Performance Effectiveness →
- 27 Jan 2014
- Research & Ideas
Family CEOs Spend Less Time at Work
CEOs who are related to the owners of family-owned firms work significantly fewer hours than nonfamily CEOs, according to a new study by Raffaella Sadun and colleagues. This is in light of the fact that longer working hours are associated with higher productivity, growth, and profitability. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Nov 2013
- What Do You Think?
Is Top-Down Resource Allocation on the Rise?
Summing Up Respondents to this month's column provided Jim Heskett possible explanations for greater reliance on top-down resource allocation processes while arguing that a blend of influences from the top and bottom of an organization are still important for best results. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 02 Oct 2013
- What Do You Think?
Is Leadership an Increasingly Difficult Balancing Act?
Summing Up: Do we long for the days of the conventional authority figure? Jim Heskett sums up this month's column. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 18 Feb 2013
- Research & Ideas
Breaking Through a Growth Stall
Many companies get stuck on a plateau, unable to grow and burning through cash at a frightening rate. Frank V. Cespedes discusses how focusing on the right customers can generate growth again. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 02 Jan 2013
- What Do You Think?
Should We Rethink the Promise of Teams?
Summing Up: Teams that are properly structured and managed can support innovative thinking that depends on contributions from both extroverts and introverts, according to Professor Jim Heskett's readers. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 17 Dec 2012
- Research & Ideas
Teaming in the Twenty-First Century
Today's teams are not well designed for getting work done in the twenty-first century, argues Professor Amy C. Edmondson. One starting point: learn the skill of "teaming." Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 28 Nov 2012
- What Do You Think?
Should Pay-for-Performance Compensation be Replaced?
Summing up: In spite of its naysayers, pay for performance compensation still makes sense to most of us, according to those responding to Jim Heskett's column on the subject. But there is a difference of opinion of about when and how it works and how it should be structured. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 05 Sep 2012
- What Do You Think?
Will Business Management Save US Health Care?
Summing Up: Problems confronting the US health care system are much larger and broader than those that can be solved by management in the absence of other remedies, readers tell Jim Heskett. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 25 Apr 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Importance of Teaming
Managers need to stop thinking of teams as static groups of individuals who have ample time to practice interacting successfully and efficiently, says Amy Edmondson in her new book, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. 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.
- 28 Nov 2011
- Research & Ideas
Rethinking the Fairness of Organ Transplants
Because of an organ shortage, hundreds or even thousands of people miss out on needed organ transplants each year. Business researchers at Harvard and MIT are rethinking how kidney transplants are allocated to give patients longer lives. An interview with professor Nikolaos Trichakis. Key concepts include: A new empirical model for allocating available kidneys to patients provides the potential for a system with greater fairness and longer life outcomes for those who receive transplants. The method—the work of Nikolaos Trichakis of Harvard Business School and Dimitris Bertsimas and Vivek F. Farias, both of MIT's Sloan School—can help policy designers create the most equitable point system based on their chosen constraints and criteria. In early simulations, the model suggests that life-year expectancies for the program can be increased by up to 8 percent, depending on variables plugged into the process. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 14 Nov 2011
- Research & Ideas
Creating a Global Business Code
In the wake of corporate scandals, many companies are looking more closely at how to manage business conduct worldwide. Professors Rohit Deshpandé, Lynn S. Paine, and Joshua D. Margolis evaluate standards of corporate conduct around the world. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 19 Jul 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model
Why might firms make operational decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits? This model looks at the question by developing scenarios using the example of inventory management in the face of an external investor. The research was conducted by Vishal Gaur of Cornell University, Richard Lai of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ananth Raman and William Schmidt of Harvard Business School. Key concepts include: Companies face pressure from external investors that leads them to make suboptimal operations decisions. This pressure arises from three forces: a strong prior belief that firms are of a "low" type (one with a low quality investment opportunity), an inability for firms to mitigate the information asymmetry regarding their actual type, and an emphasis on short-term valuation. Surprisingly, this scenario includes instances in which a firm with a high quality investment opportunity finds it attractive to underinvest. There have been relatively few applications of signaling games in the operations management literature and this model provides an important application of signaling game theory to the problem of inventory management in the face of an external investor. The researchers find several real-life examples in which firms faced pressure to underinvest, and how the firms chose to deal with those situations. One example is the decision by French upscale beauty brand Clarins Group to go private in 2008. The move relieved management of shareholder pressure for short-term profits and allowed them to pursue longer-term opportunities that eventually paid off. The model can be effectively applied regardless of whether the decision is about inventory or some other type of capacity investment, including plant expansions, capital expenditures, and contracting for production inputs. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 11 May 2011
- Research & Ideas
Building a Better Board
While corporate board members take their jobs more seriously than ever, they are not necessarily as helpful or effective as they could be, says HBS senior lecturer Stephen Kaufman. He recently sat down with HBS Working Knowledge to discuss what he considers to be the biggest practical issues facing boards today. Key concepts include: Board directors may not give an honest assessment of the company because they fear reprisal from the CEO or the other board members. In accurately evaluating a CEO's performance, board members must get feedback from other employees at the company, who possess insight into day-to-day operations that the directors do not. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 02 May 2011
- Research & Ideas
Casino Payoff: Hands-Off Management Works Best
Micromanagers beware: Research of casino hosts by Harvard Business School's Dennis Campbell and Francisco de Asís Martinez-Jerez and Rice's Marc Epstein makes the case that hands-off management can work to improve employee learning and decision making. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 28 Apr 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
When Smaller Menus are Better: Variability in Menu-Setting Ability and 401(k) Plans
Economists love menus, which can be used to help understand people's choices. For example, do we prefer more choices (larger menu) or fewer (shorter menu)? But the menu itself has to be pre-selected. Research by David Goldreich (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) and Hanna Halaburda (Harvard Business School) focuses on the menu setter's decisions about what to include, and how large a menu to construct in the context of 401(k) plan choices. Key concepts include: When the cost of increasing the size of a menu is sufficiently small, a low-ability, or less skilled, menu setter will offer more items in the menu than a high-ability menu setter, who will be more discriminate in deciding which menu items to include. Combining the two results leads to a negative relation between menu size and menu quality: Larger menus are worse. This counterintuitive finding follows from the fact that the smaller menu set by the high-ability menu setter is not a subset of the larger menu set by the low-ability menu setter. One must be aware of the role played by menu setters in designing the menu offered to individuals. An unskilled menu setter may offer many choices, but the quality of those choices may be inferior. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 31 Mar 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
What Do CEOs Do?
If time is money, as the old adage goes, then a CEO's schedule is especially important to a firm's financial success. This raises a fair question: What do CEOs do all day? To that end, researchers followed the activities of 94 CEOs in Italy over the course of a pre-specified week, enlisting the CEOs' personal assistants to track their bosses' activities with time-use diaries. Research was conducted by Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School, Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute, and Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat of the London School of Economics. Key concepts include: Compared with CEOs who work shorter hours overall, CEOs with longer workdays tend to devote more time meeting with other employees within the company and less time meeting with outsiders. The better the firm's governance structure, the more likely it is that a CEO will spend more time meeting with insiders than outsiders. The findings show a strong correlation between hours worked and productivity—a 2.14 percentage point increase in productivity for every one percentage point increase in hours worked. That positive correlation is driven entirely by the time a CEO spends with company insiders. Time spent with insiders is correlated with profits; time spent with outsiders is not. A possible interpretation is that spending time with outsiders might be more beneficial to the CEO than to the firm. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Jan 2011
- What Do You Think?
How Should Management Deal With “Anonymous”?
Summing Up When it comes to the leaky Web, Jim Heskett's readers say assume the worst and act accordingly. (New forum on February 3.) Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 15 Nov 2010
- Lessons from the Classroom
Connecting Goals and Go-To-Market Initiatives
In some respects, developing strategy is the easy part. Executing that strategy in alignment with strategic priorities is where real mastery of management takes place. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Frank V. Cespedes shows how it is done. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
When Do Alliances Make Sense?
Analyzing drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico, John Beshears explores a question as old as business itself: When does it pay to make an alliance? Open for comment; 0 Comments.