The agile management approach, which began as a project management approach in the field of software product development, rejects rigid structures and processes in favour of customer-focused incremental processes that respond and adapt continuously to changing developments and customer feedback. Numerous methodologies have been developed to ensure the flexibility and responsiveness at the heart of […]
Read More… from Leaders’ Management of Team Emotions Key to Agile Success
In a seminal 2011 Harvard Business Review article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer urged companies to abandon the ‘old narrow view of capitalism’ in which the sole purpose of companies is to make profits. Instead of focusing exclusive on share value, they argued, corporations have a duty to also address the challenges of society — […]
Read More… from How to Create Shared Value for the Firm and Society
A company in the facility engineering industry took on a large and complex project that presented both technical challenges and was subject to legal regulations that affected customer requirements. Unfortunately, the steering committee (SC) in charge of the project never really understood the key trade-offs and risks in the project. Unaware of the technical or […]
Read More… from Supervising Projects Despite Limited Time and Expertise
While large corporations may have the bandwidth to organize mandatory, sustained in-house training programs, smaller companies must depend on outside organizations and the government to provide training. The challenge with such programs is that employees will only actively participate if they are self-motivated to do so. How can companies create or enable such self-motivation? According […]
Read More… from Psychology-based Training Incentives Motivates Workers
Employees can impact a company’s brand equity. A friendly clerk in a store or an effective IT project team that delivers to the satisfaction of the customer are two positive examples. Employees, of course, can also impact a brand’s equity negatively. In the age of social media, for example, companies have had to quickly fire […]
Read More… from How to Build Brand Equity Through Employee Engagement
Executives cannot afford to ignore the dangers posed by acting overconfidently. Numerous examples in recent history can attest to this, from the inflation of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, to the housing boom pre-2008. Fortunately, overconfidence is not a universal problem; it is only likely to be a problem in certain situations. Identifying […]
Read More… from Advantages of Confidence and Dangers of Overconfidence
Flattening (or delayering) of hierarchies within an organization has been called for by much recent literature. In theory, flattening is supposed to help push decisions downwards to enhance customer and market responsiveness and improve accountability and morale. In this Idea, however, Harvard Business School’s Professor Julie Wulf suggests that many companies that flatten their hierarchies […]
Read More… from Flattened Organizations: When Cons Outweigh Pros
What is it exactly that makes a Chief Information Officer (CIO) successful? Setting out to examine the factors that determine growth and acceleration in a CIO’s career, the authors of the white paper referenced here looked at both the personal characteristics of 14 CIOs, and the environmental factors that enabled them to seize and achieve […]
Read More… from Chief Information Officers: Secrets to Success
