Best of HBR on Leadership: Balancing Stability and Change

Harvard Business Review; Product # 8288, 41 pages, Dec 1, 2001.
The four HBR articles in this collection: "Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?" by Abraham Zaleznik, product number 8334 (standard HBR reprint 92211); "What Leaders Really Do" by John P. Kotter, product number 3820 (standard HBR reprint R0111F, a republication of the 1990 reprint 90309); "What Effective General Managers Really Do" by John P. Kotter, product number 3707 (standard HBR reprint 99208); and "Leadership: Sad Facts and Silver Linings" by Thomas J. Peters, product number 8326 (standard HBR reprint R0111J, a republication of the 1979 reprint). This HBR collection suggests how to begin. First, grasp the principal distinction between managers and leaders, and cultivate environments in which both can flourish. Also, capitalize on the chaotic, messy conditions that characterize a typical business day. Those very conditions are opportunities for leaders to fulfill their real responsibilities: setting direction and motivating others to embrace--and surmount--the challenge of change.

Strategy: How to Make Yours Powerfully Simple

Harvard Business Review; Product # 6781, 42 pages, May 1, 2001
The three Harvard Business Review articles in this collection: "Building Your Company's Vision" by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Poras; "Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action" by Orit Gadiesh and James L. Gilbert; and "Strategy as Simple Rules" by Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Donald N. Sull.
It's easy to throw the word strategy around in business. But what does the word really mean? More importantly, how do you create a powerful strategy? This Harvard Business Review OnPoint collection delineates one possible, three-part process for strategy creation and communication--a process that will keep all your employees working toward the same corporate end and empower them to experiment. The bedrock of this process is your company's vision--one that's "built to last," enduring even as your more specific strategies and practices change. Vision includes the values and purposes for which your company will always stand.

Focusing Your Organization on Strategy--with the Balanced Scorecard

Harvard Business Review; Product # 5157, 47 pages, Oct 1, 2000
The three Harvard Business Review articles in this collection: "Putting the Balanced Scorecard to Work"; "Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System"; and "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It"--all by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton. The balanced scorecard augments traditional financial measures with measures in customer relationships, internal processes, and learning and growth. The balanced scorecard makes strategy a continuous process owned by everyone, not just top management. It strengthens alignment throughout your company by communicating high-level goals down to all levels of the organization. Employees know not only what to do, but why. This collection lets you start building your scorecard--choosing objectives and metrics, linking short-term actions with long-term results, and creating a strategy map that will rally your troops.

Has Strategy Changed?

MIT Sloan Management Review: Article Abstract: Reprint 43210; Winter 2002, Volume 43, Number 2, pp. 88-91; Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
What shapes strategy today and how has it changed? While many executives were focused on the implications of the Internet, a more powerful force was at work, ...: globalization. Globalization has quietly transformed the economic playing field. The traditional strategic paradigms (positioning, core competence and the like) are not dead, but they are less germane than they were. Successful strategy in today's world is simple; it uses a few clear guidelines and allows for flexibility. It is supported by organizational design; it is not handed down from on high. And timing is everything. Eisenhardt explains how managers can refocus their strategy on key processes and simple rules, mapping their individual businesses to market opportunities and employing an evolutionary form of timing to move from one competitive advantage to the next.

Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming

Harvard Business Review, Product # R0303E, 8 Pages, Mar 1, 2003; by Michael D. Watkins , Max H. Bazerman
Think hard about the problems in your organization or about potential upheavals in the markets in which you operate. Could some of those problems--ones no one is attending to--turn into disasters? As Harvard Business School professors Michael Watkins and Max Bazerman illustrate in this timely article, most of the "unexpected" events that buffet companies should have been anticipated--they're "predictable surprises." Such disasters take many forms, from financial scandals to disruptions in operations, from organizational upheavals to product failures. The bad news is that all companies, including your own, are vulnerable to predictable surprises. The good news is that recent research helps explain why that's so and what companies can do to minimize their risk. The authors contend that organizations' inability to prepare for predictable surprises can be traced to three sets of vulnerabilities: psychological, organizational, and political. To address these vulnerabilities, the authors recommend the RPM approach. More than just the usual environmental scanning and contingency planning, RPM requires a chain of actions--recognizing, prioritizing, and mobilizing--that companies must meticulously adhere to. Failure to apply any one of these steps, the authors say, can leave an organization vulnerable.

The Enemies of Trust

Harvard Business Review, Product # R0302G, 7 Pages Feb 1, 2003; by Robert Galford , Anne Seibold Drapeau
Researchers have established that trust is critical to organizational effectiveness. Being trustworthy yourself, however, does not guarantee that you are capable of building trust in an organization. That takes old-fashioned managerial virtues like consistency, clear communication, and a willingness to tackle awkward questions. It also requires a good defense: You must protect trust from its enemies. Any act of bad management erodes trust. Among the most common enemies of trust are inconsistent messages from top management, inconsistent standards, a willingness to tolerate incompetence or bad behavior, dishonest feedback, a failure to trust others to do good work, a tendency to ignore painful or politically charged situations, consistent corporate underperformance, and rumors. Fending off these enemies must be at the top of every chief executive's agenda. But even with constant vigilance, an organization and its leaders will sometimes lose people's trust. During a crisis, managers should enlist the help of an objective third party.

The Evolution of the Organizational Architect

MIT Sloan Management Review: Article Abstract: Reprint 4334; Spring 2002, Volume 43, Number 3, pp. 41-49; Chris Sauer and Leslie P. Willcocks
Strategy is increasingly a moving target. And despite strategists' and technologists' recognition that developing a productive relationship is critical, it's been hard to build a technology platform to support visions based on capabilities that may or may not exist. Fortunately, say researchers from the University of Oxford and the Warwick University Business School in England, a few enterprises are showing how to successfully bridge the great divide. Chris Sauer and Leslie Willcocks surveyed CEOs and CIOs at 97 companies that had moved or were moving to e-business. As the companies shrank their development and planning cycles, the gap between strategists and technologists grew. But in a few enterprises, the authors spotted inspired players they call "organizational architects." These leaders were generally technology-smart CEOs or business-savvy CIOs who developed mechanisms to force communication between strategists and technologists. The success stories point to the value of companywide transformation, with organizational architects guiding the translation of strategy to a flexible, integrated platform. Dialogue between strategists and technologists makes it possible to define and design structures, processes, capabilities and technologies that have a greater chance of being responsive to organizational goals. In true synergy, the platform is shaped by the vision, and the vision is reshaped by the characteristics of the platform that enable the vision. How do organizational architects keep business and technology concerns united? They view technology and organization as equal influences; they standardize and centralize; they manage change intelligently; and they match capability and ambition.

The Five Minds of a Manager

Harvard Business Review; Product # R0311C, 9 pages, Nov 1, 2003, by Jonathan Gosling , Henry Mintzberg
Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, set out to develop a masters program for practicing managers, they saw that they could not rely on the usual MBA educational structure, which divides the management world into discrete business functions such as marketing and accounting. They needed an educational structure that encouraged synthesis rather than separation. Managing, they determined, involves five tasks, each with its own mind-set: managing the self (the reflective mind-set); managing organizations (the analytic mind-set); managing context (the worldly mind-set); managing relationships (the collaborative mind-set); and managing change (the action mind-set). The program is built on the exploration and integration of those five aspects of the managerial mind.

The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors

Harvard Business Review; Product # R0309F, 7 pages, Sep 1, 2003, by Tihamer von Ghyczy
The business world is rife with metaphors these days, as managers look to other disciplines for insights into their own challenges. And metaphors can--despite their somewhat flaky image--be powerful catalysts for generating new business strategies. But metaphors are often improperly used, their potential left unrealized. We tend to look for reassuring parallels in business metaphors instead of troubling differences, the author contends. In fact, using metaphors to come up with new strategic perspectives begins to work only when the metaphors themselves don't work, or at least don't seem to. Consider the following case. An insurance company's corporate headquarters put together a team of experts to discuss ways the firm might respond to the challenges of conducting business via the Internet. Once the team drafted a master plan, the idea was that it would be promulgated to the individual agents and offices of this widely dispersed organization. In a meeting with the company's top managers, the author talked about Charles Darwin's conceptual breakthrough in formulating the principles of evolution. As his overview of Darwin's theories about variation and natural selection gave way to questions, a heretical notion took shape: Those far-flung agents' offices, instead of being strategic liabilities in a suddenly virtual age, might instead be the mechanism for achieving an incremental but powerful corporate transformation in response to the changing business environment. But it was only when the evolutionary metaphor began to break down--when the elements of Darwin's theory clearly were at odds with the besieged insurance company's situation--that real strategic insight occurred.

The Real Value of Strategic Planning

MIT Sloan Management Review Article: Abstract: Reprint 4429; Winter 2003, Volume 44, Number 2, pp. 71-76; Sarah Kaplan and Eric D. Beinhocker
Companies often approach the strategic planning process with the hope of developing real solutions that edify their organizations; however, most make the mistake of giving too much attention to brainstorming and not enough to preparing the minds of those within their management teams. Strategy experts say real strategies are developed when key decision makers have a good understanding of the business, work from the same fact base, and agree on important assumptions. A failed strategy can be attributed to decisions being made because the company is in a crunch situation, the decision is made hastily, or the discussions among top managers are based on opinion and not on facts. One way to avoid this problem is to redirect the focus of the strategic planning process. Initial meetings between top teams and the CEO should not be seen as review meetings, but rather as conversations; this suggests both parties are listening to what the other has to say.

Why Hard-Nosed Executives Should Care About Management Theory

Harvard Business Review; Product # R0309D, 7 pages, Sep 1, 2003, by Clayton M. Christensen, and Michael E. Raynor
Theory often gets a bum rap among managers because it's associated with the word "theoretical," which connotes "impractical." But it shouldn't. Because experience is solely about the past, solid theories are the only way managers can plan future actions with any degree of confidence. The key word here is "solid." Gravity is a solid theory. As such, it lets us predict that if we step off a cliff we will fall, without actually having to do so. But business literature is replete with theories that don't seem to work in practice or actually contradict each other. How can a manager tell a good business theory from a bad one? The first step is to understand how good theories are built. They develop in stages: gathering data, organizing it into categories, highlighting significant differences, then making generalizations explaining what causes what, under which circumstances. For instance, professor Ananth Raman and his colleagues collected data showing that bar code-scanning systems generated notoriously inaccurate inventory records. These observations led them to classify the types of errors the scanning systems produced and the types of shops in which those errors most often occurred. Recently, some of Raman's doctoral students worked as clerks to see exactly what kinds of behavior cause the errors. From this foundation, a solid theory predicting under which circumstances bar code systems work and don't work is beginning to emerge. Once we forgo one-size-fits-all explanations and insist that a theory describes the circumstances under which it does and doesn't work, we can bring predictable success to the world of management.