The term “strategic planning” conjures up images of suits in conference rooms diagramming the path to world domination on whiteboards. All too often, strategic planning is an activity reserved for the organizational elite—executives aided by consultants. The top dogs think up all the big ideas—and...
Editor’s note: Why are managers so often short sighted at the expense of the long-term health and value of their companies? One reason is that compensation and incentive systems are too often geared to the short term. These incentives can skew our perspective of the bigger picture. Indeed, research...
Imagine for a minute you are a member of the senior management team of a 5000-person, global organization. Your CEO has asked you and the entire senior management team to participate in an emergency week-long retreat. He doesn't reveal the purpose of the meeting ahead of time, but as he kicks off...
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...
If you were compiling a list of the world's most innovative companies, which businesses would top your list? No one would be surprised if you picked Google, Apple or Amazon, but what about Wal-Mart? (Huh?) Or PG&E (a utility, for crying out loud)? Surely there must be some mistake! Or how 'bout...
As you're putting together the guest list for your holiday parties you might want to consider this: not once, but twice over the last five years I've embarked on an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard...
Most of the time you take your office computers for granted. OK, there’s a niggle or two, but generally the IT folks can sort it out. Occasionally, though, it gets more serious. When the system crashes regularly or a virus hijacks the network there’s no easy alternative: you need to upgrade the...
When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I've certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it's also because we adults aren't exactly...
As we build towards the deadline for choosing our M-Prize winners, we're taking a look at the Stories that MIXers have shared as entries. This week, 9 promising Stories about Reinventing Leadership.
The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian...