Management - Leadership

The authors examined 15 breakthrough philanthropic initiatives and found five shared elements that provide a framework for success. First, build a common understanding of the issue and its circumstances. Second, establish achievable milestones and create a compelling message. Third, develop approaches that will function on a wide scale.

Conventional wisdom among corporate strategists is that better management processes are not a basis for competitive advantage. There are three key problems with this line of thought. First, little evidence exists that effective processes can be copied successfully. Second, variations in process quality will persist over time.

Psychologists Joyce and Robert Hogan developed a list of 11 qualities that, if unrestrained, can resemble common personality disorders. These 'dark side' qualities are grouped into three categories, distancing, seductive, and ingratiating, and include excitability, skepticism, cautiousness, boldness, and diligence.

The rise of big data has bolstered the presumption that business decisions should be made using scientific analysis. However, this approach can reduce strategic options and impede innovation.

The article discusses the relationship between the expansion of a business and its efforts to retain the loyalty of its core consumers, through offering a case study of a fictionalized running race company.

Organizations should be aware of social bias, a potential hazard when firms look to consumers for opinions when conducting crowdsourced innovation practices.

Guido Jouret, chief digital officer at Swiss industrial firm ABB AG, notes that augmented reality helps address three key challenges: dangerous jobs, operations in remote locations, and highly complex procedures or tasks.

The article discusses the ongoing development of smart glasses to support augmented reality.

Corporate transformations continue to prove challenging. Failure is typically attributed to problems with execution, but leaders can often misidentify what types of changes need to be made.