Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2017

Proactive employees do more than they are supposed to, are good at realizing ideas, and work to overcome resistance to change. They are essential for suggesting, developing, and sustaining innovative new projects and for helping companies stay competitive. Companies need proactive employees. But being proactive at work involves risk.

Middle Management 8

Middle Management Management Performance Review Project 8

Change Starts Here

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

Have you been forcing all projects to fit a single methodology because it’s what you know? The following article shares one practitioner’s journey to uncover new models and expand his change management toolkit. Change management models. I am a process guy by training, but I make my living from change management.

ADKAR 60

ADKAR Management Early Adopters Rogers 60

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 15, 2018

The preparations, produced by small teams or individual cooks, are progressively assembled, with sous-chefs (akin to middle managers) controlling the quality at every step. The projects range from developing new techniques and ingredients to designing final dishes and products.

Innovation 8

Innovation Project Creativity Open-book 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 15, 2014

The team’s mission was to come up with new products for the European market — and then, significantly, to convince senior management in South Korea to invest in those projects — several of which, it turned out, required Samsung to deviate from their current strategy within the product categories in question.

Innovation 8

Innovation Marketing Disruptive Innovation Project 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 23, 2013

It’s an IT and business consulting staffing business that: (a) recruits top programmers and program managers; (b) identifies key projects at large tech companies; and (c) makes a match. Many companies lack the right talent to take on important new projects that could help create the business’s next big category.

Innovation 8

Innovation Project Bureaucracy Talent Management 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 1, 2018

He enjoys the autonomy to pursue moon shot projects, constantly strives for mastery in what he does, and has a strong sense of purpose. But in periods of transformational change, purpose-driven organizations might be better able to weather the change than organizations that are reactive and that face a lot of resistance within the ranks.

Planning 8

Planning Marketing Automotive Long-term 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 22, 2016

Since 1983, the number of managers, supervisors, and support staff employed in the U.S. That makes bureaucracy the organizational equivalent of kudzu, the invasive, herbicide-resistant vine that has overrun thousands of acres of woodland in the American south. Why is bureaucracy so difficult to eradicate? First, it’s familiar.

Bureaucracy 8

Bureaucracy Proposal Middle Management Incentives 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 18, 2013

By identifying opportunities to fundamentally change how administrative services were delivered, the senior executives led by example and communicated a willingness to do their part in cutting costs by focusing on their own departments first – a messaging that helped dampen organizational resistance to change.

Cost 8

Cost Health Care Six Sigma Insourcing 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 24, 2015

Middle managers had to go back and forth between firing people and finding new ones with different skills, and few people believed that the yearly planning and budgeting cycle was anything more than a painful exercise, since it was always changing midway through. What are the lessons learned that you can apply to the next project?

Welch 8

Welch Six Sigma Real Estate Trends 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 15, 2014

When top management had emotional difficulty deciding to abandon memory chips, microprocessors were automatically receiving more production capacity anyway, because middle managers sturdily followed the rule that they had been given before.

Gordon 8

Gordon Strategy Decisionmaking Objective 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 9, 2015

First, the facilitators from the central improvement office, working with the local middle managers and clinicians, should collect baseline performance data for weeks or even months before the start. Your physicians almost certainly will resist. It is critically important to define what success looks like.

Health Care 8

Health Care Benchmarking Process Operations 8