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Want to Thrive in Today’s High-Speed, Hypercompetitive Business World? Teach Your Management Team to Iterate.

Strategy Driven

When boiled down to its essence, management is a system of managers, operating in concert, constantly adjusting resources based on new information coming in to keep the business on target. It involves coordinating complex efforts, enabling group work and constantly asking the question, “What’s the next most intelligent step from here?”. In other words, management is the feedback system of the organization.

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Leading Thoughts for December 30, 2021

Leading Blog

Robert Dilenschneider on knowing your strengths: “By knowing your strengths and building on them in a hypercompetitive world, we can be more effective. I DEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives.

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Mavericks at Work: A book review by Bob Morris

First Friday Book Synopsis

Labarre Harper Paperbacks (2008) How an organization can prosper in a “hypercompetitive marketplace” As William C. Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win William C. Taylor and Polly G. Taylor and Polly LaBarre explain in this book, Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-70) was a wealthy land speculator in southwest Texas who cared [.].

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Fail Bigger Cheaper: A Three Word Manifesto

First Friday Book Synopsis

Here is an excerpt from another thoughtful and thought-provoking article written by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review blog. It is worth noting that Marcus Buckingham recently ranked Umair #1 among his favorite business bloggers. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to [.].

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Cirque du Soleil: A book review by Bob Morris

First Friday Book Synopsis

Bob's blog entries "hypercompetitive marketplace" 000 hours of highly-disciplined a total commitment to (on average) 10 Anders Ericsson Anthropologie “From a tiny spark a great fire was kindled and its flames warmed the world” Cirque du Soleil Cirque du Soleil: The Spark - Igniting the Creative Fire That Lives within Us All Commerce Bank Doubleday DPR Corporation Florida State University GSD&M Guy Liberté IBM's Extreme Blue ING Direct John U.

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Thomas J. DeLong: An interview by Bob Morris

First Friday Book Synopsis

Bob's blog entries “11 traits common to driven professionals” “Let's Hear It for B Players” “Why Mentoring Matters in a Hypercompetitive World” BYU Chase Peterson David Foster Wallace David McClelland Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success Harvard Business Review Harvard Business School HBR Jonathan Franzen Leadership and Organizational Behavior Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley Group Inc. Thomas J. DeLong is the Philip J.

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8 Reasons Your Peers Rate You Low on Your 360 Feedback Assessment

Let's Grow Leaders

Today’s hypercompetitive economy has created tense, overextended workplaces. Without a doubt, the peer rating is by far the most consistent shocker for folks taking a 360 degree feedback assessment. Managers usually have a good grip on what their boss thinks, and at least an inkling of the pain points for their direct reports, but for some reason peer feedback tends to feel like stepping on a lego in the middle of the night– yikes, where did THAT come from?

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Five Happiness Traps

Leading Blog

Second, hypercompetitiveness in the workplace leaves us empty and unfulfilled, hurts our ability to lead effectively, and makes us no fun to be around. T HE IDEA of work is not always well received. And those that do work often don’t expect much out of it. They may see it as a necessity that they are not supposed to like. They should just be grateful they have one. Expecting work to make them happy is beyond the realm of possibility and so try to look elsewhere to find happiness.

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Five Ways to Project Credibility in an Instant

Great Leadership By Dan

Still, in today’s high-speed, hypercompetitive business world, when key opportunities knock, you have little time to make a big impression. Guest post by Cara Hale Alter: You’re a smart and skilled leader with powerful potential. In face-to-face interactions in particular, you have to project credibility in an instant or risk squandering precious moments to stand out and succeed. But what does credibility look like, really?

Project 241
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Revealing Leadership Insights From Thinkers50

Tanveer Naseer

From blue ocean strategy to Michael Porter’s five forces, Vijay Govindarajan’s reverse innovation to Richard D’Aveni’s hypercompetition, great thinkers and their ideas directly effect how companies are run and how business people think about and practice business. The following is a guest piece from Thinkers50 creators Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove. Business best practice never stands still. State of the art management and leadership techniques are continually evolving.

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Strategy, Culture, Knowledge Management, Firm Performance: How Are They Linked?

Strategy Driven

Executives that employ corporate strategy can propel knowledge sharing in the company to generate more innovative ideas and solutions for new and demanding issues that come up constantly in our hypercompetitive economic environment. Organizational culture includes three dimensions of collaboration, trust and learning. The cultural aspect of learning is enhanced though providing further opportunities and information sharing.

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My Competitiveness Was Hurting My Sales Team. Here’s How I Realized It

Harvard Business Review

Having spent 25 years in this field, I’ve come across some hypercompetitive people who wouldn’t lift a finger to help a colleague and others who clashed regularly with coworkers, getting into arguments that sucked up time and energy. That made me realize that one hypercompetitive colleague in particular — who had a terse, protective style when I tried to talk with him — might simply have been responding to my behavior.

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Morning Advantage: Are We Really Getting Smarter?

Harvard Business Review

In the hypercompetitive travel space, Kayak has gone head to head with well-established brands like Expedia and Priceline quite successfully. This just in from The Wall Street Journal : that’s not just a hat rack on your shoulders. It turns out that in so-called “advanced nations,” our collective brain power is growing — at least according to James Flynn, who’s studied IQ gains over time (a phenomenon now known as the Flynn effect).

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U.S. Manufacturers Are Hurting Themselves by the Way They Hire

Harvard Business Review

Given the hypercompetitive nature of global manufacturing, it wouldn't take much to kill this momentum and put the U.S. The United States is at a dangerous juncture: Manufacturing jobs are on the rise, but the growth is still fragile. back to where it was a couple of years ago. That's why it's critical for American manufacturers to maximize the return on all their assets — including their workforces.

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Write a Failure Resume to Learn What Makes You Succeed

Harvard Business Review

In a world defined by hypercompetition and intense pressure, where business breakthroughs and career advancement demand a willingness to take risks and defy convention, the notion that any person can achieve meaningful success without experiencing setbacks and disappointments seems hopelessly naïve. By any measure, Johannes Haushofer is an astounding success.

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Frugal Innovation: Lessons from Carlos Ghosn, CEO, Renault-Nissan

Harvard Business Review

Since its launch in September 2011, DOST has garnered more than a third of India's hypercompetitive light commercial vehicles market. Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, famously coined the term "frugal engineering" in 2006. He was impressed by Indian engineers' ability to innovate cost-effectively and quickly under severe resource constraints.

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Trial and Error Is No Way to Make Strategy

Harvard Business Review

For decades now, both consultants and academics have been arguing that the world has become so fast paced, so hypercompetitive, so complex, so ambiguous, and so uncertain, that the death knell has sounded for strategy’s central concept of sustainable competitive advantage.

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Fail Bigger Cheaper: A Three Word Manifesto

Harvard Business Review

Try this thought experiment: Maybe America's Great Stagnation isn't happening because we're failing — maybe it's happening because we're not. To illustrate, consider the most straightforward example: Wall Street megabanks were propped up and lavishly resurrected, and your grandkids will likely still be paying the price — because they were too big to fail. But if you look closely, you might see those dynamics just about everywhere.

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Why WikiLeaks Matters More (And Less) than You Think

Harvard Business Review

In turn — and here's the crucial part — India's likely to be able to create the future: stuff that's globally hypercompetitive, because it's lean, clean, and green, igniting a new basis for export-led growth, and, more than likely, offering better sources of advantage. Rather than seeing WikiLeaks through the lens of morality or national security , let's look at it through an institutional lens.

GDP 15
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Even for Companies, the U.S. Is Split Between Haves and Have-Nots

Harvard Business Review

So although you might expect that in a hypercompetitive environment, ambitious companies would constantly wrest market share from the leading firms, the reality is quite the opposite. The worldwide trend of rising economic inequality applies not only to individuals. Consider what’s happening among corporations.

ROIC 8
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Use Jugaad to Innovate Faster, Cheaper, Better

Harvard Business Review

Jugaad is a "bottom up" innovation approach that provides organizations in both emerging and developed economies the key capabilities they need to succeed in a hypercompetitive and fast-moving world: frugality, inclusivity, collaboration, and adaptability. We recently attended the World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit 2011 in Mumbai, where we moderated several panels and workshops on the topic of innovation.

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How to Gain Credibility When You Have Little Experience

Harvard Business Review

There’s a meme on the internet, which speaks truth about a dilemma for young people entering the hypercompetitive workforce of 2017. The photo is of two seasoned, older interviewers glaring critically across the table at a young interview candidate with the following words: “We’re looking for someone age 22-26… with 30 years of experience.” ” This credibility paradox is indeed a core dilemma many young people face as they enter the workforce.

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Seven Problems a Recovery Won't Fix

Harvard Business Review

Yet, mere recovery probably isn't enough to do much about growing financial insecurity, not just because gross output isn't concerned with how the pie is divided, but, more deeply, because fragility is a consequence of hypercompetitive, globalized, winner-take-all labor markets: in other words, it's a feature, not a bug. The Big Grinning Kahunas that run the world don't agree on much these days, except one thing: the urgent, vital need for "recovery."

GDP 17
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Beware the Analytics Bottleneck

Harvard Business Review

Make faster decisions for faster rewards: It’s important for businesses to sense, analyze, interpret and act fast on the data insights as competitive advantages will likely be more fleeting than long lasting in the hypercompetitive world. Within the next three years there will be over 20 billion connected devices (e.g. oil pipelines, smart cities, connected homes and businesses, etc.) which can empower the digital enterprise — or intimidate them.

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Beware the Analytics Bottleneck

Harvard Business Review

Make faster decisions for faster rewards: It’s important for businesses to sense, analyze, interpret and act fast on the data insights as competitive advantages will likely be more fleeting than long lasting in the hypercompetitive world. Within the next three years there will be over 20 billion connected devices (e.g. oil pipelines, smart cities, connected homes and businesses, etc.) which can empower the digital enterprise — or intimidate them.

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The Authenticity Trap for Workers Who Are Not Straight, White Men

Harvard Business Review

In today’s hypercompetitive world, the organization absolutely needs you to bring your whole self to work. Many employees are encouraged to “just be yourself,” only to find their authenticity — and their career ambitions — constrained by unwritten office rules about appearance, speech, and behavior.

EPS 8
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Change the World and Get to Bed by 10:00

Harvard Business Review

Whether it''s a hypercompetitive culture encouraging ambitious employees to burn the midnight oil, or the anxiety of working for a bad boss causing insomnia, or a level of pressure that leaves decision-makers lying awake at night, companies contribute to people''s sleep deficits. Let''s say you believed deeply in the importance of sleep health, and you wanted to start a movement to change people''s attitudes and behavior.

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How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate

Harvard Business Review

In such multiplayer games, players must collaborate to survive in a fast-changing environment with fierce competitors and incomplete or ambiguous information from which to base important decisions — that is, an environment not unlike many hypercompetitive global markets. I have worked on many teams in which we dutifully did our jobs, and the group fulfilled its objectives.

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We All Work at Enron Now

Harvard Business Review

It's not just that in a hypercompetitive world, yesterday's competitive edges are as dull as a plastic spork. Remember Enron? That paragon of turn-of-the-century new-economy triumphalism, gushed over by pundits, lauded by investors, celebrated by the cognoscenti — until it turned out to be a roadside bomb in disguise? The cause of its demise, ultimately: overstating benefits and understating costs. The result, of course, was a spectacular flameout, today the stuff of legend.

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What the Best Transformational Leaders Do

Harvard Business Review

Long before becoming CEO, in 2016, he was searching for new growth in the hypercompetitive travel reservations market, coming across a pair of small European startups with a business model opposite to Priceline’s in two key ways: Instead of taking an up-front 25% commission on a hotel reservation, the startups charged only 15% after check-out. Companies that claim to be “transforming” seem to be everywhere.

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Breaking the Death Grip of Legacy Technologies

Harvard Business Review

Keeping a firms asset base up to date and flexible is an important way to ensure that “legacy” doesn’t turn into a liability in today’s hypercompetitive environment. Technologies like 3-D printing, robotics, advanced motion controls, and new methods for continuous manufacturing hold great potential for improving how companies design and build products to better serve customers.

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The Benefits of Hiring Your Best Customers

Harvard Business Review

A strong superconsumer culture, where employees are willing to give a bit more because they know what their customers are feeling, can be the difference maker in a hypercompetitive world.

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The 4 Types of Project Manager

Harvard Business Review

We argue that even the most stable and conservative industries may be threatened by disruption — and the most dynamic and hypercompetitive industries also entail incremental growth opportunities that can be quantified and realistically assessed. Few issues garner more attention among top executives than how best to grow their organizations. However, few executives work systematically with the types of employees they need to realize various growth opportunities.