Leading Blog

JANUARY 14, 2014

Rod Collins writes in Wiki Management , “Today’s managers may spend more time soliciting input from their workers, but at the end of the day, the basic social technology remains the same: The managers are still the bosses, the workers are still subordinates, and the latter are still expected to do as they are told.”

Collins 283

Collins Management Bureaucracy Open-book 283

Chart Your Course

OCTOBER 9, 2012

Optimistic employees work harder, longer and with a more innovative spirit. Optimism frames and fuels decisions, and in the modern workplace, it fosters solid work, innovation and sales. Since Steve Jobs’ death, experts have mulled the incredible success he brought to Apple as its co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer.

Chief Executive Officer 185

Chief Executive Officer Bureaucracy Motivation Innovation 185

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 8, 2013

What do you do if you're a leader in a large, successful organization with an entrenched bureaucracy, and you see the need for innovation? The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), however, was successful in transforming its bureaucracy. So, what makes the difference between success and failure?

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Innovation Supply Chain Long-term 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success. Businesses are, on average, far less adaptable, innovative, and inspiring than they could be and, increasingly, must be. Bureaucracy is the technology of control. Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR , C.K.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Short-term Long-term Intellectual Capital 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success. Businesses are, on average, far less adaptable, innovative, and inspiring than they could be and, increasingly, must be. Bureaucracy is the technology of control. Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR , C.K.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Short-term Long-term Intellectual Capital 8

Chart Your Course

AUGUST 14, 2012

Large businesses soon grow into huge bureaucracies where rules, regulations, policies, procedures and “I need permission to make a decision” become the norm. Ranking is good for command and control, but not good for change and innovation. The thinking that made us successful yesterday will cause us to fail tomorrow.

Newsletter 162

Newsletter Leadership Learning Curve Bureaucracy 162

Great Leadership By Dan

JULY 11, 2013

Mistakes, loss of creativity and innovation. Success lies in getting and maintaining rapport with them; to keep emotions in check and not get drawn in to a defensive, unproductive spiral. Meanwhile, their behavior has consequences: - Low employee morale, retaliation, passive aggression, attrition. The feeling in the room was terrible.

Bond 243

Bond Attrition Absenteeism Bureaucracy 243

The Horizons Tracker

DECEMBER 19, 2019

These challenges meant that they overwhelmingly elected to go to larger companies that can help them with the bureaucracy, rather than the startup where their talents might be better put to use. They also draw attention to some of the regional inequalities that migration, and indeed technological innovation, can bring.

Globalization 52

Globalization Offshoring Human Capital Innovation 52

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 4, 2017

Department of State is a seriously big bureaucracy. My experience as a digital leader in the Obama administration confirmed my optimism that change can come to large bureaucracies. Witnessing both failure and success in government, I saw three common elements required to realize positive organizational change. Our opposition.

Bureaucracy 9

Bureaucracy Politics Technology Morale 9

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

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. Being a successful corporate hacker thus requires an enormous amount of energy and persuasiveness.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Innovation Brand Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 11, 2014

That is, why bother trying to innovate if no matter what they do, large companies can no longer maintain a sustainable advantage and their life spans are just getting shorter and shorter? In these markets if existing companies don’t rise to the innovation challenge, no one will. “Why bother?”. But it is a cost nonetheless.

Innovation 8

Innovation Venture Capitalist Company Supply Chain 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 8, 2017

Entrepreneurship aids economic vitality by getting rid of complacent incumbents, accelerating innovation, and creating jobs. Moreover, it’s not clear whether unicorns exploiting other technologies, such as genomics or robotics, will be able to expand as rapidly as Uber, Airbnb, and other smartphone-enabled businesses.

Innovation 8

Innovation Bureaucracy IPO Bottom-up 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 23, 2013

The key to its success is how well Murphy & Associates evaluates talent. They go beyond the resume and interview and instead focus on key projects employees worked on, using their industry expertise and deep network to discern whether the projects were truly successful, and then they cross-check the impact of the person.

Innovation 8

Innovation Project Bureaucracy Talent Management 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. To understand this strength, take a look at the sample of innovations in the table below.

Retail 8

Retail Planning Agility Innovation 8

Tanveer Naseer

JANUARY 6, 2015

A Leader’s Insights In “ Joy, Inc – How We Built a Workplace People Love ”, Richard Sheridan, cofounder and CEO of software design firm Menlo Innovations, delineates the practical steps he has taken to create and maintain a corporate culture that makes people “excited to come to work every day.”

Influence 100

Influence Succession Ethics Bureaucracy 100

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 2, 2015

“Technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace and this milestone allows federal regulations and the use of our national airspace to evolve to safely accommodate innovation,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a press release that accompanied the announcement. In Washington, business as usual.

Transportation 8

Transportation Proposal Technology Press Release 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 25, 2011

Today, Apple is riding high, making this the perfect time for it — and every successful company — to reflect on Nokia's fall and ensure that they don't suffer the same fate. As the failures piled up, so did the stories of mounting bureaucracy, back-stabbing, and top management "living in a different world".

Supply Chain 15

Supply Chain Long-term Brand Early Adopters 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 21, 2015

That was the essence of Jill Lepore’s essay last year in The New Yorker about the “disruption machine,” in which she argued that, “disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror” and referred to startups as “a pack of ravenous hyenas” intent on blowing things up.

Christensen 8

Christensen Disruptive Innovation Bureaucracy Business Model 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 25, 2016

Over the major innovation cycles, the capitalist system has been resilient enough to absorb the effects of the crashes caused by pure speculation and turn them to its advantage. Some prominent economists predict a new period of secular stagnation as the last great phase of innovation-fueled growth (as they see it) dries up.

Drucker 8

Drucker Long-term Short-term Christensen 8

Deming Institute

JANUARY 30, 2017

Thankfully, some organizations are learning that “Lean Design” (or “3P”) and similar methods (like Design Thinking) can help design better systems that help people be successful. This also includes managers and leaders who are so consumed with fire fighting and bureaucracy that they are not able to spend time helping improve the system.

Deming 28

Deming Kaizen System Quality 28

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 20, 2016

The auto industry is facing a trio of disruptive technologies: electric batteries, autonomous vehicles, and the mobile phone. We didn’t want to overlay them with the Ford bureaucracy. Here is the problem: none of the three disruptors I have outlined here are traditional Christensen-style innovations.

Christensen 8

Christensen Hedge Bureaucracy Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 27, 2016

But what are their odds of success — and how do those odds compare to start-ups? Still, statistically your chances of success are much better—based on the numbers above, roughly 1,700 times better—if you can benefit from a strong existing business and the scale advantages of an established company.

Company 9

Company Supply Chain Retail Bureaucracy 9

Strategy Driven

AUGUST 10, 2015

But for old-school bureaucracies, it’s a scary new world that requires managers to rethink the basic principles that govern established businesses. To do so, you have to set aside everything that made your company a big success and focus on the changes that will wipe all of that success away. That’s easier said than done.

Strategy 50

Strategy Succession Software Industry 50

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 20, 2010

Robert MacDonald, one of the most offbeat and opinionated insurance-industry executives I've met (yes, I know, he doesn't have tons of competition), has a way with words when it comes to innovation. That was the spirit behind LifeUSA, MacDonald's memorable contribution to an industry whose record of innovation is pretty forgettable. "If

Insurance 15

Insurance Bureaucracy Innovation Industry 15

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 10, 2013

The appointment of Mary Barra as CEO-to-be of General Motors is a signal to car-lovers everywhere that the company is serious about its products and vehicle innovation. The centrality of innovation to the future — electric cars, hybrids, self-driving cars, and beyond — makes her experience pivotal.

Engineering 9

Engineering CFO Industry Bureaucracy 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 9, 2011

The news that Cisco is dismantling its unique structure of councils and boards to reduce bureaucracy presents a cautionary tale and an insight into the true meaning of teamwork and collaboration in organizations. As each successive project was undertaken, differentiated roles and responsibilities were elaborated again.

Team 15

Team Sports Teamwork Bureaucracy 15

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 4, 2013

Not by gathering waves of data and solving successive equations. Moreover, when we look around at the companies who are doing well, it can be hard to see the rhyme or reason of the decisions that led to that success. Continuous innovation is now a requirement for survival. In fact, these companies are not behaving chaotically.

Management 8

Management Bureaucracy Self-aware Agility 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2016

They abhor complexity, bureaucracy, and anything that gets in the way of the clean execution of strategy. Together, these attitudes and behaviors constitute a frame of mind that is one of the great and most undervalued secrets of business success. We call it the founder’s mentality. How can you avoid the fate of Nokia?

Company 8

Company Survey Bureaucracy Globalization 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

According to one McKinsey study , the success rate for organizational redesign efforts is less than 25%. Intentional design can improve the health of the organization, position your team for success, and make life better for everyone. Product innovation sits at the intersection of R&D, marketing, and business intelligence.

Competitive Advantage 8

Competitive Advantage Supply Chain Bureaucracy McKinsey 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2017

When Americans reflect on what makes their military the best, it is not just its unrivaled technology, the nearly $600 billion dollars per year we spend on it, its compelling mission, or our network of global allies. To do so, the Pentagon proposed some important and innovative improvements, but although the U.S.

Talent Management 8

Talent Management Learning-by-Doing Advertising Training 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

Google and Intel rely on experts in social science and biomechanics to develop transformative products by better understanding how people think about and use technology. A recent McKinsey global survey found that just 26 percent of surveyed executives say that key change initiatives were successful at sustainably improving the organization.

Agility 8

Agility Organization Resources Fixed Costs 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 2, 2015

While leaders of many care organizations may be fearful that a new centralized staff function would add to corporate overhead and bureaucracy at a time when they are trying to reduce expenses, becoming adept at the delivery of value-based care requires capabilities that provider organizations currently lack.

Health Care 8

Health Care Management Cost Efficiency 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. As technology-satellites, cellular networks, etc…- made the transmission and reception nearly instantaneously, this float collapsed.

Business Model 93

Business Model Ries Agility Entrepreneur 93

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 17, 2015

This intensive customer focus has increased as technology-enabled transparency and online social media accelerate an inexorable flow of market power downstream from suppliers to customers. The clients don’t have to own or maintain the technology. The technologies and trends shaping tomorrow’s businesses.

Productivity 8

Productivity Products Customer Intimacy Software 8

Strategy Driven

OCTOBER 11, 2013

economy spent one trillion dollars fixing and treating the so-called Y2K Bug, which we now know was a manufactured “crisis” by technology consulting companies. As was discussed in Chapter 8, technology constitutes one tenth of 1% of any organization’s overall Big Picture. In 1999, the U.S. Bad Work, Poor Planning.

Crisis 58

Crisis Crisis Management Retail Budgeting 58

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

In today's world, start-ups aren't the only ones who can innovate. As I discussed in my post How Big Companies Can Save Innovation , large companies are now better positioned to innovate than ever before. Innovation increasingly involves creating business models that tap big companies' unique strengths.

Innovation 8

Innovation Company Venture Capitalist Health Care 8