Management - Leadership

Though it's been over a decade since the first wave of post-Enron governance reforms, boards are still failing to provide strong oversight and strategic support for management's efforts to create long-term value.

Individuals assess one another through three lenses: trust, power, and ego. Presenting oneself in an effective, positive manner requires addressing these lenses: for trust, project competence and warmth; for power, project instrumentality; for ego, project inclusiveness and modesty.

The HBR Case Study is a fictional account of a business dilemma with advice from several experts suggesting how to solve that dilemma. In this case study, a young-adult book series about a gangster may send the wrong message to its target audience.

Today we use far fewer materials than we once did to get the same things done--a phenomenon known as dematerialization. But, paradoxically, this efficiency seems to drive up overall consumption.

Sodexo S.A. addressed global diversification by organizing its structure by client type, and focusing on improvements for individual consumers. Reliance on employees, rather than subcontractors, to deliver services ensures quality.

The French non-profit Action Tank is testing the social business model, which differs from conventional low-cost models in that its focus is to solve customers' social problems. Key benefits include motivation, image, and innovation.

Successful implementation of corporate strategy relies less on alignment or adhering to plan, and more on coordination across divisions and fostering ability to adapt to varying market conditions. Other cautions include the assumption that communication means comprehension.

Research indicates that managers project their own preferences onto customers more frequently after they had been primed to be empathetic. Egocentrism is strong enough to cause individuals to ignore objective input when making predictions about others.

Because all psychological distance involves the same underlying thought processes, substituting one type for another can spur either more-abstract or more-concrete thinking. This trick works so well that academic researchers use it to establish that what they are manipulating really is psychological distance.

As two of his business units were completing their merger, Peter Noll, chief of the Diagnostics division at the Frankfurt-based Scherr Pharmaceuticals, felt it was time to address a nagging issue: the combined entity had no overarching revenue model.