The traditional approach to workforce differentiation is talent management, which involves disproportionately investing in a small, exclusive group of high-value employees, often referred to as “talents”. However, there’s been increasing pressure for organizations to adopt more inclusive talent management differentiation practices i.e., including a larger number of employees in the pool of high-value talents. For […]
The benefits and drawbacks of datafication technology in organizations, particularly its impact on employees, is hotly debated. Datafication is defined as the conversion of social interactions into numerical data, which is then used to optimize organizational processes and generate value. While some view such technology as a catalyst for efficiency, others warn of work intensification, […]
The evolving sophistication and scope of automation and AI technology will impact the jobs of individuals at all levels of the organization. For middle managers, automation can threaten to render their jobs obsolete, leading to redundancy and the thinning of middle management ranks. From a more positive perspective, automation can free up middle managers from […]
Companies have both short-term and long-term responsibilities: they must be successful in the present while preparing for the future. While many companies believe they are managing these two priorities effectively, in truth, the urgency of the exploiting the present — launching marketing campaigns, resolving customer service issues or managing the supply chain, for example — […]
Stakeholder Theory is a view of capitalism that stresses the interconnected relationships between a business, its customers, suppliers, employees, investors, communities and others who have a stake in the organization. Traditional accounting fails to adequately represent the risk and returns of stakeholder activities — i.e. the net value created by ‘stakeholders’. Stakeholders include customers, employees, […]
To make decisions, leaders must understand, to use the vernacular, ‘what is happening’. They must make sense of the events and situations that impact their areas of responsibility; this sense-making not only involves the past and present, but also the future: what is likely to happen. In July of 2005, an innocent man commuting to […]
Expatriate assignments are great opportunities for employees and managers assigned overseas to not only increase their personal knowledge, but also share knowledge across units. In a study on the knowledge benefits from expatriate experiences, Sebastian Reiche, a professor at IESE Business School, showed that there are two types of such knowledge benefits. The first is […]
While the commonly accepted wisdom is that new CEOs from the outside will be in a better position to bring change to an organization, the record indicates otherwise. They often fail. Ayse Karaevli of the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management, and Edward Zajac of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management challenge the conventional wisdom and […]
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 […]
