As a reverse fairy tale for the CEO set, the reality television program Undercover Boss is fascinating, not so much in the witness-to-a-train- wreck mode of the rest of the genre, but because it is so revealing of our conflicted relationship with "the boss." The premise of the show—that the only way to get a clue about what's really going on in his (or her) organization, is for the boss to go undercover on the front lines—is all too often the actual reality in organizations of any size. Yet, at the same time, the view of the boss as the ultimate authority with the heroic power to swoop in and save the day—whether that means paying down a mortgage, granting an instant promotion, or banishing a reviled policy—holds sway in real life as well as on "reality" TV.
In this document we explain how we went from being an organization of hierarchical bankers, to a team of 16,000 systematic innovators who learn every day and believe that everyone can be innovative.
For all of the billions organizations invest each year in “leadership development,” a criminal amount of human potential is left on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs: absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung...
This case study shows how Microsoft Netherlands (MS Netherlands) successfully implemented a radical and wide-ranging change to its management approach.
Editor's note: Research by McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice finds that better collaborative capabilities help companies achieve superior financial performance. These results are supported by academic research, which shows that the ability to collaborate in networks is more important...
The aging population in the Nordics/Western part of the world and the possibility for early retirement will cause competency gaps and will lead to loss of knowledge in Enterprises.
We live in a world where never before has leadership been so necessary but where so often leaders seem to come up short. Our sense is that this is not really a problem of individuals; this is a problem of organizational structures—those traditional pyramidal structures that demand too much of too few and not enough of everyone else.
In Parts 1-3, I recounted the Pull Replenishment saga of how a small team started a bottom-up movement that generated millions of dollars in profit, improved shipping performance to the customer, and
