Management - Leadership

The best way for companies to improve the lives of the world's poorest people--those at the bottom of the pyramid--is to focus first on doing good business, not just on doing good.

For many years Document Security Management (a pseudonym) had a thriving business in retrieving and shredding or securely storing organizations' documents. Executives and their assistants loved its one-stop-shopping value proposition, and the sales force cultivated deep relationships with them.

In an HBR article in January 2005, Cappelli and Hamori compared leaders in the top 10 roles at each of the Fortune 100 companies in 1980 with those in 2001.

Senior executives have discovered through hard experience that prospering at their level is a matter of carefully combining work and home so as not to lose themselves, their loved ones, or their foothold on success.

We'd like to think that no smart, upstanding manager would ever overlook or turn a blind eye to threats or wrongdoing that ultimately imperil his or her business. Yet it happens all the time. We fall prey to obstacles that obscure or drown out important signals that things are amiss. Becoming a "first-class noticer," says Max H.