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How Managers Can Avoid Playing Favorites

Harvard Business Review

But when managers favor one employee over another, morale and productivity suffer. What Great Managers Do. Exceptional managers find and capitalize on their employees' unique strengths. . Maybe you’re both fans of the same hockey team or you both like foreign films. Here are some strategies to ensure fairness.

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Kill Your Business Model Before It Kills You

Harvard Business Review

The Postal Service, even with the constraints of its government mandate, has known for years that its traditional model was coming apart; Kodak realized that film was being replaced by digital media long before it changed its investment strategy; AOL knew that dial-up subscriptions were fading years before it took action.

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Kodak and the Brutal Difficulty of Transformation

Harvard Business Review

In the decades that followed Kodak established a dominant position in the lucrative film business, with its "you push a button, we do the rest" slogan demonstrating its commitment to making photography accessible to the masses. Of course, being a dominant film provider became increasingly irrelevant in light of recent technological shifts.

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Kill Your Business Model Before It Kills You

Harvard Business Review

The Postal Service, even with the constraints of its government mandate, has known for years that its traditional model was coming apart; Kodak realized that film was being replaced by digital media long before it changed its investment strategy; AOL knew that dial-up subscriptions were fading years before it took action.

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How to Hand Off an Innovation Project from One Team to Another

Harvard Business Review

This is a strong model for industries like consumer packaged goods, where one person, such as a brand manager, is responsible for product development from beginning to end. This model is most common in software development teams, where UX designers may be involved in both early user research and long-term management of the product.

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Africa’s Entrepreneurs Can’t Be Restrained by Fear of Failure

Harvard Business Review

From South Africa’s Silicon Cape to Kenya’s iHub -centered Silicon Savannah movement – from Ethiopia’s burgeoning textiles industry to Nigeria’s ubiquitous Nollywood film industry – there are visible signs of the growing profile of African entrepreneurs. The problem of course is that the status quo often cannot last.

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Procrastination Is Essential to Innovation

Harvard Business Review

This post was co-authored with Bob Moesta , Managing Partner of The Re-Wired Group in Detroit. According to the Journal of Management , NASA scientists and engineers found that performance increases as deadlines shorten, but when the deadlines became too short, performance declined. How's your book launch coming?" Bob asked me.