precipice , a classic case study on the company offers powerful lessons that still resonate 20 years after it was written. But surveys show that more than 25% of firms still think of IT as a cost center, 53% of CIOs' time is focused on cost control, and 54% of companies outsource their IT services.

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Develop Your Company’s Cross-Functional Capabilities

Harvard Business Review

You’ll often find customer relationship management within marketing, budgeting within finance, supply-chain management within operations, outsourcing within procurement, training within HR, and new product development within R&D. Business units come and go, but finance, HR, marketing, IT, legal, and R&D seem to last forever.