To foster innovation, the first step is to recognize the difference between business thinking and innovative thinking. Business thinking is logical, builds on past precedents and pursues certainty. Innovation thinking is intuitive, revels in ambiguity, and favours slow reflection over quick decisions. Leaders in innovative companies are adept at both business thinking and innovative thinking. […]
Read More… from Three Building Blocks of Innovation Leadership
Whether developing new products or services, refining internal processes, or creating disruptive business models, innovation is the key to sustained competitive advantage. Many companies, however, are unable to meet their innovation goals. In a recent Center for Creative Leadership white paper, authors David Magellan Horth and Jonathan Vehar cite a survey of 500 leaders in […]
Read More… from Innovation Leaders Turn Creative Ideas Into Action
People react differently to decisions based on what they perceive was the fairness of the outcome as well as the fairness of the process — and whether or not they trusted the decision makers in the first place. For example, if people trust a manager, they are more likely to see both the outcome and […]
Read More… from How People React to the Fairness of Decisions: Trust Makes a Difference
Even the most well-intentioned people can be swayed by almost subconscious, automatic biases against certain categories of people — what scientists call “implicit out-group bias.” These biases emerge from engrained negative and positive associations that lurk in our minds. A team of researchers from Central Michigan University explored whether mindfulness meditation could help reduce our […]
Read More… from Mindful Meditation Helps Reduce Racial and Age Bias
Many CEOs recognize gender equality as an important strategic priority. However, top-level strategic priorities can be undermined if male middle managers display or enable gender bias through the type of small-scale everyday organizational practices that often go unnoticed… and become accepted as the way things are. As a result, male middle managers are the linchpin […]
Read More… from Male Middle Managers: Linchpins of Gender Parity at Work
Should a board hire a former or current CEO from another company to become the new CEO? In the past, companies tended to promote new CEOs from within, ensuring that the new chief executive had the vital firm-specific experience needed to succeed. Today, however, more boards tend to believe that someone who has successfully navigated […]
Read More… from Why Previous Experience of New CEOs Makes Matters Worse!
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 […]
Read More… from Bad Framing Leads to Bad Decisions and Bad (Even Fatal) Actions
Equity-based incentives, such as restricted stock grants or options, are common for C-suite corporate executives. This is not surprising as they have corporate-level responsibilities. For business-unit managers in decentralized corporations, however, the practice has been less common. The preference in the past was for business unit-level incentives — that is, compensation tied to business unit-level […]
Read More… from Why Equity-Based Incentives Work Below the C-Suite
Previous research has explored the impact of life and career experiences and circumstances on CEO managerial styles. This past research shows a monotonic or unidirectional effect of a CEO’s life experiences on risk-taking. For example, CEOs rising from difficult economic circumstances might be more risk-averse while CEOs born in prosperous circumstances might be less risk-averse. […]
Read More… from The Connection Between Disasters and Less Risk-Averse CEOs
Many business leaders tend to paint all Millennials with the same brush — as young people who on one hand refuse to compromise on work-life balance issues while at the same time expecting fast-track careers without ‘paying their dues’. A global study of 16,000 Millennials in 43 countries — conducted in 2014 and co-sponsored by […]
Read More… from Millennials 5: Attitudes and Aspirations in Different Regions of the World
