Search Results

How leading companies use price, speed, quality and flexibility to drive innovation and shareholder value.

Coaching increases performance, productivity and job satisfaction at all levels.

Conventional wisdom has it that most innovations eventually become commodities, bought on the basis of price and nothing else. Citing a quotation by a Columbia Business School professor that epitomizes that point of view -- "In the long run, everything is a toaster" -- the author uses the technological history of toast to persuasively undermine that notion. Drawing on the wisdom of economists Ronald Coase, Paul Samuelson, John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith, he makes a historical case that commodity is not destiny, and uses brands such as Starbucks, Evian, Dasani, Scott Paper, Yahoo and Google, Hoover and Dyson to illustrate the point. The danger, he says, is that executives, entrepreneurs and investors may buy into the commodity designation far more often than they should, making the commodity ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy. Businesses that believe that today's breakthrough is tomorrow's toaster understandably fear rapidly diminishing returns from their innovation investments, and the economics of "good enough" innovation become good enough. The potential of ideas is inherently undervalued. Sustainable innovation opportunities are either missed or dismissed. Intense price competition, the author argues, may not signal the prolific presence of substitutable commodities but rather an arid absence of innovation. That signal, he says, should give a clear and present incentive for executives and entrepreneurs to innovate in order to differentiate; to identify hidden or untapped potential for new value creation.

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).