Harvard Business Review

MAY 22, 2018

Believe it or not, bureaucracy was once a progressive innovation. The German sociologist Max Weber famously praised bureaucracy’s rationality and efficiencies. Today, most people work in some sort of bureaucracy — and according to Gallup, 85% of employees around the world feel disengaged from their work.

Bureaucracy 11

Bureaucracy Agility Energy Constraint 11

Skip Prichard

JANUARY 10, 2022

But in the RPT way, you can systematically engineer the culture your team needs to fuel innovation, i.e., you can be vision-driven about changing your culture. Examples include: Dealing with bureaucracy and writing standard reports. Managing up. How do leaders initiate a change in the culture to create an RPT culture?

Productivity 106

Productivity Products Development Short-term 106

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 15, 2016

Partly a byproduct of user-centered approaches and do-it-yourself ingenuity, this emerging wave of intrapreneurship is due to a rising generation of managers who have been empowered by accessible technology and mobilized by social media. Today Atis manages L’Oréal’s Women of Color Lab, in Clark, New Jersey.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Innovation Brand Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2016

The other one of us cofounded 10x Management , a well-respected talent agency representing top-tier freelance programmers, designers, and other technology professionals. Others are new to managing or stronger technically than as a supervisor. One approach that 10X has recommended is creating a roving CTO or project managers.

CTO 8

CTO Agility Management Chief Technology Officer 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 20, 2017

The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity. You have no moral authority to ask other managers to hold people accountable if you’re not doing so yourself. What Great Managers Do. Are you sure you’re doing enough to push for high performance?

Team 15

Team Bureaucracy Video Telecommunications 15

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 29, 2013

What should you do if the person you manage drives you crazy? 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. But Linda thought he had the right skills and experience.

Management 13

Management How To Case Study Learning-by-Doing 13

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 14, 2014

GM’s bankruptcy and bailout four years ago earned it the nickname “Government Motors,” a reference to both the $80 billion lent by the US government (repaid in full in December, 2013) and to the bureaucratic, top-down management GM executives had used to try to reverse the company’s tailspin. They play well as a team.

Team 8

Team McGregor Parcell Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

Insurgent startups, such as Instagram and Snapchat, manage to operate with far fewer resources than legacy companies in the same industry in the “pre-digital” era. Look at WhatsApp, which had 55 employees (35 of them engineers) and reached more than 450 million users when it was acquired by Facebook in 2014.

Company 8

Company Engineering Technology Bureaucracy 8

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

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. Yet actually, small-world networks often form naturally, without design or complex organizational engineering.

Organization 8

Organization Bureaucracy Network Organization Informal Structure 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. Amazon’s greatest competitive advantage is not its e-commerce network; it is its innovation engine. A Quick Introduction to Agile Management. of sales) on “technology and content.”

Retail 8

Retail Planning Agility Innovation 8

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

Strategy Driven

DECEMBER 16, 2020

For years now, huge corporations such as British Aerospace Engineering and Raytheon have completely dominated the market and swooped in to poach promising innovators. The defense industry is changing in the United States of America.

Innovation 130

Innovation Software Industry Politics 130

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 21, 2011

The prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly against other people's attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management. Front line workers need broad empowerment to address problems with a minimum of bureaucracy. I worry about competitors. And there is a culture of no blame.

Process 15

Process Bureaucracy Innovation Short-term 15

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

Imagine if managements, boards, and investors adopted them: we could restart our economy, energize our business school curricula and create prosperity for our children and grandchildren. Berkshire's talented managers get the P&L independence to run their own businesses. He wants loyal investors who seek to be stockowners, not renters.

Letter 14

Letter P&L Net Present Value Insurance 14

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 26, 2015

Taylor , the founder of scientific management who died 100 years ago. The nerds’ power was sharply amplified: Massive investments required the centralized engineering of business processes, putting all the control in the hands of a cohort of experts. How did the war start, and why is it important? It began with Frederick W.

Process 8

Process Banking Compliance Bureaucracy 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2016

They abhor complexity, bureaucracy, and anything that gets in the way of the clean execution of strategy. Leadership & Managing People Book. Armed with interview results, start one-on-one discussions with your top managers, asking: Does everyone understand the company’s insurgent mission? Adapted from. Add to Cart.

Company 8

Company Survey Bureaucracy Globalization 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 26, 2016

I found that the companies that survive and thrive are good at aligning their organizations around three critical but competing activities : Box 1: Manage the present at peak efficiency and profitability. ” In his characteristic style, Welch blasted the Elfun Society at their leadership conference. It was just what I was looking for.”

Company 8

Company Welch Bureaucracy Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 25, 2016

In terms of management, the advent of the entrepreneurial society means above all replacing the rigidities of industrial-age mind-sets, with their command-and-control, top-down orientation. Managing the transition. The entrepreneurial society. There are indications that this is happening.

Drucker 8

Drucker Long-term Short-term Christensen 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. Many such leaders are relatively young and highly sought after.

Short-term 8

Short-term How To Venture Capitalist CFO 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 14, 2016

Nineteen days later, as rescue crews grew desperate, a 24-year-old field engineer named Igor Proestakis decided to travel to the site with what he hoped was a breakthrough idea: using a particular drilling technology, called cluster hammers, to cut through the collapsed rock. So what is holding these engineers back?

Engineering 8

Engineering Project Benchmarking Hammer 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. Here’s the arithmetic.

Cost 8

Cost Bureaucracy GDP Management 8

Strategy Driven

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Current management of both companies were ill-advised on handling the crises. When they are compelled to do so, company leadership will provide leadership for change management and re-engineering…two of the many worthwhile concepts that should be advocated every business day. Those We Bring Upon Ourselves.

Crisis 58

Crisis Crisis Management Retail Budgeting 58

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 18, 2014

Her story is not only an inspiring one of adapting self-help narratives and neuroscience to "trick" her own mind; it’s also a tale couched in almost a century of management thinking about who can and can''t be a leader. In Amsterdam, Dutch architects are constructing a 13-room house from 3-D printed Lego-like plastic blocks.

Charisma 8

Charisma Hamel Bureaucracy Meyer 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

We announced the winners of the Management 2.0 Challenge (the first of three legs of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation) here last week. Here are just three lessons from our management innovators about leveraging social technologies to create truly social organizations: Trust your people with the future of the company.

Management 8

Management How To Innovation Bureaucracy 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 15, 2017

To succeed in India, an American company either needs to have robust electronic communication processes at the top management level or must be willing to set its leaders in India free of the bureaucracy at corporate headquarters, so that they can address local issues and opportunities. Local autonomy makes important decisions possible.

CEO 10

CEO Long-term Short-term Mass Marketing 10

Harvard Business Review

JULY 8, 2014

Virtually everything except customer management and building the brand was left to partners. We could easily envision a landscape of lean, open, networked firms that managed their customers and their brands themselves but outsourced everything else to partners. Now, by “hierarchy” I don’t mean a stifling bureaucracy.

Technology 8

Technology Marketing Outsourcing Supply Chain 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 1, 2017

3M, for example, has long allowed engineers to devote 15% of their time to skunkworks projects, without supervisor approval.) Even when an organization has a robust pipeline of growth ideas and manages to keep many of them alive, it may lack the human capital needed to accelerate growth.

ROE 14

ROE Long-term GDP Six Sigma 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 1, 2013

Ferose became the managing director of SAP Labs India, one of fifteen global R&D centers of the German software giant SAP. At 35 years old, Ferose was the youngest-ever managing director of a global multinational firm in India — overseeing a staff of 4,000. In April 2010, V.R.

Innovation 9

Innovation Attrition Software Globalization 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

In an era when every young, gifted programmer, engineer, or entrepreneur's first instinct was to write their own business plan or head to a fast-growing startup, life as a foot soldier in Big Blue's global army was a pretty hard sell. Polly LaBarre is editorial director of the Management Innovation Exchange. What's your question?

Organization 15

Organization Open-book Bureaucracy CEO 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 9, 2018

While GDPR is certain to improve choice, control, and transparency for EU consumers, these new powers come with new responsibilities and new costs for users, not least of which are ballooning budgets for government data management and enforcement bureaucracies worldwide. And governments are hardly the experts on data security.

Advertising 11

Advertising Cost Business Model Information 11

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

Management thinking is inherently faddish, but there are some favorite themes that never fall out of favor. 3M and Google, among others, have given "innovation time off" to their scientists and engineers. Innovation is one those evergreen themes: it is a rare CEO who doesn't list innovation as one her top four or five priorities.

Company 8

Company Stage-Gate Innovation Bureaucracy 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 7, 2014

For fans of management books, this month marks a big anniversary. Moreover, Sloan did this by means of organizational mastery, without the major engineering breakthrough that other GM insiders believed was their only hope. Despite his own origins as an MIT-educated engineer, he took inspiration from the “Paris dressmakers.”

Decentralization 8

Decentralization Venture Capitalist Price Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 18, 2013

Many of the thousands of highly qualified engineers either started companies or joined growing startups — it did not take too many talented people with experience in developing advanced technology products to turbocharge Israel's entrepreneurial revolution. The result?

Company 8

Company Bureaucracy Restructuring Bottom-up 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 13, 2012

If I ask you to name the major causes of stress in your work life, you would probably say things like deadlines, a heavy workload, bureaucracy, or your terrible boss. Rely on routines. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia. –President Obama, Vanity Fair. Take five (or ten) minutes to do something you find interesting.

Stress 8

Stress Succession Self-aware Learning-by-Doing 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 7, 2016

One of the great innovations in business, which has held sway since 1976, is the idea that professional managers should have an owner’s mindset—that is, they should treat their company’s money as if it were their own. They loathe bureaucracy that traps resources and slows decision making.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Short-term Budgeting Long-term 8