   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S34Seizing Opportunities When Advantages Don't Last   I’ve been researching what allows companies to be successful even when their competitive advantages are short-lived — a phenomenon I call transient advantage. The Regus Group, Ltd., a company that provides many services but is best-known for its offices-for-rent business, is one of many I’ve been studying whose leaders seem comfortable that their current competitive advantages won’t last, and don’t waste too much time clinging on to them once competitors have caught up or the moment has passed.Their success is a great example of how companies can quickly get out of an uncompetitive business, and decisively spot, capture and exploit new opportunities, even as the next one unfolds. What’s their secret? How do they manage from one wave of transient advantage to another?
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S70Kibbeh labaniyeh: Lebanese meatballs to start a new year  To start the year with a clean slate in Lebanon, the hearty dish of kibbeh labaniyeh (meatballs in a thick mint yoghurt sauce) is served at family tables on New Year's Day. For award-winning cookbook author, food consultant and president of Slow Food Beirut, Barbara Massaad, kibbeh labaniyeh is "comfort food with a capital C"."My kids always make fun of me because I say it 10 times when we're eating it," Massaad said from her home in Beirut, as she cracked eggs into a pan of heated yoghurt. "Kibbeh labaniyeh is white, pure… it's so good. Everything that has to do with dairy is nurturing and delicious."
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S46Getting Unusual Suspects to Solve R&D Puzzles For even the toughest of R&D problems, there are often people out there with innovative solutions already on their shelves or in their back pockets. The trick for corporate executives is finding and gaining access to those individuals. Our research with a company that broadcasts technological problems into the ether—and gets back solid results—has given us a profile of the kind of people most likely to solve R&D puzzles. We wonder whether firms might be able to emulate this method to draw new insights from the talents and expertise of their own employees.
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S33Manage Your Human Sigma Yet most businesses don’t measure or manage the quality of employee-customer encounters. If they did, they’d discover extreme differences in employee and customer satisfaction across units. For example, some stores operated by the same retail chain are exceptional places to work and shop; others, awful.
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S50How the Big Data Explosion Has Changed Decision Making  Organizations I work with increasingly struggle to straddle two painfully polarizing operating principles. On the one hand, they desperately seek greater agility; on the other, they genuinely want to include all the right stakeholders in their processes. This conflict uncomfortably transcends traditional “centralization/decentralization” debates. Customers and clients demand greater agility, and employees and partners expect greater empowerment. So the companies push hard to provide both.
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S26Strategy is Different in Service Businesses Many managers of service businesses are aware that the strategic management (by which I mean the total process of selecting and implementing a corporate strategy) of service businesses is different from that of manufacturing businesses. This article discusses how pure service businesses are different from product-oriented businesses and why they require different strategic thinking. A pure service business is one in which the service is the primary entity that is sold.
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S30Strategic Analysis for More Profitable Acquisitions Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, and Kennecott Copper. Because of the decline in the value of the dollar and the greater political stability of the United States, foreign companies also have become increasingly active buyers of U.S. companies during the past few years.
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S29Why the Wall Street Journal Online Will (Eventually) Go Free It’s not often that the conventional wisdom in business gets turned on its head not once but twice in a month’s time. But Rupert Murdoch’s recent statements, following News Corps’ acquisition of Dow-Jones, that he intends to keep the Wall Street Journal’s website a subscription service certainly qualifies.
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S48S25To Grow as a Leader, Seek More Complex Assignments  Over the course of my career, I’ve spent countless hours talking to and hearing from leaders around the world. I’ve interviewed thousands of candidates for managerial roles and tracked the performance of those I successfully hired. I led the global management appraisal practice of our own executive search firm, Egon Zehnder. And I’ve spent years with colleagues at Harvard Business School and other academic institutions researching what makes people effective in their jobs.
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S35How to Live with Risks Following a crisis, regulators and managers naturally take steps to prevent a recurrence. In 2002, after Enron and WorldCom succumbed to massive accounting fraud, U.S. legislators passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which gave directors and executives new oversight responsibilities. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis many large banks changed their business models, and other companies implemented systems to better manage credit risks or eliminate overreliance on mathematical models.
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S32How Leading Companies Build the Workforces They Need to Stay Ahead  Digital transformation, the industrial Internet, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and a plethora of other innovations are fundamentally changing the nature of work. The impact of technology will be felt over time, and not overnight, creating the illusion there is time to react. But building a winning workforce for tomorrow starts today. The best-performing companies are already taking steps to attract new talent and widen their lead over rivals. They delineate the skills and capabilities needed to win in the future, identify gaps, and aggressively fill the gaps. Even as strategies, business models, and needed skills and capabilities continue to change as new technologies emerge, successful companies don’t wait to upgrade their workforce.
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S64AI can now attend a meeting and write code for you - here's why you should be cautious  Microsoft recently launched a new version of all of its software with the addition of an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that can do a variety of tasks for you. Copilot can summarise verbal conversations on Teams online meetings, present arguments for or against a particular point based on verbal discussions and answer a portion of your emails. It can even write computer code.This quickly developing technology appears to take us even closer to a future where AI makes our lives easier and takes away all of the boring and repetitive things we have to do as humans.
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S39The CEO of UPS on Taking the Reins Amid Surging Pandemic Demand  When the author agreed to accept the top job at UPS, the global shipping service, in late winter of 2019, she expected to steer the company toward a brighter future. She had no idea that she would have to do it during a global pandemic that made her organization an essential service but kept most people at home and pushed demand for shipped goods to holiday levels year-round.
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S19Boards Can't Wait for CEOs to Prioritize Digital Change  Boards need to take a proactive role in digitization of legacy businesses. If they don’t, activist investors and shareholders will. Starting with their own education of how digitization will affect the business, boards should make sure they have the right CEO and that the CEO has a bold vision for reimagining the business. They will have to be prepared to defend the CEO against backlash from the inside, outside, and investment community. And in some cases, boards may have to evaluate and refresh their composition – resisting the reality of digitization is a good reason to expedite a change.
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S52How Anger Poisons Decision Making You’re late for work, and it’s pouring rain. In the parking lot, a car speeds around you and takes the last spot near the building entrance. You end up trudging from the back of the lot and get soaked to the skin. You’re mad, and you know your judgment at the moment is probably impaired. Worse, the leftover anger will continue to color your decisions at work, our research suggests, without your awareness—not a good thing for anyone trying to steer the best course through the day’s business problems.
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S57The businesses betting on new year's resolutions  New year's resolutions provide an opportunity for brands to pitch consumers on products or services that will help them achieve their goals. Companies know there's revenue potential, especially in membership-based models; many say the start of the new year is an important time to attract new users whom they hope will convert to long-term active paying customers. "There are specific spikes in demand for certain products around new year because of resolutions," says Neil Saunders, US-based managing director at GlobalData, a consulting firm.
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S45S61True Detective: Night Country review: 'Fierce and richly imagined'  In the opening credits of True Detective: Night Country, a small stuffed-toy polar bear, a graveyard full of crosses and a clothed body falling into the sea emerge under a chilly midnight-blue sky, as the soundtrack plays Billie Eilish's haunting Bury a Friend ("Bury a friend, try to wake up... I want to end"). Liz Danvers – Jodie Foster, in a bracing performance – is the brittle, acerbic police chief in the small town of Ennis, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. During a winter period when the sun never rises, and night lasts for weeks, she investigates after the eight scientists living at a research centre suddenly vanish, all at once. With eerie suspense, vibrant characters and a layer of the supernatural, the series' creator and director, Issa López, gives Night Country a singular feeling, and those opening credits suggest how: this show gets really creepy, in a good way. The original season of True Detective (2014), with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, set high expectations. After two much weaker follow-ups, this fourth season finally lives up to the exhilarating promise of the first.More like this:- The 18 best TV shows of 2023- The one thing The Crown got wrong- Is Netflix's new show unethical?
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S63Privatised Moon landings: the two US missions set to open a new era of commercial lunar exploration  Two commercial spacecraft are scheduled to launch to the Moon early in 2024 under a Nasa initiative called the Commercial Lunar Payload Service CLPS. This programme is intended to kickstart a commercial transportation service that can deliver Nasa experiments and other payloads to the lunar surface.If successful, these missions will represent the first landings on the Moon by spacecraft designed and flown by private companies. They could potentially open up a new era of commercial lunar exploration and science.
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S43Treat Employees like Adults People aren’t getting dumber, but they’re often treated that way. Politicians, educators, and the media assume the public is uncomfortable with nuance and grateful for prescribed solutions. Business, too, is being progressively dumbed down, not only by book authors who teach management by parable but also by managers themselves. Ironically, the infantilization of work is happening at the same time experts tout employee skills and knowledge as a prime source of corporations’ intellectual capital.
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S17What Ron Johnson Got Right  Ron Johnson’s 17-month tenure as J.C. Penney’s CEO was a catastrophe — an assessment captured in the coverage of his ouster this week: “Former Apple Retail Guru Dumped;” “How Ron Johnson Made JCPenney Even Worse;” and my favorite: “I Am Become Ron Johnson, Destroyer of Worlds.” It’s true. Under Johnson’s leadership, Penney’s share price plunged by half and the company lost $4 billion in sales.
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S37Why Good Companies Go Bad Many leading companies plummet from the pinnacle of success to the depths of failure when market conditions change. Because they’re paralyzed? To the contrary, because they engage in too much activity—activity of the wrong kind. Suffering from active inertia, they get stuck in their tried-and-true activities, even in the face of dramatic shifts in the environment. Instead of digging themselves out of the hole, they dig themselves in deeper.
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S60Moki Cherry: The overlooked Swedish artist who created a 'soulful home'  In a photograph from 1967, the Swedish artist Moki Cherry lies on a rug on the floor in her home, staring into the distance, sporting a feather-trimmed jacket and a pixie haircut. She holds a book open on a page seemingly about art. Behind her, the walls are entirely draped in decorated textiles covered in colourful shapes and patterns – the ambiguous body parts and abstract swirling lines of these pieces have since become known as the artist's signature style. In front of her is her young daughter, the now multi-award-winning singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry, sitting on a stool and pointing in the direction Moki is staring.This image encapsulates Moki as an artist, and how Neneh perceives her mother. "She was self-taught but also incredibly studious," the now 59-year-old Neneh tells the BBC over the phone, reflecting on her childhood. Neneh notes that Moki was always working to improve her practice. "She was always present, but there was a kind of intensity to it that was so beautiful," she says. "I remember her working with fabrics on the floor. I always think of how her head was turned down on whatever area she was working on."
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S36S27S69Crash diets may work against you - and could have permanent consequences  Those trying to kick-start their weight loss or perhaps wanting to lose a few pounds before a big event or holiday may be tempted to try a crash diet. While it’s true that in order to lose weight you need to eat fewer calories than your body uses each day, in reality crash diets may actually work against you – and may make weight loss more difficult.Crash diets have been around for years, but have stayed popular more recently thanks to influencers and social media. Typically, these diets involve drastically reducing calorie intake to 800-1,200 calories a day for a few weeks at a time. Proponents of these diets claim it can lead to rapid weight loss, which may explain why they have such a significant appeal.
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S51When Failure Isn't an Option Teams in all kinds of nonbusiness settings—from stock car racing to wedding planning to hostage negotiating—rely on flawless preparation and execution. Here’s how they consistently achieve the highest standards.
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S13How to Move Forward When You Feel Frozen  Fear is manifesting itself in a wide range of ways in corporate hallways and virtual channels. Alarm paralyzes us and leads to counterproductive behaviors. We postpone taking action because we’re afraid of making things worse. We focus our attention on short-term demands because we don’t want to confront the future.
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S41A New Social Contract for Teams  Companies have traditionally emphasized leadership competencies, not team competencies. But the transformation of an organization must begin with the transformation of its teams; team leaders and members must commit to new behaviors to escape mediocre or even merely good performance, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth. Drawing on more than a thousand assessments of teams conducted over two decades of research and coaching, the author presents a simple diagnostic that enables leaders to evaluate their teams on critical dimensions that relate to performance. He describes several practices designed to move members away from outdated behaviors and facilitate lasting, positive change: collaborative problem solving, “bulletproofing,” candor breaks, red-flag replays, safe words, and open 360s. Although the examples often involve leadership teams, the practices outlined can be used at any level. They can be implemented in any context but are especially effective in virtual environments, where tools permit a broader range of collaborative practices than strictly in-person formats allow.
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S44S40How To Make Companies Think Long-Term This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The CEO’s Role in Fixing the System. In my latest book, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism can Learn from the NFL, I wrote about the negative impact of executive stock-based compensation on corporate short-termism. Eliminating stock-based compensation would help reduce the incentive […]
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S49Competing Through Manufacturing Manufacturing companies, particularly those in the United States, are today facing intensified competition. For many, it is a case of simple survival. What makes this challenge so difficult is that the “secret weapon” of their fiercest competitors is based not so much on better product design, marketing ingenuity, or financial strength as on something much harder to duplicate: superior overall manufacturing capability. For a long time, however, many of these companies have systematically neglected their manufacturing organizations. Now, as the cost of that neglect grows ever clearer, they are not finding it easy to rebuild their lost excellence in production.
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S58Tea House Hike: A tiny, tasty secret deep in the Canadian Rockies  It was the middle of August 2023 when Laura Karan, a 20-something civil servant from London, first headed out into the mountains alone. She was walking on a winding, tree-lined trail, moving beneath the corridor of fir, larch and spruce, every so often getting a glimpse of the dazzling emerald-blue waters of Lake Louise an ever-increasing number of metres below. As an outdoors newbie hiking alone on the trail, rather than enjoying the scenery she was instead trying hard not to think about the 65 grizzly bears that call Banff National Park home."I was scared," Karan confessed when I met her six weeks later at Lake Agnes Teahouse, 2,135m above sea level in the Canadian Rockies. "I'd heard a lot of stories about bear encounters and was convinced I'd see one."
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S54Don't Let a Good Story Sell You on a Bad Idea  Stories are powerful — they were probably a key factor in our species’ evolution, and they’re undoubtedly an important tool in any leader’s toolbox. However, they can also be dangerous, because they can be misleading in subtle ways. These include but are not limited to the following: they tend to make success and failure seem more predictable than they actually are (hindsight); they assert causation where only correlation exists; they look at data sets in blunt, unsophisticated ways; they’re often based on anecdotes; they explain “success” based on factors that many failures in the same cohort display. Don’t ignore stories — but approach them with a critical, skeptical eye.
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S70A beginner's guide to sustainable investing  Humans have made drastic changes to the environment. We need to change our behaviour – and we need to do it fast. One simple way you can do your part is by investing your money responsibly. Sustainable investing has emerged as a way to make a positive impact on the planet and society while also achieving your financial goals – and it’s popularity is really starting to grow.
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S18How to Encourage Small Innovations The announcement of Apple’s iPad is turning many people’s thoughts to the innovations behind big ideas. Innovations such as these play a critical role in a company’s future, but companies often hinder themselves by focusing on finding the next big thing, when in reality, the next small thing might be more beneficial.
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S56 Making Magic With Gen AI: Capital Oneâs Prem Natarajan  The winter 2024 issue features a special report on sustainability, and provides insights on developing leadership skills, recognizing and addressing caste discrimination, and engaging in strategic planning and execution.The winter 2024 issue features a special report on sustainability, and provides insights on developing leadership skills, recognizing and addressing caste discrimination, and engaging in strategic planning and execution.Growing up in a multilingual community, Prem Natarajan became interested in language at a young age. Eventually that interest, aptitude, and curiosity translated into an interest in machine learning and technical development, and today Prem works as the chief scientist and head of enterprise AI at financial services company Capital One.
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S22Three Tips to Start Facing Down the Recession Have you noticed how many people are responding to the economic crisis in the same way they would deal with the sudden death of a loved one? In fact, the Kubler-Ross model of the five stages of grief seems incredibly appropriate to the times. Most people appear to be stuck in one of the first […]
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S42When Should Multinationals Move Back into Venezuela?  Venezuela’s economic and political crisis is unlikely to become top of mind for Latin America regional executives and corporate centers, at least from a business standpoint. Most multinationals have fled the Venezuelan market over the last three years, amid growing difficulties to repatriate profits, import raw materials and finished goods into the market, get paid by local partners and the Venezuelan government, and more recently due to full-fledged expropriations and factory confiscations — all problems stemming from the abrupt reduction of U.S. dollars in the Venezuelan economy since oil prices started to plunge in April 2014. A return to growth will likely be long and painful. Companies should hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
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