The most powerful way to prevail in global competition is still invisible to many companies. During the 1980s, top executives were judged on their ability to restructure, declutter, and de-layer their corporations.
In lean manufacturing, the goal is to establish precise procedures for making products in the safest, easiest, and most efficient manner possible. When critical processes become standard work, variation decreases, throughput increases, costs fall, and quality rises. Companies as diverse as Toyota, Amazon, Intel, and Nike leverage this approach in their operations to great effect.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Henry Mintzberg’s classic article “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact.” The essay, which sought to debunk some of the myths about what makes a good manager, won what was then called the McKinsey Award, given annually to the year’s best article in Harvard Business Review.
How do you add value? When we say a person, team, or company has added value, we usually mean that they’ve gone above and beyond what was asked or expected of them. For example, imagine your manager asks you to source three vendors who can deliver a needed service. You provide a list of three vendors, their respective pros and cons, and a potential solution where you can solve for the needed service in-house instead.
What could our senior leadership team achieve if we worked at full potential? And what’s keeping us from achieving it? Those were the questions the leaders at Root Capital found themselves asking in 2022.
General Electric, Wells Fargo, and Boeing all chose the wrong CEOs for the job, says Bill George, creating big problems for the companies. George outlines five common mistakes boards of directors make when selecting leaders and provides advice for picking the appropriate person for this all-important role.
The Drucker Forum, as part of its five-year effort to develop “the next management,” gave us a progress report last week. The theme of its conference in Vienna in November will be: “managing for new levels of value creation and innovation” with a particular focus on “knowledge workers.”
Last week’s session provided insights into flaws of current management practices. Speakers noted the need to “change our mindsets,” “invert what we give priority to,” and “upend the way we think.”
Chinese companies have long been acclaimed for their manufacturing prowess and, more recently, for their pragmatic approach to innovation. Now it’s time to recognize how they are also reinventing the role of management through an approach we call “digitally enhanced directed autonomy,” or DEDA.
We recently asked members of the HBR community to gauge the extent of “bureaucratic sclerosis” within their organization using our Bureaucracy Mass Index (BMI) tool. Since then, we’ve received over 7,000 responses from a diverse group of participants. Here are our initial takeaways:
