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The First Step to Fixing U.S. Manufacturing

Harvard Business Review

manufacturers do source from domestic suppliers, they tend to regard them purely as a cost center. Past work by McKinsey found that inefficiencies in manufacturer-supplier interactions add up to roughly 5% of development, tooling, and product costs in the auto industry. Even when large U.S. But the future trajectory of U.S.

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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. Communicating with strategic goals in mind. Support from the top.

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Bridging the Gap Between IT and Your Business

Harvard Business Review

The business complains that IT doesn’t understand the business, consistently overpromises and under-delivers, and slows innovation. We propose business and IT work in that direction by bringing a few tough technological trade-offs front and center, with the goal of finding some middle ground.

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Charlie Ackerman on Winning A World in Flux

HR Digest

And if not, what are the ways and means of creating a culture where employees are united by curiosity, knowledge, innovation and a shared sense of purpose. The HR Digest: What is Bosch’s secret sauce to being recognized as one of the “Best Workplaces for Innovators?”. Bosch takes great pride in its Business Resource Groups (BRGs).

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Why Leaders Need To Stop Using Performance Reviews

Tanveer Naseer

Begin with previously discussed goals and work forward from those to observations and measurements. Your competitor is getting nothing but a disingenuous cost center. Sadly not one of them has anything to do with innovation. Feedback, sometimes known as coaching, requires relevant substance to have impact.

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Social Means Freedom, for Better or for Worse

Harvard Business Review

These experts are highly briefed on the purpose and goals of the SU organization. Typically an in-house cost center, service is usually viewed as a necessary evil and constantly targeted for "efficiency." When a clear purpose is coupled with shared power, people can self-organize to reach the goal.

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Top 10 Sustainable Business Stories of 2012

Harvard Business Review

The retail giant's powerful buyers, or merchants, now have a sustainability goal in their performance targets and reviews. For example, the laptop PC buyer set a goal that, by Christmas, all of the laptops Walmart sells would come pre-installed with advanced energy-saving settings. Five Questions For 2013.