I remember my first close encounter with birds. I must have been about three years old and had discovered a blackbird nest unusually accessible in our garden hedge. Still naked and blind, the chicks had not long hatched and I discovered that if I poked the nest, four little heads shot up – gapes open wide for feeding. Discovering a natural jack-in-the-box was a delight and gave me hours of fun – so much so that I may have caused the parents’ desertion, since I found the chicks dead the next day. I take some small consolation from the likelihood that this encounter helped forge a lifetime of fascination and involvement with birds. It may also have contributed to my sense of responsibility to birds and other creatures.

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Poetic Ecology and the Biology of Wonder

“The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.”

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How to Delegate Your Email to an Assistant

In the early days of the internet, email natives loved to trade tales of executives who asked their assistants to print out emails so they could read and respond to them on paper. Now we all use email, and assistants are a seemingly rare commodity. But they can still play a useful role in managing your messages.

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Algorithms Can Save Networking from Being Business Card Roulette

Networking can be something of a crapshoot. Though there may be someone in the room you really should meet — someone whose acquaintance might help you out professionally — it’s often impossible to determine who precisely that is. And so we go to industry conferences and share business cards like shotgun spray, hoping that with a little luck we’ll make a useful connection. In large organizations, the same thing goes for networking at company functions; surely there’s someone in another department it would be useful to know, but when scanning the room at the holiday party it’s not always clear who that is.

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How Location Analytics Will Transform Retail

In order to survive, firms must embrace customer intimacy — online and off.

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The Shrinking Advantage of Brands

Quick – what’s the top brand in the world? Coca-Cola? Nope. IBM? Nope. One of GE’s stable of brands? Wrong again. All these players are near the top. But the most powerful brand in the world today is, according to the gold standard of brand valuation, Millward Brown’s Brandz report, Google. Now, that might seem […]

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Getting Real About Virtual Commerce

Navigational tools comprise everything that helps ease consumers’ search for products they want to buy: brands, advertising, relationship building, even merchandising. The Internet alters the economics that determine how these tools get used. Today, e-businesses such as Yahoo! and Quicken focus on providing information, leaving the manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution to others. They make detailed, customized information available to a mass audience at very low cost. The information is not just in one category—say, travel. It cuts across traditionally defined industry boundaries. And it gives preference to consumers’ desire for objective information over retailers’ and suppliers’ desire to promote sales.

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Whether You're Qualified Depends on How You're Quantified

Brainteasers need not apply when it comes to hiring. Real-world research affirms that interview questions like How many golf balls could you fit into a school bus? “don’t predict anything” and “are a complete waste of time” for employers. Google, for one, no longer uses them. Unstructured interview questions don’t help much either. Projects and portfolios prove reliably superior predictors of professional performance.

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Your Data Isn't Helping Your Marketers If They Can't Access It

Marketers these days can capture and analyze sales patterns in minute detail. They can geolocate customers and mine transaction histories. They can see patterns emerge from wholly new information streams, such as what people are saying about the company on social media. Because much of the data flows into a company in real time, they can also see what their customers are up to right now.

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How to Stop People Who Bog Things Down with Bureaucracy

Companies are filled with energy vampires. We all know who these people are: When their names come up on your phone, you automatically stop and think, “Do I have the energy to take this call?” They’re the people in the company who have demonstrated repeatedly that they will suck the life out of you and others in every interaction. They schedule lots of meetings. They fire off lots of missives that force your people to stop serving the customer and instead respond to yet another information request. They exercise pocket vetoes on key decisions, and stop action with their requests for one more round of analytics.

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Why Doctors Need Leadership Training

Medicine involves leadership. Nearly all physicians take on significant leadership responsibilities over the course of their career, but unlike any other occupation where management skills are important, physicians are neither taught how to lead nor are they typically rewarded for good leadership. As more evidence shows that leadership skills and management practices positively influence both patient and healthcare organization outcomes, it’s becoming clear that leadership training should be formally integrated into medical and residency training curricula. Leadership curricula should focus on two key sets of skills. First, interpersonal literacy is crucial for effective leadership in modern healthcare. Second, a separate set of necessary skills deals with systems literacy.

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Grow Your Stars--Don't Buy Them

Boris Groysberg, Harvard Business School professor and coauthor of the HBR article Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model. Many star performers hired from outside don’t perform as expected at their new company. So, develop stars within your company; for example, through strong training and mentoring programs.

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When Company Values Backfire

John Bryant had a different kind of company in mind when he launched Maverick Advertising in 1989. Repelled by the pretentious, cutthroat world of the big-name ad agencies, Bryant built Maverick on a set of core values that expressly rejected the Madison Avenue model—values that spurned pretense and extravagance and instead embraced belonging, employee growth, diversity, and work-life balance.

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Life's Work: An Interview with Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey acted on Broadway in the 1980s, hit it big in Hollywood in the 1990s, and then surprised everyone by moving to London to become the director of the Old Vic theater. In 2013 he returned to the screen, producing and starring in Netflix’s first streaming series, House of Cards. Why all the unconventional career moves? As he told a 2015 World Business Forum audience, “It’s the risk takers who are rewarded.”

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What Today's Leaders Can Learn From Tomorrow's

A recent study of boys and girls aged 8-17, conducted by the Girl Scouts of America, found that “being a leader” was not a priority. Leadership ranked behind other aspirations such as “fitting in, “making a lot of money,” and “helping animals or the environment.” Is this study a cause for alarm? Far from it. […]

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Leading Clever People

The authors conducted more than 100 interviews with leaders and their clever people at major organizations such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Cisco Systems, Novartis, the BBC, and Roche. What they learned is that the psychological relationships effective leaders have with their clever people are very different from the ones they have with traditional followers. Those relationships can be shaped by seven characteristics that clever people share: They know their worth—and they know you have to employ them if you want their tacit skills. They are organizationally savvy and will seek the company context in which their interests are most generously funded. They ignore corporate hierarchy; although intellectual status is important to them, you can’t lure them with promotions. They expect instant access to top management, and if they don’t get it, they may think the organization doesn’t take their work seriously. They are plugged into highly developed knowledge networks, which both increases their value and makes them more of a flight risk. They have a low boredom threshold, so you have to keep them challenged and committed. They won’t thank you—even when you’re leading them well.

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It's Time to Invest in Climate Adaptation

Currently, climate adaptation initiatives — that is, those that help people, animals, and plants to survive despite rising climate volatility rather than trying to reverse it — receive only 7% of climate-related investment. They deserve far greater business investment. Solutions that are low cost, proven to be effective, and have immediate impact include early warning systems for extreme weather events, coastal barriers, water desalination and wastewater treatment, vertical farming and hydroponic agriculture, improved cooling and insulation systems, 3D printed and modular housing, and many other measures.

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Changing the Mind of the Corporation

The most exasperating fact about big companies in crisis is that they got there by doing what once made them big. They come by their troubles honestly. This irony may seem manageable to people hoping to turn things around; but I have been in the business of strategy consulting for 13 years, and I am only now beginning to appreciate how mechanically organizations resist newer truth—and how strong the emotions are that underlie these mechanisms. Perhaps I should begin with a story.

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3 Ways to Innovate in a Downturn

Recessions offer major opportunities for innovators. They can be a good time to introduce game-changing offerings or simple, affordable solutions or make bold, strategic moves. The resource scarcity that typically accompanies recessions forces innovators to do things they should have been doing already: prune prudently, re-feature to cut costs, master smart strategic experiments, and manage the risks of innovating by sharing them with others.

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In a Volatile World, Your Strategy Must Be Flexible

Although it sounds cliché, the world really is a more volatile place than it used to be. That’s because the drivers of uncertainty are more intense — there are more and more change vectors affecting outcomes and these vectors are more and more inter-related. The range of likely outcomes five and 10 years has grown much larger than it was even a decade ago, dooming traditional approaches to strategy setting and planning to failure. To have a hope of succeeding, strategy makers need to give themselves plenty of opportunities to change course and treat their strategic plan as an evolving construct rather than a fixed roadmap.

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How Anxiety Affects CEO Decision Making

The paranoid may survive, but at what cost?

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Research on Delegating Shows How Uncomfortable We Are Making Choices for Others

People can be notoriously reluctant to give up control. Managers often hesitate to delegate tasks and decision making to others, even when they would benefit from doing so. Yet anyone who has worked in a large organization will tell you that, just as often, decisions can get passed from person to person, making it difficult for everyone to get work done. So how do we encourage delegating when it’s beneficial and reduce it when it’s not?

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Back to Decision-Making Basics

A little while ago I had a conversation with an academic whose expertise is in political decision-making and negotiation. I described my interest in analytics and automated decision-making, and information systems in general. “I guess,” he said, “these companies you work with have some specific decisions in mind when they put all these information systems in place, right?”

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Two Powerful Ways Managers Can Curb Implicit Biases

Many managers want to be more inclusive, but they don’t know how to get there. They are often not given the right tools to overcome the challenges posed by implicit biases. Research shows there are two, small—but more powerful—ways managers can block bias: First, by closely examining and broadening their definitions of success, and second, by asking what each person adds to their teams, what we call their “additive contribution.”

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