For many strategic decisions such as product development or market expansion, retailers have access to sophisticated information on which to base these decisions. When it comes to customer service, however, the information is less complete. Retailers may have extensive data on customer purchases, for example, but no data on how long those customers stood in […]
Read More… from How Checkout Lines Affect Consumer Purchases
Discussing her return to PwC as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in 2012, Carol Sawdye said she would be spending much of her first year on the job focused on “change management.” In saying so, Sawdye acknowledged that the role of a CFO has now transformed; they need to assume bigger responsibilities and play a crucial […]
Read More… from CFOs Reborn as Agents of Organizational Change
Does bad weather reduce productivity within factories and other workplaces? This is the question that the latest research from Marcelo Olivares of the Columbia Business School and Gérard Cachon and Santiago Gallino of Wharton addresses. The researchers used inventories and productivity statistics covering 10 years for 64 US automobile assembly plants, and matched them to […]
Read More… from Severe Weather: Moderating Its Impact on Productivity
One way that organizations ensure that they accomplish certain objectives is through management control systems. These systems reward and promote employees according to certain criteria, in order to achieve goal congruence. According to the authors, very little research into the design of control systems that lead to goal congruence takes into account the role that […]
Read More… from Better and Fairer Management Control Systems
Can the loss of an integrative and humanistic approach to management be to blame for the recent economic crisis? According to the authors of this paper, meaningful and holistic management can help address the major management challenges that managers confront in today’s social and economic crisis. They refer to a 2010 IESE symposium, ‘Facing the […]
Through their research, the authors set out to examine the effects that leaders at different levels in an organization have on each other. To do so, they investigated the relation between leadership alignment and strategy implementation in a large health care organization of more than 3,000 physicians, who work in 19 large medical centres or […]
Read More… from Leadership Alignment and Strategy Implementation
The authors propose that different leadership development learning methods should be adopted according to the varying needs and issues faced by leaders at different levels and stages of their lives. They note that there are no definitive ‘best strategies’ for developing leaders, but that there has been an increasing recognition that leadership development must incorporate […]
Read More… from Beyond ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Leadership Development
Scenario planning (SP) and early warning scanning (EWS) are considered important to ‘managerial cognition’. They help leaders understand how the future might unfold and they alert top management to new developments and ‘issues’ – typically conceived as opportunities and threats. They help leaders understand how to reconfigure resources to match or create market change – […]
Read More… from Scenarios Planning + Early Warning Scanning = Strategic Advantage
Robots are taking over our jobs! Ok, maybe that’s not quite the case just yet, but as technology continues to develop swiftly, there is no doubt that machines are getting smarter, cheaper, and – in some cases- more effective than humans. In several fields, analytical models are already heavily relied on for forecasting; take the […]
Read More… from Human Judgement Vs Computer Aided Forecasting
Recent years have seen company stakeholders demand better environmental performance, particularly by businesses in polluting industries. Whether it is consumer pressure for green products, media pressure for a green approach or government pressure to stick to green regulations, leaders must take action. The degree to which they respond – or not – appears to hinge […]
