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Morning Advantage: How Bosses Do Harm

Harvard Business Review

As Kannan Ramaswamy and Bill Youngdahl point out in this excellent Thunderbird research blog, they chuckle along with everyone else when they read Dilbert cartoons about the Pointy-Haired Boss. Two-thirds of them are still with the company — and they’re the ones making the decisions about where the products and the company are going.

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CEOs Should Activate Their Company's Stakeholders

Harvard Business Review

Triggering this process of collective engagement — Venkat Ramaswamy and I call it co-creation — is what is missing in the agenda of many CEOs today (to say nothing of our political leaders). Companies in emerging countries such as Brazil and India are showing the way. Having already mobilized diversity suppliers (e.g.,

CEO 10
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A New Framework for Customer Segmentation

Harvard Business Review

The approach echoes Ted Levitt''s famous comment about selling ¼ inch holes rather than ¼ inch electric drills, and advocates a mindset shift away from selling products to "doing jobs" that solve customers'' problems. We agreed to work on a new kind of segmentation based the combinations of jobs that customers need to get done.