Harvard Business Review

APRIL 20, 2017

Chronic mediocrity is a symptom of ineffective leadership, not anemic personnel. In fact, I’ve even seen examples of government bureaucracies in tragically broken countries that dramatically turned around their performance in a matter of months. They do it through four leadership practices that lead to performance excellence.

Team 15

Team Bureaucracy Video Telecommunications 15

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 10, 2013

An engineer with a diemaker father who worked in a Pontiac plant, Barra is a 33-year company veteran. Barra began her career at the old GM as a young student engineer. Mary Barra is good for GM first and foremost because she’s an engineer who cares about cars. This is a new GM. This situation was untenable.

Engineering 11

Engineering CFO Industry Bureaucracy 11

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2017

When one of us (Vivek) and his team launched Roivant Sciences in 2014 and began developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease — they were determined to learn from the pharma industry’s innovation issues and build a more sustainable innovation engine.

Innovation 9

Innovation Company Incentives Industry 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

JUNE 8, 2015

Weber saw that traditional and charismatic leadership would have to give way to a more bureaucratic and rational model. So much so that we see them as “the way things work” and forget that bureaucracies were once innovations too. Before Weber’s bureaucracies became predominant, most enterprises were fairly organic.

Organization 8

Organization Bureaucracy Network Organization Informal Structure 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2016

They abhor complexity, bureaucracy, and anything that gets in the way of the clean execution of strategy. During that decade, we estimate, the company captured more than 90 percent of the market’s global profits and seemed poised to maintain its leadership for years to come. Leadership & Managing People Book.

Company 8

Company Survey Bureaucracy Globalization 8

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. To the engineers, the design thinking process seemed like a return to the Waterfall method. .”

Productivity 8

Productivity Products Customer Intimacy Software 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

Three years later, GE hired veteran software engineer Ganesh Bell to be chief digital officer of GE Power and Water. Domain expertise at an automaker includes things like mechanics, telematics, structural engineering, design, and so on. Change the dialogue in the senior leadership team to focus on the end-to-end customer experience.

Short-term 8

Short-term How To Venture Capitalist CFO 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 26, 2016

” In his characteristic style, Welch blasted the Elfun Society at their leadership conference. They have mentoring programs for high school students… Elfin’s self-engineered turn around became a very important symbol [of reducing bureaucracy]. He saw the club as a symbol for “superficial congeniality.”

Company 8

Company Welch Bureaucracy Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 29, 2013

Robert Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University and the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and coauthor with Huggy Rao of the forthcoming Scaling Up Excellence , agrees. Leadership is mischaracterized as a solo adventure. Ask for frank feedback on whether your evaluation matches the outsider''s.

Management 13

Management How To Case Study Learning-by-Doing 13

Strategy Driven

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Among the lessons which we learned from the Y2K Bug exercise were: When they want to do so, company leadership will provide sufficient resources to plan for the future, including crisis management and preparedness (of which computer glitches are one set of “what ifs.”). Won’t listen to advice. Bad Work, Poor Planning.

Crisis 58

Crisis Crisis Management Retail Budgeting 58

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 15, 2017

1 — Consistent Leadership Over Time Matters in This Market. One of us (Gunjan) counseled a top video game company to develop collaboration processes so that engineers in Bangalore and California could work on one integrated team over a 12.5-hour India is a complex country and has a unique mix of Asian and Western values.

CEO 10

CEO Long-term Short-term Mass Marketing 10

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 1, 2013

Frustrated employees were complaining about the lack of amenities — such as child care facilities — on campus and the stifling bureaucracy which, for instance, made expense reimbursment a time-consuming process. Ferose was recently promoted to become the head of SAP's Globalization Services organization.

Innovation 9

Innovation Attrition Software Globalization 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

That turns out to be a powerful approach to leadership in a world of expanding complexity, immense challenges and intense change. Share it here and join the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge to share your stories, ideas, and practices about what it takes to make our organizations more inspiring, open and free. What's your question?

Organization 15

Organization Open-book Bureaucracy CEO 15

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

3M and Google, among others, have given "innovation time off" to their scientists and engineers. There is also a "sweat the small stuff" day, once a quarter, for getting on top of the creeping bureaucracy and niggling problems that accumulate over time. So a more focused approach may be more worthwhile. Loosely defined roles.

Company 8

Company Stage-Gate Innovation Bureaucracy 8

Mark Sanborn

MARCH 22, 2022

Don’t let bureaucracy, slow decision making and outdated rules slow the process. It is the engine that drives what gets done and how it gets done. Compare the four leadership styles below. The post 6 Shifts for Leading The Future that is Already Here appeared first on Mark Sanborn Keynote Leadership Speaker.

Agility 100

Agility Contingency Plans Crisis Learning-by-Doing 100

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 7, 2016

They loathe bureaucracy that traps resources and slows decision making. ” Bureaucracy sets in, and bureaucrats don’t feel the insurgent mission. At smaller companies, founders and their employees engage in this sort of reallocation constantly and instinctively. Instead, they focus only on their small piece of it.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Short-term Budgeting Long-term 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2016

In 1987, a Portuguese audio engineer named Fernando Duarte took a friend, South African entrepreneur Robbie Brozin, to a small takeout restaurant in a suburb of Johannesburg. And you also can’t put customers first until senior leadership meetings are filled with the voices of the customers and front line.

Company 8

Company Hotels Supply Chain Long-term 8