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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Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 4/8/13)

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

BOOK REVIEWS

The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
Ramez Naam

World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It
John A. Byrne

HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Communication
Editors of Harvard Business Review

StoryBranding: Creating Stand-Out Brands Through The Power of Story
Jim Signorelli

Talent Leadership: A Proven Method for Identifying and Developing High-Potential Employees
John Mattone with Luiz Xavier

Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent
Nolan Bushnell with Gene Stone

Rain: What a Paperboy Learned About Business
Jeffrey J. Fox

Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence
Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins

INTERVIEWS

Marcus Ryu (Guidewire Software) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

Chip Heath and Olivier Sibony on “Making great decisions”
The McKinsey Quarterly

Karen Wright
BOB

George Kohlhieser
BOB

COMMENTARIES

“The Art and Science of Delivery: In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Skoll World Forum”
Volume 5 , Voices on Society series
The McKinsey Quarterly

“Evolution of the networked enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey results”
Contributors include Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui
The McKinsey Quarterly

“The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete”
Chris Anderson
Inc.

“The Hidden Biases in Big Data”
Kate Crawford
HBR

“The Rise of Executive Feminism”
Joan C. Williams andRachel W. Dempsey
HBR

“4 Ways to Be a Leader Who Matters”
Les McKeown
Inc.

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

“How to ‘dance in the rain’”
BOB

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Chip Heath and Olivier Sibony on “Making great decisions”

Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a conversation featured by The McKinsey Quarterly during which Stanford’s Chip Heath and McKinsey’s Olivier Sibony discuss new research, fresh frameworks, and practical tools for decision makers. To read the complete transcript, check out other resources, learn more about McKinsey & Company, and register for Quarterly email alerts, please click here.

Source: Strategy Practice

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Every few years, Stanford University professor Chip Heath and his brother, Dan, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), distill decades of academic research into a tool kit for practitioners. The bicoastal brothers offered advice on effective communications in Made to Stick, on change management in Switch, and now, in their new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, on making good decisions. It’s a topic that McKinsey’s Olivier Sibony has been exploring for years in his work with senior leaders of global companies and in a number of influential publications. 1

Chip and Olivier recently sat down to compare notes on what matters most for senior leaders who are trying to boost their decision-making effectiveness. Topics included Heath’s new book, research Sibony and University of Sydney professor Dan Lovallo have under way on the styles of different decision makers, and practical tips that they’ve found make a big difference. The discussion, moderated by McKinsey’s Allen Webb, represents a state-of-the-art tour for senior executives hoping to help their organizations, and themselves, become more effective by benefiting from the core insight of behavioral economics: systematic tendencies to deviate from rationality influence all of our decision making.

The Quarterly: What’s the current state of play in real-world efforts to improve decision processes through behavioral economics?

Olivier Sibony: The point we haven’t conveyed effectively enough is that however aware you are of biases, you won’t necessarily be immune. You should see yourself as the architect of the decision-making process, not as a great decision maker enhanced by the knowledge of your biases.

Chip Heath: The analogy I like is how we handle problems with memory. The solution isn’t to focus harder on remembering; it’s to use a system like a grocery-store list. We’re now in a position to think about the decision-making equivalent of the grocery-store list.

Olivier Sibony: We’re doing ourselves a disservice by calling it a decision-making process, because the word “process,” as you point out in your book—

Chip Heath: — It’s boring.

Olivier Sibony: It immediately conjures up images of bureaucracy and slowness and decisions by committee—all things associated with bad management.

Chip Heath: Early in the history of decision making, people were optimistic about a better process called decision analysis. But nobody ever used it, because very few people have the math chops to fold back probabilities in a three-layer decision tree. The process that we’re advocating runs away from decision analysis and bureaucracy. We wanted some tools that someone could use in five or ten minutes that may not make the decision perfect but will improve it substantially.

Olivier Sibony: There are individual solutions and organizational solutions. Perhaps because we’re a consulting firm, we tend to look for organizational solutions. In an article you wrote long ago, Chip, you quote somebody who asks something like, “If people are so bad at making decisions, how did we make it to the moon?” Your answer was that individuals didn’t make it to the moon; NASA did. 2 That insight has been translated into all sorts of operational decision making. It is the fundamental insight behind work in continuous improvement—for instance, when people are trained to go beyond the superficial, proximate cause of a problem by asking “five whys.”

But we don’t apply that insight when we move from shop floors to boardrooms. Partly, that’s because of a lack of awareness. Partly, it’s because the further up the hierarchy you go, the harder it becomes to say, “My judgment is fallible.” Corporate cultures and incentives reward the kind of decision making where you take risks and show confidence and decisiveness, even if sometimes it’s really overconfidence. Recognizing uncertainty and doubt—it’s not the style many executives have when they get to the top.

Chip Heath: Yes, but we’re never really sure when we’re being overconfident and when we’re being appropriately confident. That’s where we go back to processes.

Olivier Sibony: It’s a lot easier to say, “Let’s build a good process so your direct reports have better recommendations for you” than “Let’s come up with a process for you to be challenged by other people.”

Chip Heath: I love that emphasis: “We’re going to help others get you the right recommendations.” We all tend to believe “I’m not subject to biases.” But we can easily believe that others are. I’m curious about your batting average, Olivier. Suppose you walk into an executive group and start talking about the behavioral research and how they could change their processes to overcome biases. Are a third of the people interested? Five percent?

Olivier Simony: If we tell the story like that, it’s zero. But exactly as you just suggested, a lot of executives are open to discussing how their teams could help them make better decisions. So we will say, for example, “Let’s talk about what works and what doesn’t work in your strategic-planning process.” We don’t talk about biases, because no one wants to be told they’re biased; it’s a word with horrible, negative connotations. Instead, we observe that people typically make predictable mistakes in their planning process—for instance, getting anchored on last year’s numbers. That’s OK because we are identifying best practices. We end up embedding this thinking into processes that generate better strategic plans, R&D choices, or M&A decisions.

Chip Heath: The process changes don’t have to be very big. Ohio State University professor Paul Nutt spent a career studying strategic decisions in businesses and nonprofits and government organizations. The number of alternatives that leadership teams consider in 70 percent of all important strategic decisions is exactly one. Yet there’s evidence that if you get a second alternative, your decisions improve dramatically.

One study at a medium-size technology firm investigated a group of leaders who had made a set of decisions ten years prior. They were asked to assess how many of those decisions turned out really well, and the percentage of “hits” was six times higher when the team considered two alternatives rather than just one.

Notes

1 See, for example, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, “The case for behavioral strategy,” mckinseyquarterly.com, March 2010; and Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony, “Before you make that big decision,” Harvard Business Review, June 2011, Volume 89, Number 6, pp. 50–60.

2 See Chip Heath, Richard Larrick, and Joshua Klayman, “Cognitive repairs: How organizational practices can compensate for individual shortcomings,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 1998, Volume 20, pp. 1–37.

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To read the complete transcript of this conversation, please click here.

This discussion was moderated by Allen Webb, editor in chief of McKinsey Quarterly, who is based in McKinsey’s Seattle office.

Five routes to more innovative problem solving

Here is a brief excerpt from an article featured by The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which Olivier Leclerc and Mihnea Moldoveanu explain how and why tricky problems must be shaped before they can be solved. To start that process, and stimulate novel thinking, leaders should look through multiple lenses. To re3ad the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain Quarterly subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

Source: McKinsey Strategy Practice

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Rob McEwen had a problem. The chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner—a mine nearby was thriving—but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine.

Then inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the open-source revolution. Bucking fierce internal resistance, he created the Goldcorp Challenge: the company put Red Lake’s closely guarded topographic data online and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could identify rich drill sites. To the astonishment of players in the mining sector, upward of 1,400 technical experts based in 50-plus countries took up the problem. The result? Two Australian teams, working together, found locations that have made Red Lake one of the world’s richest gold mines. “From a remote site, the winners were able to analyze a database and generate targets without ever visiting the property,” McEwen said. “It’s clear that this is part of the future.” [Note: Please see Linda Tischler, “He struck gold on the Net (really),” fastcompany.com, May 31, 2002.]

McEwen intuitively understood the value of taking a number of different approaches simultaneously to solving difficult problems. A decade later, we find that this mind-set is ever more critical: business leaders are operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more volatile, and the stakes higher. The number of variables at play can be enormous, and free-flowing information encourages competition, placing an ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions.

This article presents an approach for doing just that. How? By using what we call flexible objects for generating novel solutions, or flexons, which provide a way of shaping difficult problems to reveal innovative solutions that would otherwise remain hidden. This approach can be useful in a wide range of situations and at any level of analysis, from individuals to groups to organizations to industries. To be sure, this is not a silver bullet for solving any problem whatever. But it is a fresh mechanism for representing ambiguous, complex problems in a structured way to generate better and more innovative solutions.

[Here's the first of five that Leclerc and Moldoveanu discuss.]

The flexons approach

Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do. [Note: Lu Hong and Scott Page, “Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004, Volume 101, pp. 16385–89. For more on the benefits of open innovation, see John Seely Brown and John Hagel III, “Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation,” mckinseyquarterly.com, May 2006.] When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.

Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Fortunately, generating diverse solutions to a problem does not require a diverse group of problem solvers. This is where flexons come into play. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions—creating a compensation system, for instance, or undertaking a value-chain analysis for a vertically integrated business—they have limited applicability. They are, if you like, specialized lenses. Flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges. In essence, flexons substitute for the wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts.

To accommodate the world of business problems, we have identified five flexons, or problem-solving languages. Derived from the social and natural sciences, they help users understand the behavior of individuals, teams, groups, firms, markets, institutions, and whole societies. We arrived at these five through a lengthy process of synthesizing both formal literatures and the private knowledge systems of experts, and trial and error on real problems informed our efforts. We don’t suggest that these five flexons are exhaustive—only that we have found them sufficient, in concert, to tackle very difficult problems. While serious mental work is required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each retains blind spots arising from its assumptions, multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Olivier Leclerc is a principal in McKinsey’s Southern California office. Mihnea Moldoveanu is associate dean of the full-time MBA program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, where he directs the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking.

Six social-media skills every leader needs

Here is a brief excerpt from an article co-authored by Roland Deiser and Sylvain Newton for The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which they explain how and why organizational social-media literacy is fast becoming a source of competitive advantage. Learn, through the lens of executives at General Electric, how you and your leaders can keep up. To read the complete article, check out other resources, obtain information about the firm and a subscription to The Quarterly, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Few domains in business and society have been untouched by the emerging social-media revolution—one that is not even a decade old. Many organizations have been responding to that new reality, realizing the power and the potential of this technology for corporate life: wikis enable more efficient virtual collaboration in cross-functional projects; internal blogs, discussion boards, and YouTube channels encourage global conversations and knowledge sharing; sophisticated viral media campaigns engage customers and create brand loyalty; next-generation products are codeveloped in open-innovation processes; and corporate leaders work on shaping their enterprise 2.0 strategy.

This radical change has created a dilemma for senior executives: while the potential of social media seems immense, the inherent risks create uncertainty and unease. By nature unbridled, these new communications media can let internal and privileged information suddenly go public virally. What’s more, there’s a mismatch between the logic of participatory media and the still-reigning 20th-century model of management and organizations, with its emphasis on linear processes and control. Social media encourages horizontal collaboration and unscripted conversations that travel in random paths across management hierarchies. It thereby short-circuits established power dynamics and traditional lines of communication.

We believe that capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization.
Social media also adds new dimensions to these traits. For example, it requires the ability to create compelling, engaging multimedia content. Leaders need to excel at cocreation and collaboration—the currencies of the social-media world. Executives must understand the nature of different social-media tools and the unruly forces they can unleash.

Equally important, there’s an organizational dimension: leaders must cultivate a new, technologically linked social infrastructure that by design promotes constant interaction across physical and geographical boundaries, as well as self-organized discourse and exchange.

We call this interplay of leadership skills and related organizational-design principles organizational media literacy, which we define along six dimensions that are interdependent and feed on one another.

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Please click here to check out an Exhibit, “The six dimensions of social-mediate-literate leadership (Adviser, Architect, Analyst at the Strategic/organizational level and Producer, Distributor, and Recipient at the Personal level) and read the complete article.

Roland Deiser is a senior fellow at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and author of Designing the Smart Organization: How Breakthrough Corporate Learning Initiatives Drive Strategic Change and Innovation (John Wiley & Sons, October 2009). Sylvain Newton is the GE Crotonville Leadership Senior Leader for Business and Regions.

Beyond corporate social responsibility: Integrated external engagement

Obviously, companies must incorporate interaction with stakeholders into decision making at every level of the organization. That’s much easier said than done, however. Here is a brief excerpt from an article co-authored by John Browne and Robin Nuttall for The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which they explain how and why traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) is failing to deliver, for both companies and society. They then share their thoughts about HOW to increase external engagement (EEI) in the given enterprise. To read the complete article, check out other resources, obtain information about the firm and a subscription to the Quarterly, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

Source: Strategy Practice

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Executives need a new approach to engaging the external environment. We believe that the best one is to integrate external engagement deeply into business decision making at every level of a company. In this article, we show how to make that kind of integrated external engagement a reality. We set out to answer three questions. Are companies doing well at external engagement? Where might they be going wrong? How can they do better?

Are companies doing well at external engagement?

Properly understood, external engagement means the efforts a company makes to manage its relationship with the external world. This relationship can and should include a wide variety of activities: not just corporate philanthropy, community programs, and political lobbying, but also aspects of product design, recruiting policy, and project execution. In practice, however, most companies have relied on three tools for external engagement: a full-time CSR team in the head office, some high-profile (but relatively cheap) initiatives, and a glossy annual review of progress.

That traditional approach has had some positive effects. Companies certainly consider the external environment more carefully than they did in the past, and their philanthropic programs have helped many people. But in a majority of cases, CSR has failed to fulfill its core purpose—to build stronger relationships with the external world. The Occupy movement in the United States is the most visible sign of discontent, but polls show that levels of trust in business are below 55 percent in many countries. A significant minority views business executives as villains, enriching themselves at the expense of society. Even firms with the glossiest CSR reports have found themselves cast as public enemies. Take major Wall Street firms in the aftermath of the financial crisis or BP after the Gulf of Mexico spill: their relationships with the external world have been shattered, and they have lost billions of dollars of value as a result.

Many executives recognize that their current approach is inadequate. In a recent McKinsey survey of more than 3,500 executives around the world, less than 20 percent of the respondents reported having frequent success influencing government policy and the outcome of regulatory decisions.1This problem creates an opportunity for significant competitive advantage. In marketing or operations, companies struggle to raise their performance a few percentage points above that of their competitors. But as leading-edge companies such as Statoil and Unilever have discovered, effective external engagement can set you far above your rivals.

Where are companies going wrong?

Executives should not blame themselves alone. One reason they struggle is that the expectations of citizens and governments have never been higher. Companies are expected not only to obey the law or meet certain standards within their own businesses but also to ensure high standards across their supply chains. Large companies are expected to go further still, helping to solve major economic, environmental, and social problems—even those unrelated to their businesses. Moreover, as the expectations of citizens have increased, so has their power to scrutinize. Digital communication has enabled individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to observe almost every activity of a business, to rally support against it, and to launch powerful global campaigns very quickly at almost zero cost. High expectations and scrutiny are here to stay. Successful companies must be equipped to deal with them.

What is wrong with CSR? Why have well-resourced teams, backed by the authority of CEOs, failed to deliver on their core purpose? In our experience, that centralized approach has four serious flaws.

First, head-office initiatives rarely gain the full support of the business and tend to break down in discussions over who pays and who gets the credit. Without the active participation of the big-spending functions—typically, production and marketing—the ambitions of a central team are difficult to realize.

Second, centralized CSR teams can easily lose touch with reality—they tend to take too narrow a view of the relevant external stakeholders. Managers on the ground have a much better understanding of the local context, who really matters, and what can be delivered.

Third, CSR focuses too closely on limiting the downside. Companies often see it only as an exercise in protecting their reputations—to get away with irresponsible behavior elsewhere. Effective external engagement is much more than that: it can attract new customers, motivate employees, and win over governments.

Finally, CSR programs tend to be short-lived. Because they are separate from the commercial activity of a company, they survive on the whim of senior executives rather than the value they deliver. These programs are therefore vulnerable when management changes or costs are cut.

Michael Porter and Mark Kramer summarize the result: “a hodgepodge of uncoordinated CSR and philanthropic activities disconnected from the company’s strategy that neither make any meaningful social impact nor strengthen the firm’s long-term competitiveness.”2

Notes

1 “Engaging and understanding governments: McKinsey Global Survey results” (PDF–561 KB), mckinseyquarterly.com, January 2012.
2 Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, “Strategy and society: The link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility,” Harvard Business Review, December 2006, Volume 84, Number 12, pp. 78–92.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

John Browne, former CEO of BP, is a partner of Riverstone Holdings; Robin Nuttall is a principal in McKinsey’s London office.

Preparing for a new era of work

Employees are an organization’s lifeblood, but recent research suggests that it could become harder for companies everywhere to find skilled workers — and for unskilled workers to find jobs. Here is an excerpt from an article featured in The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which Susan Lund, James Manyika, and Sree Ramaswamy explain how and why global competition, emerging skill shortages, and changing demographics will soon force companies to use their most highly paid talent more effectively. To read the complete article, check out other resources, sign up for email alerts, and learn more about the firm, please click here.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute

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Implications for senior executives

Savvy senior executives will recognize that managing the shift currently under way is analogous to leading a major change-management program and that managers, at all levels, will be the ones most keenly affected. The first priority for executives seeking to lead their organizations into the new world of work should be helping their management teams improve—or in some cases develop—abilities such as these:

Coordinate and sequence: Managing diverse groups of on-site and remote employees will be challenging in a world where the composition of teams changes rapidly as project-based contractors and temporary staff come and go. Managers must become nimble coordinators and better coaches to ensure that all tasks, wherever they occur, mesh smoothly and that information is shared effectively among colleagues. Group interactions, in particular, will require more careful planning and structuring.

(Over)communicate: Some companies require offsite workers to be available for a certain period each day to handle team catch-ups and check-ins with colleagues; other companies set aside regular times for in-person meetings. “You really have to over-communicate to make sure everyone understands their roles and when work will be handed off,” said one manager we spoke with.

Observe and listen: While some employees thrive in independent, remote work environments, others wither in the absence of daily contact with coworkers or the camaraderie of working in a traditional team. Likewise, some managers worry that remote workers will identify less fully with their companies. “You save money, but you lose control,” warned one executive. “We’re worried about loyalty, about identification with the company. If they work from home anyway, will they go to a competitor for just a small bump up in salary?” The best managers will vigilantly observe how their people adjust and respond accordingly.

Let go: Some managers already struggle when they evaluate the performance of knowledge workers. It’s a perennial challenge to judge employees on outcomes, not hours, since defining clear goals and determining reasonable time lines are difficult. Yet in an environment where some employees work in a central office and others are time zones away, managers have no choice but to define goals and step back. “Bosses need to just relax,” observes JetBlue’s Bonny Simi. “They don’t have to see the employee for the work to get done. That’s the hardest shift in mind-set for some managers.”

As with all change programs, the role of senior management will include communicating a clear rationale for any moves and creating a compelling vision of how they will help the company reach its goals. Managers must be convinced of the benefits—higher performance for their teams—if they are to become enthusiastic leaders of change. Above all, senior executives should encourage managers to think big: the new world of work opens up new possibilities for how companies define their boundaries and organize work. Distinctions among employers, employees, and customers are blurring. Innovation happens and tasks get done in new ways. Companies that take advantage of these trends—and indeed pioneer them—can lower their costs while significantly enhancing their value proposition to employees.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Susan Lund is director of research at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and a principal in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office; Sree Ramaswamy is an MGI fellow and a consultant in the Washington, DC, office; James Manyika is a director of MGI and a director in the San Francisco office.

Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 12/24/12)

 

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

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything
Carol J. Loomis

The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow
Michael Macoby

The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time
Mark W. Schaefer

HBR Guide to Finance Basics for Managers
Various Contributors

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative (Second Edition)
Stephen Denning

INTERVIEWS

John A. Daly
Bob Morris

Gregory Unruh
Bob Morris

Karen May (Google) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
New York Times

COMMENTARIES

“Economic Conditions Snapshot, December 2012″
McKinsey & Company
The McKinsey Quarterly

“Six Great Work Paradoxes”
Michael Bungay Stanier
from Do More Great Work

“Play Makes Us Human V: Why Hunter-Gatherers’ Work is Play”
Peter Gray
Psychology Today

“Lincoln’s Leadership Lessons”
Nancy Koehn
HBR

“Michael Lewis’ perspectives on the writing process”

“The ‘talent myth’ revisited”
BOB

“Three fertile problems”
Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
HBR

“How many of these Qs can you answer?”
Harold Urschel

“How and Why Perception Gaps Impede Working Women”
Kip Kelly
Talent Management

“4 of the best marketing videos of 2012″
Erik Sherman
CBS MoneyWatch

“Enduring Ideas: The Three Horizons of growth”
Steve Corley
The McKinsey Quarterly

“Overcoming a bias against risk”
Tim Koller, Dan Lovallo, and Zane Williams
The McKinsey Quarterly

“Beyond machines, then what?
IBM

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

To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.

How to Make Your Big Idea Really Happen

Brown and Hagel

Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown for the Harvard Business Reviewblog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

* * *

Inspired by the loss of her thirteen year-old daughter, Candice Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980 to combat drunk driving through education and legislation. Just a few years later, Lightner and MADD played a pivotal role in passing a federal law which penalized any state that didn’t raise the minimum drinking age to 21.

After Barbara Minto joined McKinsey as the firm’s first ever female consultant, she found that many management consultants had trouble communicating information effectively. She developed the Minto Pyramid Principle to help colleagues structure their writing, and after gaining support within McKinsey, took the framework to other firms. It has since become ubiquitous across the consulting industry.

Lightner and Minto started out as individuals with a vision, and both women went on to significantly impact the realms they cared about. In our 2008 Harvard Business Review article ”Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption,” we discuss how certain firms are harnessing the power of business ecosystems to shape entire industries or markets. As it turns out, individuals can apply several lessons from shaping strategies when trying to turn a grand idea (be it for social good or professional gain) into a reality.

[Here's the first lesson they discuss.]

1. Create a Compelling Shaping View.

In order to mobilize supporters, it helps to put forth a compelling view of what the future-state could look like. Perhaps the most famous example of a shaping view comes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream”speech. In just 17 minutes, the Baptist minister who had been gaining reputation as a Civil Rights leader painted a vivid portrait of a world without racial inequality that ignited his supporters and spurred many to action (even risking their lives) in order to help achieve such a world.

Though the delivery may be less dramatic, a compelling view is just as important when trying to launch a new business venture. When Marc Benioff launched Salesforce.com in 1999, he used speaking engagements not to pitch his new business, but rather, to evangelize his vision of where the future was headed and bring supporters on-board. By getting people to believe in a radically redefined industry, Benioff inspired listeners to invest in making it a reality.

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We live in a world where individuals increasingly have the ability to shape the environment in which they live. Shaping is not just limited to large institutions. In fact, in many of the successful shaping strategies that we studied, the strategies were executed by people with limited resources on the edge of a market or industry. Whether we are seeking to shape our workplace or our society, small moves smartly made can set big things in motion.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

John Hagel III (jhagel@deloitte.com) is co-chairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for Edge Innovation, located in the Silicon Valley region of California. He writes a strategy blog at edgeperspectives.typepad.com. John Seely Brown (jsb@johnseelybrown.com) is independent cochairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for Edge Innovation. He formerly was chief scientist at Xerox and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). To check out their other articles, please click here.

 

The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

Here is the executive summary of a recent report featured online by The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI),  the business and economics research arm of McKinsey & Company. MGI was established in 1990 to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving global economy. Our goal is to provide leaders in the commercial, public, and social sectors with the facts and insights on which to base management and policy decisions.

MGI research combines the disciplines of economics and management, employing the analytical tools of economics with the insights of business leaders. Our “micro-to-macro” methodology examines microeconomic industry trends to better understand the broad macroeconomic forces affecting business strategy and public policy. MGI’s in-depth reports have covered more than 20 countries and 30 industries. Current research focuses on six themes: productivity and growth; the evolution of global financial markets; the economic impact of technology and innovation; urbanization; the future of work; and natural resources. Recent reports have assessed job creation, resource productivity, cities of the future, and the impact of big data.

MGI is led by three McKinsey & Company directors: Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Charles Roxburgh. Susan Lund serves as director of research. Project teams are led by a group of senior fellows and include consultants from McKinsey’s offices around the world. These teams draw on McKinsey’s global network of partners and industry and management experts. In addition, leading economists, including Nobel laureates, act as research advisers.

The partners of McKinsey & Company fund MGI’s research; it is not commissioned by any business, government, or other institution.

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To downloard this report, please click here.

For further information about MGI and to download other reports, please visit www.mckinsey.com/mgi.