Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 6/10/13)

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Stiletto Network: Inside the Women’s Power Circles That Are Changing the Face of Business
Pamela Ryckman

Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know They Must Make
Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood

The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think
Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed

 

INTERVIEWS

Mario Livio: An interview by Bob Morris
BOB

Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed: An interview by Bob Morris
BOB

Leon M. Hielkema: An interview by Bob Morris
BOB

Paulett Eberhart (CDI) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

 

COMMENTARIES

“How to Give a Killer Presentation”
Chris Anderson
HBR

“Three Things I’ve Learned From Warren Buffett”
Bill Gates
LinkedIn

“The do-or-die questions boards should ask about technology”
Paul Willmott
The McKinsey Quarterly

“Seven Strategies for Simplifying Your Organization”
Ron Ashkenas with Lisa Bodell
HBR

“What’s Ahead: Is Involvement the New Engagement?”
Dwaine Maltais
Talent Management

“Progress At Work, But Mothers Still Pay a Price”
Stephanie Coontz
The New York Times

“The huge impact that a small liberal arts college can have”
Michael Dirda
The American Scholar

“What great coaches do — and leaders should, too”
Laura Vanderkam
CBS Moneywatch

“The Tyranny of the Micromanager”
Amanda Foreman
The Wall Street Journal

“Toward a Self Employed Nation?”
Wendell Cox
NewGeography.com

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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.

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Great leaders manage expectations

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Laura Vanderkam for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

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(MoneyWatch) We all approach work under certain assumptions. Many years ago, I did an internship at a publication that gave me an e-mail address of “intern 2.” I think the higher-ups didn’t think it mattered because they did their reporting by phone. I did mine by e-mail, and this was a cause of friction because, well, just try to get people to respond to the e-mails of intern 2. I wound up using my personal e-mail address for much of the summer.

Likewise, we assume certain things about when and how people are supposed to work. But across generations and work styles, employees may not make the same assumptions. So it is not a given that they understand you expect them to respond quickly to e-mail sent after 6 p.m. Nor do they know that you expect them to leave when you leave or that you may actually want the office to yourself for a while in the evenings.

In research for the new Hartford Tomorrow@Work trends report, Gen Y expert and LinkedIn ambassador Lindsey Pollak found that “Millennials in particular look for these ‘guardrails’ as they enter the workforce,” she says. “As a manager, when you spell out employee expectations for work done outside the 9-to-5 day, you are also providing direction for daily expectations. By being up front and outlining the different expectations for inside and outside the workday, employees will feel a sense of fairness from the manager.” She adds that such spelled-out expectations can prevent conflict and promote teamwork and productivity. Millennials, she says “are used to having teachers, professors, deans, parents and tutors give them guidelines on their activities. They do best in workplaces that provide similar support.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Laura Vanderkam, a Philadelphia area journalist, is the author of 168 Hours and All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending. To view all articles by Laura Vanderkam on CBS MoneyWatch, please click here.

Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 6/3/13)

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
Neil Shubin

Finerman’s Rules: Secrets I’d Only Tell My Daughters About Business and Life
Karen Finerman

Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology
Bob Lord and Ray Velez

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Third Edition
Warren E. Buffett (Author) and Lawrence A. Cunningham (Editor)

12 Disciplines of Leadership Excellence: How Leaders Achieve Sustainable High Performance
Brian Tracy and Peter Chee

HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across
HBR Editors and Various Contributors

Results-Based Leadership: How Leaders Build the Business and Improve the Bottom Line
Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, and Norman Smallwood

Mind Code: How the Language We Use Influences the Way We Think
Charles E. Bailey

INTERVIEWS

Ray Attiyah: An interview by Bob Morris
BOB

Lewis Schiff: Part 2 of an interview by Bob Morris
BOB

Jenna Fagnan (Tequila Avión) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

COMMENTARIES

“Suburbs and Sacred Space”
Aaron M. Renn,
NewGeography.com

“Do You Know Your Worth?”
Emily Bennington

“Great leaders manage expectations”
Laura Vanderkam
CBS MoneyWatch

“’Leaning In’ to a New Career”
Elizabeth Bowling
Talent Management

“Queen Victoria and the Pains of Women”
Amanda Foreman
The Wall Street Journal

“How to lead like Phil Jackson”
Dave Logan
CBS MoneyWatch

“The Graduation Advice We Wish We’d Been Given”
Gretchen Gavett
HBR

“Inside Google’s Secret Lab”
Brad Stone
Bloomberg Businessweek

“When You Can’t Get No Respect”
Charles H. Green
Trusted Adviser Associates LLC

“The defining characteristics of a healthy organization”
BOB

“Motivating people: Getting beyond money”
Martin Dewhurst, Matthew Guthridge, and Elizabeth Mohr
The McKinsey Quarterly

“How to Write an Email That People Will Read”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

“Why You Should Embrace the Business Model That Threatens You”
Leonard Fuld
HBR

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How to tame your work week

Here is an excerpt from article written by Laura Vanderkam for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. She shares portions of a conversation with M.R. Nelson. To read the complete article, check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Roger4336

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(MoneyWatch) M.R. Nelson, a project manager at a biotech company, recalls being in the office kitchen once when she overheard a curious conversation. Two colleagues lamented their endless workloads. One reported working 60 hours a week for as long as he could remember. The other claimed he was there until 7 p.m. every night, even though he was working through lunch.

As Nelson writes in her new ebook, Taming the Work Week, “I was busy, too, but I couldn’t join them in their lament about long hours because I wasn’t working them. I have opted out of the craziness. I work a 40- to 45-hour work week most weeks. Interestingly, at the same company as these two overworked colleagues, with her career zipping along just fine. She supervises five direct reports and 10 contractors, manages five projects directly and 5 indirectly, controls a seven-figure budget, and gets home to her two young daughters at a reasonable time — and with enough energy left to maintain a popular blog called Wandering Scientist.

How does Nelson do it? I caught up with her to learn her secrets.

Vanderkam: As a project manager, you see keeping your team members’ work weeks at a reasonable level as a critical part of your job. Why is that? I suspect it’s not just because you’re a nice person.

Nelson: Originally, it actually was just because I’m a nice person! But then I got interested in the question of why some project teams can bring amazing projects in on time and on budget, and others struggle to do so. I looked more closely at the high performing teams around me, and I saw that they weren’t actually working super long hours.

That made me think about what long hours actually do to a team. I realized that consistently requiring long work hours creates more risk to the project timeline, because 1) overworked people make more mistakes and mistakes take time to fix; 2) overworked people get fed up and quit, and then the project has to absorb the time it takes to find and train a replacement; and 3) there is no room to increase intensity for short periods of time if something goes wrong.

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Laura Vanderkam, a Philadelphia area journalist, is the author of 168 Hours and All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending. To view all articles by Laura Vanderkam on CBS MoneyWatch, please click here.

Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 5/13/13)

 

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

The Lean Practitioner’s Handbook
Mark Eaton

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing
HBR Editors and various contributors

Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee

Untapped Talent: Unleashing the Power of the Hidden Workforce
Dani Monroe

The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off
Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan

The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
Michael D. Watkins

The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace: Know What Boosts Your Value, Kills Your Chances, and Will Make You Happier
Cy Wakeman

INTERVIEWS

Charting technology’s new directions: A conversation with MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson
Rik Kirkland
McKinsey Publishing

Eric Schmidt on “Disruptive technologies”
Richard Dobbs
The McKinsey Global Institute

Brooke Denihan Barrett (Denihan Hospitality Group) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

COMMENTARIES

“If you think top executives have to have charisma, think again.”
Christian Stadler and Davis Dyer
MIT Sloan Management Review

“How to Listen When Someone Is Venting”
Mark Goulston
HBR

“How to Stop Going to So Many Meetings”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

“How to stop the mediocrity pandemic”
Dave Logan
CBS MoneyWatch

“How the Internet of Things Changes Everything”
Stefan Ferber
HBR

“Several expert perspectives on data analytics”
McKinsey & Company

“Does it matter where you went to school?”
Margaret Heffernan
CBS MoneyWatch

“The coming era of “on-demand” marketing”
Peter Dahlström and David Edelman
The McKinsey Quarterly

“How to Influence People with Your Ideas”
John Butman
HBR

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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.

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Does it matter where you went to school?

Here is an article written by Margaret Heffernan for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

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(MoneyWatch) Every year, Amazon (AMZN) hires hundreds of MBA graduates. Where they come from, they say, doesn’t matter as much as the way they think. According to Jennifer Boden, who runs their university programs, Amazon wants entrepreneurial thinkers who are good at using data to drive decisions and get new products to market fast.

She said that where you went to school didn’t really matter and that experience counted for more. I’m not entirely sure I believe this. The target schools she mentioned — Carnegie Mellon, Wharton, Michigan — are a good deal more famous for their quantitative style than their entrepreneurial flair. And it’s hard to imagine a true entrepreneur eager to join a company rapidly becoming famous for treating its low-level employees like robots.

But she makes a good point in arguing that jobseekers can expect too much from their school’s name or even from their degree. Thinking that the institution’s reputation will stand in for your own is always a mistake. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve known (and sometimes hired) for whom getting into a big name school was pretty much the biggest achievement of their lives. They hoped to ride on that — and many did. But their work was never interesting and their leadership didn’t inspire.

We are rapidly approaching a moment in which the number of candidates with great degrees from great schools are plentiful — even over-supplied. What makes the difference isn’t your ability to get into these places or even to emerge with a decent degree. What matters is who you are and what you’ve achieved outside of the warm embrace of an institution. The true test of a great employee isn’t their MBA or their quantitative skills but their ability to see what is needed — in the company, in the market — without being told.

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Margaret Heffernan has been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom. A speaker and writer, her most recent book, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, was shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book 2011. Visit her on http://www.mheffernan.com/. To read Margaret’s articles for CBS MoneyWatch, please click here.

To read my interview of her, please click here.

Laura Vanderkam on “What great coaches do — and leaders should, too”

Here is an article written by Laura Vanderkam for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

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(MoneyWatch) You and your team pitched a project to a potential client. She shot it down. Everyone’s feeling a little sore about it. So the last thing you want to do is relive that meeting play by play, right?

That’s human nature. But if you have a tendency to tell everyone to just move on, not to worry and that you’ll do better next time, you could be missing a huge opportunity.

In the sports world, coaches often make their teams watch footage of past games. They study what plays worked — and which could work better with some tweaking. They figure out vulnerabilities. This post-game analysis is key to improving. It’s expected as part of practice.

I’ve written before of how few people practice in work contexts, which is a shame, because practice is one of the things the most successful people do at work, daily if they can. If one person is actively trying to get better at her job, and another is not, it’s not hard to guess who will eventually do the job better.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Laura Vanderkam, a Philadelphia area journalist, is the author of 168 Hours and All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending. To check out all articles by Laura Vanderkam on CBS MoneyWatch, please click here.

Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 5/6/13)

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
Eric Siegel

Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams: How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results
Roger Schwarz

Smart Thinking: Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done
Art Markman

From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom
Prasad Kaipa and Navi Radjou

Customer CEO: How to Profit from the Power of Your Customers
Chuck Wall

INTERVIEWS

Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins
BOB

Steve Case (Revolution) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

Peter Gray: Part 2
BOB

COMMENTARIES

“5 signs a workplace is family-friendly”
Amy Levin-Epstein
CBS MoneyWatch

“Why Ken Robinson is so important”
TED

“What great coaches do — and leaders should [comma] too”
Laura Vanderkam
CBS MoneyWatch

“A Tribute to Steve Jobs”
The Charlie Rose Show

“Risk: The story of America’s greatest idea”
John Dickerson
Slate

“Never Embolden the Naysayers”
Josh Linkner

“These Soft Skills Can Go a Long Way”
Paul H. Eccher and Dave Ross
Talent Management

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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.

To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.

Why you should avoid charismatic leaders

Here is an article written by Margaret Heffernan for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

(MoneyWatch) I’ve written about the perils of narcissistic leaders. They’re dangerous because they want the applause that ensues after big dramatic gestures and that inclines them to heroic strategies that make their companies far more volatile. But what about charismatic leaders — doesn’t every company want to find its own Steve Jobs?

No, at least not according to Christian Stadler, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review. I like Stadler’s work because, as you might expect of a European, his sense of history is more than a week long and he’s interested in the patterns and lessons it can offer. Surveying 100 years of European business leaders, he found that leaders of high-performing companies were not charismatic — at least not as charismatic as the leaders of companies that did worse. He argues that the problem with charisma is that you can persuade just about anyone to do anything — even when it’s crazy.

Poster child for the perils of charisma is Michael Frenzel, Chief Executive of TUI AG, Europe’s largest travel agency. When he got the top job, the company main business lay in commodities and steel. But this was too boring for Frenzel who divested himself of those “old economy” businesses and instead went pell-mell into the travel business. The timing was wrong, the strategy was flawed and in 15 years, TUI shares lost almost 60 percent of their value.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Margaret Heffernan has been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom. A speaker and writer, her most recent book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril was shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book 2011. Visit her on www.MHeffernan.com. You may also wish to check out another of Margaret’s articles, How to survive a narcissistic leader by clicking here.

Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 4/1/13)

 

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
Steven Gary Blank

Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You: Retrain Your Brain to Conquer Fear, Make Better Decisions, and Thrive in the 21st Century
Marc Schoen with Kristin Loberg

Intelligent Leadership: What You Need to Know to Unlock Your Full Potential
John Mattone

INTERVIEWS

Francesca Zambello in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

Lawrence Cunningham
BOB

Gerard J. Tellis
BOB

Emily Bennington
BOB

Vijay Govindarajan
BOB

COMMENTARIES

“Remembering Roger Ebert “
Linda Holmes
NPR

“The Psychology of the Creative Class: Not as Creative as You Think”
Richey Piiparinen

“Five routes to more innovative problem solving”
Olivier Leclerc and Mihnea Moldoveanu
The McKinsey Quarterly

“The Originality Scale”
Marty Neumeier
Liquid Agency

“The Most Popular Articles (First Q 2013)”
The McKinsey Quarterly

“How to Tell Your Company’s Story”
Nadia Goodman
Entrepreneur

“Don’t Sandwich Negative Feedback”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

“5 Insanely Simple Work-Life Balance Shortcuts From People Who ‘Have it all’”
Cali Williams Yost
Fast Company

“Lessons From Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg On How To Succeed In Business By Really Trying”
Sharon Poczter
Forbes

“Yes, women make better leaders.”
Margaret Heffernan
CBS MoneyWatch

“How Innovative Is Your Company’s Culture?”
Jay Rao and Joseph Weintraub
MIT Sloan Management Review

“What Losing My Job Taught Me About Leading”
Doug Conant
HBR

“How to Know the Difference Between Your Data and Your Metrics”
Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin
HBR

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