Decision Making →
- 04 Dec 2012
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: Harder Than I Thought
Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a Twenty-First Century Leader invites readers to critique the fictional journey of Jim Barton, the new CEO of a west coast aerospace firm. The book was written by business scholars Robert Austin, Richard Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 03 Dec 2012
- HBS Case
HBS Cases: Against the Grain
Dealing with pervasive, institutionalized corruption is tough but not impossible. A new case study on Tanzania joins a series of cases in professor Karthik Ramanna's research that explore the deep-seated problems of corruption as well as multiple entrepreneurial paths to combat it. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 01 Nov 2012
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: Judgment Calls
In their book Judgment Calls, Visiting Professor Thomas H. Davenport and independent consultant Brook Manville share the tales of several organizations that made successful choices through collective judgment. Read our excerpt on growing pains at Tweezerman. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Aug 2012
- Research & Ideas
Strategic Intelligence: Adapt or Die
In his new book, Strategic IQ, Professor of Management Practice John R. Wells explains why adapting to changing circumstances isn't only smart, it's also a matter of survival. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 16 Jul 2012
- Research & Ideas
Are You a Strategist?
Corporate strategy has become the bailiwick of consultants and business analysts, so much so that it is no longer a top-of-mind responsibility for many senior executives. Professor Cynthia A. Montgomery says it's time for CEOs to again become strategists. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 09 Jul 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Unconscious Executive
Postdoctoral fellow Maarten Bos investigates how unconscious processes improve decision-making. Conscious deliberation, it turns out, does not always lead to the best outcomes. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 04 Jun 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Business of Life
Scholarly economic theory applies to more than just business. The same causal mechanisms that drive big corporations to success can be just as effective in driving our personal lives, says Professor Clayton M. Christensen. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 10 May 2012
- Working Paper Summaries
The Flattened Firm—Not as Advertised
For decades, management consultants and the popular business press have urged large firms to flatten their hierarchies. Flattening (or delayering, as it is also known) typically refers to the elimination of layers in a firm's organizational hierarchy, and the broadening of managers' spans of control. While flattening is said to reduce costs, its alleged benefits flow primarily from changes in internal governance: by pushing decisions downward, firms not only enhance customer and market responsiveness, but also improve accountability and morale. But has flattening actually delivered on its promise and pushed decisions down to lower-level managers? In this paper, Julie Wulf shows that flattening actually can lead to exactly the opposite effects from what it promises to do. Wulf used a large-scale panel data set of reporting relationships, job descriptions, and compensation structures in a sample of over 300 large U.S. firms over roughly a 15-year period. This historical data analysis was complemented with exploratory interviews with executives (what CEOs say) and analysis of data on executive time use (what CEOs do). Results suggest that flattening transferred some decision rights from lower-level division managers to functional managers at the top. Flattening is also associated with increased CEO involvement with direct reports—the second level of top management—suggesting a more hands-on CEO at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. In sum, flattening at the top is a complex phenomenon that in the end looks more like centralization. Yet it is crucial to consider different types of decisions and activities and how they vary by level in the hierarchy. Key concepts include: Firms may flatten structure to delegate decisions, but doing so can lead to unintended consequences for other aspects of internal governance. For instance, a manager may flatten structure to push decisions down and then hire and develop division managers suited to "being the boss." If flattening actually pushes decisions up, division managers are now out of sync with the organization: They don't have autonomy to make decisions and there is a mismatch between managerial talent and decision rights. A change in structure has implications not only for who makes decisions, but also for how decisions are made. Flatter structures involve different roles for the CEO and the senior team. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 09 May 2012
- Research & Ideas
Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?”
World-renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen explores the personal benefits of business research in the forthcoming book How Will You Measure Your Life? Coauthored with James Allworth and Karen Dillon, the book explains how well-tested academic theories can help us find meaning and happiness not just at work, but in life. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 28 Mar 2012
- Working Paper Summaries
When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint versus Separate Evaluation
Gender-based discrimination in hiring, promotion, and job assignments is difficult to overcome. This paper suggests a new intervention aimed at avoiding biased assessments: an "evaluation nudge," in which employees are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. While joint evaluation is common for most hiring decisions, especially at the lower levels, it is rarely used when job assignments and promotions are being considered. The research shows that a joint-evaluation mode succeeds in helping employers choose based on past performance, irrespective of an employee's gender and the implicit stereotypes the employer may hold. While it is not always feasible to bundle promotion decisions and explicitly compare candidates, the research suggests that, whenever possible, joint evaluation would increase both efficiency and equality. Findings have implications for organizations that want to decrease the likelihood that hiring, promotion, and job-assignment decisions will be based on irrelevant criteria triggered by stereotypes. Key concepts include: In addition to being a profit-maximizing decision procedure, joint evaluation is also a fair mechanism, as it encourages judgments based on people's performance rather than their demographic characteristics. In experiments, employers tasked to choose an employee for future performance were influenced by the candidate's gender in cases where candidates were evaluated separately. In contrast, in joint evaluation, gender was irrelevant. Employers were significantly more likely to choose the higher- rather than the lower-performing employee. Companies concerned about discrimination in these phases of employment might choose to review how, for example, career-relevant jobs are assigned and how promotion decisions are made. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 12 Mar 2012
- Research & Ideas
Crowded at the Top: The Rise of the Functional Manager
It's not lonely at the top anymore—today's CEO has an average of 10 direct reports, according to new research by Julie M. Wulf, Maria Guadalupe, and Hongyi Li. Thank a dramatic increase in the number of "functional" managers for crowding in the C-suite. Key concepts include: The number of managers reporting directly to the CEO has doubled, from an average of 5 direct reports in 1986 to an average of 10 today. In 2008, companies averaged 2.9 general managers, compared with 1.6 in 1986, according to data from several surveys. The average number of functional managers reporting directly to the CEO increased much more dramatically, from 3.1 in the late 1980s to 6.7 in 2008. Two main factors have driven the C-suite sea change: an overall increase in IT investments and an overall decrease in firm diversification. As hierarchical flattening occurs, companies are pushing some decisions toward the top, casting doubt on the common idea that firms flatten in order to push ideas down the organization. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 15 Feb 2012
- Working Paper Summaries
Learning from My Success and From Others’ Failure: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery
The importance of failure in the learning process is well recognized. In organizations as work grows increasingly fragmented—more specialized and divided into smaller tasks—the role of individuals in organizational learning becomes more important. This paper examines how individuals learn directly from their own past experience, and indirectly from the past experience of others. Focusing on one particular performance outcome, the quality of surgeries, findings indicate that individuals learn the most from their own successes and the failures of others, possibly because in both cases they attribute the outcomes to internal rather than external factors. This research has implications for healthcare and organizations more generally. Research by KC Diwas, Bradley R. Staats, and Francesca Gino. Key concepts include: Individuals learn more from their own success than from their own failure or from the success of others. The failure of others has a greater learning effect on individual performance than does others' successful experience. Certain types of experience help to make individuals more open to learning from their own failures. Individuals may be more open to reflect on their own failures and learn from them when they have greater experience with success. Seeing failures in others makes failure not only more acceptable, but it also makes one's own failure less threatening to one's own identity. In addition, the failure of others provides valuable knowledge that can be used for ongoing problem solving. Organizations may need to find other ways to make their members feel capable and interpret failures in ways that do not threaten their self-image. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 26 Jan 2012
- Working Paper Summaries
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty
What makes even good people cross ethical boundaries? Society demands that business and professional schools address ethics, but the results have been disappointing. This paper argues that a behavioral approach to ethics is essential because it leads to understanding and explaining moral and immoral behavior in systematic ways. The authors first define business ethics and provide an admittedly biased history of the attempts of professional schools to address ethics as a subject of both teaching and research. They next briefly summarize the emergence of the field of behavioral ethics over the last two decades, and turn to recent research findings in behavioral ethics that could provide helpful directions for a social science perspective to ethics. These new findings on both intentional and unintentional unethical behavior can inform new courses on ethics as well as new research investigations. Such new directions can meet the demands of society more effectively than past attempts of professional schools. They can also produce a meaningful and significant change in the behavior of both business school students and professionals. Key concepts include: Shifting the modes of thought can lead to profound differences in how we make ethical decisions. This has implications at the individual and at the societal level. Until recently, little empirical attention was given to how people actually behave when they face ethical dilemmas and decisions or to how their behavior can be improved. A behavioral ethics approach does not teach students how they should behave when facing ethical dilemmas, nor inform them about what philosophers or ethicists would recommend. Instead it sees an opportunity in helping students and professionals better understand their own behavior in the ethics domain, and compare it to how they would ideally like to behave. Behavioral ethics identifies levers at both the individual and the institutional level to change ethically questionable behaviors when individuals are acting in unethical ways that they would not endorse with greater reflection. Prior to the 1990s, it was rare for professional schools to have a significant focus on the area of ethics (or business ethics more specifically) in the courses offered to students. Courses that were taught used philosophical approaches or suggested that morality is a rather stable personality trait that individuals develop by going through differences phases of development. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 21 Dec 2011
- Research & Ideas
The Most Common Strategy Mistakes
In the book, Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy, Joan Magretta distills Porter's core concepts and frameworks into a concise guide for business practitioners. In this excerpt, Porter discusses common strategy mistakes. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 07 Dec 2011
- Research & Ideas
Are Creative People More Dishonest?
In a series of studies, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely found that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative people. Furthermore, they showed that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior. It's a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 01 Dec 2011
- What Do You Think?
Thinking Slow: An Argument for Bureaucracy?
Summing Up Readers of Jim Heskett's column this month offer guidelines for when to think fast and when to think slow, from author Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 23 Nov 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
Economists have been paying increasing attention to the role that culture plays in a firm's overall performance. This paper focuses on how trust—a key cultural factor—affects firms' decision-making process, size, and productivity. Research was conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Rafaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics. Key concepts include: If a firm is headquartered in a country where trust is prevalent (such as Sweden), it is much more likely to decentralize its decision making than if it is headquartered in a country in which trust is rarer (such as India). In short, higher trust leads to more decentralization. Trust also enables a firm to hire a large number of plant managers, because the CEO will feel comfortable delegating decisions to their direct reports without spending too much time on supervision. Thus, higher trust increases firm size. Higher trust increases the marginal value of information technology's effect on productivity. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 20 Oct 2011
- Research & Ideas
Getting the Marketing Mix Right
Marketers have a wide array of selling tools at their disposal, but lack an effective method for predicting their success. Associate Professor Thomas J. Steenburgh and collaborators offer a new model for guiding their marketing investments. Key concepts include: Discrete choice models commonly used to evaluate marketing strategies often provide misleading results, leaving managers with the inability to accurately measure how they can get the best bang for their buck. A new model could help managers figure out which marketing efforts work best, and therefore decide which strategies to invest in. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Oct 2011
- What Do You Think?
How Will the ‘Moneyball Generation’ Influence Management?
Sum-up Nontraditional performance measures, as highlighted in the movie 'Moneyball', will become an increasingly important part of the young manager's toolkit, Jim Heskett's readers say. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
Should Managers Bother Listening to Predictions?
Summing Up Should we use predictions at all when planning for the future? Jim Heskett's readers offer a variety of opinions. What do YOU think? Closed for comment; 0 Comments.