Can Your Sales Team Actually Achieve Their Stretch Goals?

Sales leaders have a deep-seated belief in using stretch goals to challenge a sales force. Stretch goals are correctly credited with guiding effort, promoting innovative thinking, energizing salespeople, and boosting persistence. Many successful companies have lived the virtuous cycle: Sales leaders set a stretch goal, the sales force surpasses it, and sales force morale and confidence gets a boost. But we’ve also seen, with increasing frequency in the last decade, companies set stretch goals that are impossible to achieve. What masquerades as a stretch goal is really wishful thinking or misguided sales goal padding.

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How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O'Donohue on the Light Within Us and Between Us

“The structures of our experience are the windows into the divine. When we are true to the call of experience, we are true to God.”

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How T-Mobile Brought Collaboration to Customer Service

There are no rows of service agents robotically responding to random calls as quickly as possible. Instead, T-Mobile relies on colocated, collaborative teams of reps who manage specific accounts in a given locale, with a focus on autonomous problem solving. Reps get more-comprehensive training, managers get more time for coaching, and team members are evaluated on group performance as well as individual performance. In addition, teams are authorized and expected to manage their own P&L statements.

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What Skeptics Get Wrong About Crypto's Volatility

One of the leading arguments against crypto is its volatility. In the wake of the most recent downturn, critics have doubled down on this point. But the argument misses an important insight about how crypto assets differ from those in traditional finance. While different coins are meant to serve different functions, today they all more or less act as startup equity — and often serve as hybrid assets, treated as commodities, currency, store of value, and incentive for the validators that make a project function. Unlike traditional equity, crypto assets have liquidity and price discovery from the start. This does mean that crypto markets are more sensitive to signals and changes. The overlooked feature of this, however, is that price swings communicate important information to founders and investors, and builds previously unseen levels of transparency into the system.

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Adding More Data Isn't the Only Way to Improve AI

Sometimes an AI-based system can’t decipher the physical world with a sufficient degree of accuracy and the option of just adding more data isn’t possible. In many of these cases, however, this deficiency can be addressed by using four techniques to help AI better understand the physical world: synergize AI with scientific laws, augment data with expert human insights, employ devices to explain how AI makes decisions, and use other models to predict behavior.

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Stop Feeling Guilty About Delegating

Overriding guilt around delegation is not easy. Especially when you and your team are already time-strapped, it can feel misguided to invest in delegating. But remember this investment will unlock longer-term benefits: time savings and more capable, engaged employees. In this piece, the author offers five strategies to help you delegate more often and with less guilt.

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How Will You Measure Your Company's Life?

Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life has turned into a well-deserved best seller. Beyond drawing individual lessons from the book, corporate leaders should turn the central framing question on their organizations — asking how they will measure their company’s lives.

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What to Ask the Person in the Mirror

Every leader gets off track from time to time. But as leaders rise through the ranks, they have fewer and fewer opportunities for honest and direct feedback. Their bosses are no longer monitoring their actions, and by the time management missteps have a negative impact on business results, it’s usually too late to make course corrections that will set things right. Therefore, it is wise to go through a self-assessment, to periodically step back from the bustle of running a business and ask some key questions of yourself.

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Seven Transformations of Leadership

Every company needs transformational leaders—those who spearhead changes that elevate profitability, expand market share, and change the rules of the game in their industry. But few executives understand the unique strengths needed to become such a leader. Result? They miss the opportunity to develop those strengths. They and their firms lose out.

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Being a Good Boss in Dark Times

Senseless acts of violence affect all of us. Mass shootings, suicide bombers, assassinations — the emotions such events bring up are strong, even if our personal connection to the events is not. Feelings of sadness, pain, confusion, and anger don’t get checked at the office door. If you’re leading a team or an organization, how can you help manage the emotional culture of the people you’re responsible for?

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Fast Thinkers Are More Charismatic

The Research: William von Hippel of the University of Queensland and a team of researchers recruited dozens of small groups of friends for a study. They gave participants intelligence and personality tests and then asked each subject to answer 30 common-knowledge questions—such as “What’s the name of a precious gem?”—as rapidly as possible. Participants also rated their friends’ charisma and social skills. The researchers found that individuals who answered the questions more quickly were perceived to be more charismatic—regardless of their IQ, knowledge, or personality.

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Deciding Whether to Respond to Breaking News (or Not)

As leaders, there is no way to anticipate and be ready with a public response for every scenario. In this excerpt from her new book, Pfizer Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sally Susman provides a five-point framework of questions to help leaders figure out whether and how to weigh-in: Does the issue relate to our purpose? How does it impact our stakeholders? What are our choices for engagement? What’s the price of our silence? How does the issue relate to our values?

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Don't Focus on Your Job at the Expense of Your Career

The gap between what we have to do today and where we see ourselves in the future can be vexing. We’d like to advance toward our goals, but we feel dragged down by responsibilities that seem banal or off-target for our eventual vision. In this piece, the author offers four strategies you can try so that you can simultaneously accomplish what’s necessary in the short-term while playing the long game for the betterment of your career.

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The Best Negotiators Plan to Think on Their Feet

You can’t adapt if you haven’t prepared.

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Strategic Planning as Leadership Challenge

Company strategies often fail and this is frequently ascribed to unpredictable changes in the context. But most failures are the result of fairly predictable challenges, including one factor that is constantly overlooked: the role and impact of loss. New strategic priorities inevitably generate losses as people’s reality changes: loss of power, loss of competence or identity. Companies typically trumpet the benefits and ignore these losses, treating implementation as a straightforward technical challenge. Instead, they need to treat strategic planning as an adaptive leadership challenge, helping the organization come to terms with new realities and to appropriately grieve what is lost. Leaders should build an adaptive strategic planning process by: strengthening the “holding environment”; creating a formal moment to discuss losses; and mapping the affected groups and losses for each strategic priority.

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Riding the Marketing Information Wave

The phrase “getting close to the customer” now has a definite high-tech ring. Farsighted companies like American Airlines and R.J. Reynolds have gained a decisive competitive edge by building powerful customer information systems. Through such systems, these companies not only understand individual consumers better but also employ information to develop and market new products.

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Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters

Among the tests of a leader, few are more challenging—and more painful—than recovering from a career catastrophe. Most fallen leaders, in fact, don’t recover. Still, two decades of consulting experience, scholarly research, and their own personal experiences have convinced the authors that leaders can triumph over tragedy—if they do so deliberately.

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The Main Ingredient of Change

When I became Campbell’s CEO, in 2011, our soup sales in the U.S. were down and our innovation pipeline was virtually dry. More concerning, our people seemed content to rest on our past success. How could we get a 145-year-old company to embrace change? We started by pointing to the seismic shifts going on around […]

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How Banks Can Finally Get Risk Management Right

Banks have three lines of defense for managing risk — and then regulators are the fourth line of defense. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, all four failed. If banks want to manage risk better, one good place to start is making sure a Chief Risk Officer is in place and a board-level risk committee is in place. And the people on that committee should have real experience in managing enterprise risk.

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Your Corporate Purpose Changed. Has Your Strategy Kept Up?

Following statements by the U.S. Business Roundtable in 2019 and 2021, the basic purpose of the corporation has been expanded from maximizing value for shareholders to maximizing it for all stakeholders. The implications of this are that performance must now be measured along many more dimensions than before and that leaders have to help employees transition to a stakeholder mindset, broaden participation in strategy-making, and make sure that their strategies really do reflect purpose.

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Keeping Up with Customers' Increasingly Dynamic Needs

Over time, businesses have moved from a product-centric approach focused on performance to a customer-centric strategy meant to prioritize experience. But today’s dynamics are more complicated. Companies need to accept their customers as ever-changing, complex people deeply impacted by unpredictable external forces — an approach the authors call life centricity. Life-centric businesses are deeply attuned to the forces that most profoundly affect their customers’ lives, such as technology, health, and culture. They achieve relevance by bridging the interplay between these life forces and their customers’ everyday decisions. And they maintain that relevance by perpetually evolving their products, marketing, sales, and service experiences as life continues to shift.

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Absorb Their Uncertainty -- And Get Your People Unstuck

I am here to tell you, it’s a pretty depressing time to be a business professor focused on helping companies identify and capitalize on new growth opportunities. Last week, a financial services client set to send their top people to a session I was going to run on finding opportunities from disruptive innovations cancelled – at 3pm the day before! Although everybody recognized the importance of the workshop, they couldn’t help it – they were all called off to an urgent offsite meeting to figure out how the company was going to respond to the mornings’ headlines.

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The Condensed May 2015 Issue

Amy Bernstein, editor of HBR, offers executive summaries of the major features.

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You've Made A Mistake. Now What?

Anyone who has worked in an office for more than a day has made a mistake. While most people accept that slip-ups are unavoidable, no one likes to be responsible for them. The good news is that mistakes, even big ones, don’t have to leave a permanent mark on your career. In fact, most contribute to organizational and personal learning; they are an essential part of experimentation and a prerequisite for innovation. So don’t worry: if you’ve made a mistake at work, — and, again, who hasn’t? — you can recover gracefully and use the experience to learn and grow.

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