Articles

Meetings are a central fact of organizational life. As a vehicle for communication, they can be extremely valuable mechanisms for disseminating vision, crafting strategic plans, and developing responses to challenges and opportunities. They can also be helpful for gathering ideas, brainstorming, and generating higher levels of employee involvement. But too many meetings are seen as a waste of time -- as a source of frustration rather than enlightenment. The authors explore some basic questions: How much time do people really spend in meetings? Are employees burning out from meeting overload? To what extent do people consider their time in meetings unproductive? And how can companies use meeting time better? To answer these questions, they look at a variety of sources: research and application literature; their own experiences working with clients; and data from two multinational studies of employees (including one that provided the basis of an article titled "'Not Another Meeting!' Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-Being?" Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 1 (2006): 86-96, by Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield). Based on these inquiries, they offer insights into the world of meetings and how organizations can use them more effectively.

Contrary to the beliefs of many managers, their companies' product and corporate brands cannot truly be managed, much less owned. That much has become clear in recent years as many well-known brands have seemed to take on lives of their own, changing in the minds of many even though management may think of them as immutable. In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a "brand manifold" in order to bring out two overlooked factors: first, that brands have multiple dimensions depending on who is valuing them, and second, that those dimensions change in space and time. Drawing on automotive industry examples such as Maybach, Morgan, and BMW's Mini, the authors demonstrate the importance of managing a brand's evolution so that the brand does not lose its roots in the past. The article goes on to highlight the importance of understanding that brands have a life and meaning independent of what their initiators intended -- as embodied by the thriving user community around Apple Computer's long-obsolete Newton handheld and evident in the influence of Harley-Davidson owners over many of the company's strategic decisions.

Raises and bonuses are both effective for motivating people, but which is better for eliciting top performance?

Using outside technologies to develop products and licensing intellectual property to external parties will carry a company only so far. The next frontier is to open the business model itself.

Responding to competitive pressures, a growing number of corporate managers are dismantling organizations and cultures that were built on selling particular products and replacing them with new structures designed to be more responsive to customer needs. The push to restructure around customers is more than a new management fad. It is supported by success stories at companies including IBM, Cummins India, Fidelity Investments and Imation. Companies transitioning from product-oriented to customer-centered organizations progress along a continuum. They begin with informal coordination to overcome the deficiencies of product or functional silos, adding integrating functions (such as key account managers and customer segment task forces) as needed. The market logic for becoming customer-focused is often compelling. In surveying 347 companies, the author found that companies that embraced this approach saw accountability for customer relationships improve, and information about customers was more readily shared. These companies were also easier to do business with, according to customers. However, the author found that transforming product-centered cultures can be difficult and that the potential benefits do not necessarily translate into superior performance.

A company's market value actually increases when its known rivals innovate.

Most large-scale change efforts fail to meet their expectations. A major problem is that even the most advanced change models will stumble when they face organizational designs and management practices that are inherently anti-change. The truth is that the effectiveness of change efforts is largely determined by organizational design, or how a company's structure, processes, reward systems and other features are orchestrated over time to support one another as well as the company's strategic intent, identity and capabilities. In a world that is perpetually changing, an organization's design must support the idea that the implementation and reimplementation of a strategy is a continuous process. However, a number of traditional organizational design features tend to discourage -- and not encourage -- change. Thus, to transform themselves into organizations that are "built to change," companies need to rethink a number of these basic design assumptions with respect to managing talent (forget about job descriptions and redefine the relationship between company and worker), reward systems (implement a "person-based" pay system), structure (redesign the organization to maximize its "surface area"), information and decision processes (scrap the annual-budget process and move decision making closer to the front lines), and leaders (replace hierarchical command-and-control with shared leadership).

Launching new ventures outside a corporation's core business is risky and failure-prone -- yet often perceived as vital to innovation and organic growth. Can investing in new ventures add value to a company despite the risks? To explore that question, the authors conducted an in-depth study of corporate venturing at Nokia Corp. between 1998 and 2002; the study included two years of dissertation research by one of the authors. The research yielded a number of lessons about corporate venturing. For example, Nokia discovered that looking at the success or failure of an individual project as a business was the wrong way to evaluate the effectiveness of the venturing program. Whether or not they succeeded as businesses, Nokia's corporate ventures often added important capabilities to the core business, such as familiarity with a new customer segment for the company. In fact, seemingly unrelated investments sometimes led to technologies that later benefited the company's core business. The authors conclude that, to extract value from corporate ventures, companies must use different management practices than in their established businesses, structure new ventures so that they don't face pressure to deliver immediate results, and emphasize learning. Although 70% of Nokia's corporate venturing investments during the period studied were either discontinued or completely divested, the capabilities and technologies developed nonetheless played an important role in helping the company's core businesses respond to change.

According to conventional wisdom, companies resemble organisms destined to pass through the stages of start-up, scaling, maturity and decline. In reality, business opportunities & #8212; and not firms & #8212; pass through these stages, and most organizations consist of multiple opportunities arrayed across the different stages of the life cycle. Executives who understand this crucial distinction can view their organization as a portfolio of opportunities that requires constant re-jiggering to balance the demands of the present with the promise of the future. The authors suggest that, when assessing any opportunity portfolio, executives should remain on the lookout for the following common pathologies: waiting too long to exit a declining business, failing to salvage usable pieces of a business that is shutdown, shunning promising new markets because of an overly conservative fiscal approach, trying to scale too many business opportunities so that none of them receives the necessary resources), applying the same management style to business opportunities at different life cycle stages, and erring on the side of loss aversion.

Early research in e-commerce projected that online retailing would spiral into a never-ending price war, but recent research has shown that customers are more likely to pay higher prices to online retailers of high quality that they trust. But how do customers evaluate quality in online retailing? What are the specific aspects of an online transaction that customers value and use to distinguish one site from another? The authors explored these issues by surveying customers who had recently engaged in an online retail transaction to determine how they evaluate the quality of their experiences with online retailers. The results demonstrated that customers' perceptions of quality and satisfaction with online purchases depend upon three things: interaction with the Web site, delivery of the product and how prepared retailers are to address problems when they occur. Of the three, product delivery has the strongest influence on customers' satisfaction and future purchase intentions. The authors further break down each of the three aspects of quality to create a complete picture of what it takes to build a trusting relationship with customers in an e-commerce environment.