Insights
Harvard Business Review
What Are Your KPIs Really Measuring?
No CEO doubts the importance of measuring their company’s performance properly. Yet the executive teams I’ve assisted over more than 25 years generally struggle to engage with the challenge. As one CEO put it to me, “when we get to corporate KPIs their eyes glaze over.” Or, as another said “they [the managers] start looking for the exits.”
Embrace a Little Chaos When Innovating Under Pressure
The Covid-19 crisis has put many product development teams in a tough bind: they’re being asked to rapidly accelerate their processes, but research shows that extreme time pressure often stifles creative work. Best practices for innovation emphasize upfront coordination and synchronization, all of which take time and can’t be rushed. Is it really possible for organizations to push creative teams to work faster without sacrificing quality?
What Has — and Hasn’t — Changed Since “Dear White Boss…”
More than 18 years ago, we co-authored a Harvard Business Review article entitled “Dear White Boss… .” It was a fictional letter from a Black manager to an anonymous white executive. The letter was based on our years researching, interviewing, and working with Black leaders, as well as personal experiences. We described how the challenge of inequity based on racial, gender or other differences was debilitating for both people of color and the broader organization.
McKinsey
Ecosystem 2.0: Climbing to the next level
As COVID-19 accelerates customers’ migration to digital, with consumers of all ages going online for everything from food to cars to doctor visits, some companies may feel that the channels, platforms, and approaches they have relied on for years are burning up faster than ever.
Rethinking AI talent strategy as automated machine learning comes of age
In recent years, as the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) crystallized across industries, organizations revamped their talent strategies to gain the skills necessary to deploy and scale AI systems. They hired legions of data scientists and other data experts to build AI applications, trained analytics translators to connect the business and technical realms, and upskilled frontline staff to use AI applications effectively.
COVID-19: Implications for business
No nation has escaped widespread disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, but some have fared better than others. This week, McKinsey researchers examined the state of the recovery in some of the emerging Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam—that began the crisis at a disadvantage and have suffered disproportionate effects.
Warren Buffett: An appreciation
Patience, caution, and consistency. In volatile times such as these, it may be difficult for executives to keep those attributes in mind when making decisions. But there are immense advantages to doing so. For proof, just look at the steady genius of now-nonagenarian Warren Buffett.
Wall Street Journal
When Revlon Inc. wanted to know what lipstick women of different races and in different countries were wearing, the cosmetics giant didn’t need to send out a survey. It hired Miami-based Kairos Inc., which used a facial-analysis algorithm to scan Instagram photos.
CEOs Call in the Coaches as Covid-19 Tests Their Companies
Executives are turning to their longtime coaches to help them navigate the uncertainty—and unprecedented leadership challenges—presented by the coronavirus pandemic. Two chief executives of major U.S. companies have used the same coaches since before they reached the corner office and still rely on them during the current chaotic business climate.
Chief information officers should leverage the current business slowdown imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic to assess the digital transformation skills of every individual on their IT staff. Here’s how to do it. And why it is important. In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, wrote Being Digital, a book which helped introduce the concept of digital transformation, a “irrevocable and unstoppable” shift in business processes from physical atoms to digital bits. Twenty-five years later, digital transformation languishes as an aspirational strategy for most firms.
On his first day as CEO of a Washington, D.C., commercial real-estate company, John L. Ziegenhein turned to his wife over morning coffee and joked: How do I get to the office? In three months of interviewing for the top job at Chevy Chase Land Co., he had never been inside the company’s corporate headquarters. Instead of boardroom presentations or quiet dinners in restaurant banquettes, he completed more than 15 interviews for the job almost entirely from his home, sitting on Zoom calls for sometimes hours at a time.
U.S. Industrial Production Points to Slowing Manufacturing Recovery
U.S. industrial production rose for the fourth consecutive month in August but at a much lower rate than earlier in the summer, a sign that the manufacturing recovery is slowing. The Federal Reserve on Tuesday said industrial production—a measure of output at factories, mines and utilities—rose a seasonally adjusted 0.4% in August from July, following a revised 3.5% rise in July. Despite several months of advances, output remains far below its level before the coronavirus pandemic hit in the spring.
Boston Consulting Group
It’s Go Time for Digital Transformation
If people had doubts about the new capabilities that companies everywhere are implementing as part of digital transformations, the response to the COVID-19 crisis appears to have put them to rest. The vast majority of both managers and employees believe that these capabilities helped counter the effects of the pandemic and will aid businesses in getting back on their feet once the crisis is over, according to a new survey commissioned by Boston Consulting Group.
How Do You “Design” a Business Ecosystem?
If designing a traditional business model is like planning and building a house, designing an ecosystem is more like developing a whole residential district: more complex, more players to coordinate, more layers of interaction and unintended emergent outcomes.
Advantage Beyond the Crisis
The only certainty about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it will eventually end, and when it does, many of the changes it has brought will recede. Like wildlife returning to Chernobyl, prior conditions will reappear. Consumers will once more shop and socialize, supply and demand will rebalance, and markets will recover.
The Next Frontier in Digital and AI Transformations
Is your company transforming into a butterfly, or is it just training to be a faster caterpillar? That metaphor—coined or at least popularized by George Westerman, principal research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy—captures the challenges of digitization. In other words, has your digital program actually been transformational or merely incremental?
Preemptive Transformation: Fix it before it breaks
In business transformations, there are plausible reasons to believe that time is an essential factor. Companies that change early may get a first-mover advantage, acting ahead of their competitors and potential disruptors. Besides, business organizations are complex systems, which often decline much faster than they grow, an asymmetry that has been called the Seneca effect. Considering that transformations take time, moving preemptively may be the best way to prevent obsolescence and collapse.
More
Millions of Small Businesses Don't Sell Online. It's Time
The pandemic helped push e-commerce retail sales above $210 billion in the second quarter of 2020, an increase of over 30% from the previous quarter, according to Commerce Department data. Millions of shoppers are clearly comfortable buying stuff online. Still, only about half of U.S.-based small businesses have websites, according to one estimate. Even fewer establishments actually sell their products online.
Tech rebound momentum continues as market climbs
Stocks are adding to Monday's gains, with technology again in the lead and megacaps rising. The Nasdaq is up 1.2%, the S&P is up 0.8% and the Dow is rising 0.7%.
How Companies Are Getting Speedy Coronavirus Tests for Employees
As businesses try to recover from the pandemic’s economic blow while ensuring the safety of workers and customers, many have complained of two obstacles: access to coronavirus testing for their employees and long delays in receiving results.
