Harvard Business Review

How can a person who seems so qualified for a position fail miserably in it? How can someone who clearly lacks relevant skills and experience succeed? The answer is potential, the ability to adapt and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments. For the past several decades, organizations have based their hiring decisions on competencies. But we have entered a new era of talent spotting. Geopolitics, business, industries, and jobs are changing so rapidly that it's impossible to predict the capabilities employees and leaders will need even a few years out...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Over the past five years, there's been an explosion of interest in purpose-driven leadership. Academics, business experts, and even doctors make the case that purpose is a key to exceptional leadership and the pathway to greater well-being. Despite this growing understanding, however, a big challenge remains. Few leaders have a strong sense of their own individual purpose, the authors' research and experience show, and even fewer can distill their purpose into a concrete statement or have a clear plan for translating purpose into action...

Even in an age of relentless self-promotion, some extremely capable professionals prefer to avoid the spotlight. "Invisibles" work in fields ranging from engineering to interpreting to perfumery, but they have three things in common: They are ambivalent about recognition, seeing any time spent courting fame as time taken away from the work at hand. They are meticulous. And they savor responsibility, viewing even high pressure as an honor and a source of fascination. Something else unites Invisibles: They represent a management challenge...

It's one thing to set goals-and entirely another to get the people in your organization to actually accomplish them. To make the leap from vision to execution, you can't just define what needs doing; you also need to spell out the details of getting it done. One motivational tool that enables this is "if-then planning," which helps people express and carry out their intentions. If-then plans work because contingencies are built into our neurological wiring, says social psychologist Halvorson. Humans are very good at encoding information in "If x, then y" terms and using such connections to guide their behavior, often unconsciously...

Most companies have elaborate procedures for managing capital. They require a compelling business case for any new capital investment. They set hurdle rates. They delegate authority carefully, prescribing spending limits for each level. An organization's time, by contrast, goes largely unmanaged. Bain & Company, with which all three authors are associated, used innovative people analytics tools to examine the time budgets of 17 large corporations. It discovered that companies are awash in e-communications; meeting time has skyrocketed; real collaboration is limited; dysfunctional meeting behavior is on the rise; formal controls are rare; and the consequences of all this are few...

Ten years ago, two INSEAD professors broke ground by introducing "blue ocean strategy," a new model for discovering uncontested markets that are ripe for growth. In this article, they apply their concepts and tools to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of employees. Research indicates that this gulf is vast: According to Gallup, 70% of workers are disengaged from their jobs. If companies could find a way to convert them into engaged employees, the results could be transformative...

Innovative management ideas that bubble up in other companies pose a perennial quandary for leaders: Should you attempt to borrow new ideas, and if so, which ones and how? Even the most promising practices can be disastrous if they're transplanted into the wrong company, writes Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to borrow from innovative companies, he argues. The first, observe and apply, is the most commonly used approach for adopting new management ideas. It can and does work well, but only under Limited sets of circumstances: when the observed practice easily stands alone or involves just a small constellation of supporting behaviors (think of GE's well-regarded succession-planning process) and when a company's management model or way of thinking is very similar to the originator's (think of two software firms that both use the Agile development approach)...

In his work as an executive coach, psychotherapist Kets de Vries sometimes comes across bosses with mental demons. The four kinds he encounters most frequently are pathological narcissists, who are selfish and entitled, have grandiose fantasies, and pursue power at all costs; manic-depressives, who can leave a trail of emotional blazes behind them; passive-aggressives, who shy away from confrontation but are obstructive and under-handed; and the emotionally disconnected--literal-minded people who cannot describe or even recognize their feelings...

The value of many products and services rises or falls with the number of customers using them; the fewer fax machines in use, the less important it is to have one. These network effects influence consumer decisions and affect companies' ability to compete. Strategists have developed some well-known rules for navigating business environments with network effects. "Move first" is one, and "get big fast" is another. In a study of dozens of companies, however, the authors found that quite often the conventional wisdom was dead wrong...

Climate change presents clear and pressing threats to business--materials and product shortages, price volatility, legal bans or consumer backlash, and damaged transportation infrastructure, to name just a few. But there are opportunities as well. Lowitt, a consultant in the sustainability field, has developed a series of detailed checklists that will help smart managers reduce operational, regulatory, and reputational risk while finding new ways to cut costs, improve performance, enhance customer relationships, and otherwise increase competitiveness...

Addressing global sustainability challenges--including climate change, resource depletion, and ecosystem loss--is beyond the individual capabilities of even the largest companies. To tackle these threats, and unleash new value, companies and other stakeholders must collaborate in new ways that treat fragile and complex ecosystems as a whole. In this article, the authors draw on cases including the Latin American Water Funds Partnership, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (led by Nike, Patagonia, and Walmart), and Action to Accelerate Recycling (a partnership between Alcoa, consumer packaged goods companies, and local governments, among others) to describe four new collaboration models that create shared value and address environmental protection across the value stream...

As the planet warms, storms and floods are becoming wilder--killing thousands, disrupting supply chains and power grids, and causing billions of dollars in damage. Meanwhile, supplies of all kinds of resources are dwindling, and demand is rising. These two megachallenges--extreme weather and resource scarcity--could have an unprecedented impact on corporate profits and global prosperity, warns Winston. To manage these threats, companies must do what he calls "the big pivot". The big pivot represents a radical change in strategy, operations, and mind-set...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In the past 10 years, under pressure from shareholders, stock exchanges, and state and federal governments, corporate boards have changed dramatically. For example, regulations require that a majority of directors be independent; independent directors regularly meet in executive sessions without the CEO; shareholders can review decisions by the compensation committee; and directors are required to attend meetings more often. But externally driven reforms have proved rather ineffectual when it comes to improving boards' managerial oversight...

We'd like to think that no smart, upstanding manager would ever overlook or turn a blind eye to threats or wrongdoing that ultimately imperil his or her business. Yet it happens all the time. We fall prey to obstacles that obscure or drown out important signals that things are amiss. Becoming a "first-class noticer," says Max H. Bazerman, a professor at Harvard Business School, requires conscious effort to fight ambiguity, motivated blindness, conflicts of interest, the slippery slope, and efforts of others to mislead us...

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When a new work group forms, people often make snap judgments about who is qualified to lead. If the players don't already know one another, they tend to afford status to teammates on the basis of factors such as age, gender, race, attractiveness, and rank. These are characteristics beyond your control, but they don't necessarily predetermine the influence you can have on a group. Anyone, the authors say, can achieve higher status and more influence by getting in the right mind-set before engaging with new teammates...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.