Showing results by narrator "Todd Mundt"

This issue includes four complete articles, all on the theme of this month's issue: leadership. In "Becoming the Boss", Linda Hill offers some tips from common mistakes first time managers make. In "Firing Back", Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward talk to leaders about their career disasters and how they bounced back.

"The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson; "Saving the Planet: A Tale of Two Strategies" by Roger Martin and Alison Kemper; and "Retail Doesn’t Cross Borders" by Marcel Corstjens and Rajiv Lal.

The views and insights of Harvard Business School are among the most sought after by the world's top business leaders. With this Audible audio exclusive, you can have Harvard Business Review read to you each month, placing the latest business trends and managerial wisdom within earshot!

Businesses hoping to survive over the long term will have to remake themselves into better competitors at least once along the way. These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, rightsizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds, to name a few. In almost every case, the goal has been to cope with a new, more challenging market by changing the way business is conducted. In this article, John Kotter outlines the eight largest errors that can doom these efforts.

Virtually all leaders believe that to stay competitive, their enterprises must learn and improve every day. But even companies revered for their dedication to continuous learning find it difficult to always practice what they preach.

When researchers asked carpenters, roofers, and in-line skaters how to improve safety gear for all three activities, each group turned out to be significantly better at thinking of novel solutions for the fields other than its own. Studies like this one demonstrate the value of accessing expertise from "analogous fields"--areas that seem different on the surface but are similar on a deep structural level.

A look at the tenets of disruption theory, its usefulness and limitations, and its evolution over the past 20 years, by the leading experts on the subject.

The CEO and president of IDEO writes that when designers are involved from the very beginning of the innovation process, startling new ideas can result - as a U.S. health care provider, a Japanese bicycle components manufacturer, and a system of Indian eye hospitals learned.

"Back to the City" by Ania Wieckowski; "When You've Got to Cut Costs – Now" by Kevin P. Coyne, Shawn T. Coyne, and Edward J. Coyne Sr.; and "How to Stop Customers from Fixating on Price" by Marco Bertini and Luc Wathieu.

Research shows that eating together enhances group performance.

Start-ups are getting bigger faster than ever - but that’s no guarantee of success.

How companies can benefit from "inconspicuous consumption".

In the fall of 2014 an investor contacted HBS professor Clayton Christensen with a friendly challenge. Christensen is best known for his theory of disruptive innovation, which describes how firms that introduce rudimentary products can eventually overrun established players by systematically improving the products until they meet the needs of mainstream consumers, generally at low prices.

"New Thinking for a New Financial Order" by Diana Farrell; "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity" by Ed Catmull; "Seven Ways to Fail Big" by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui; "Don't Try This Offshore" by Stephen Brown; "Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership" by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis; and "Where Oil-Rich Nations Are Placing Their Bets" by Rawi Abdelal, Ayesha Khan, and Tarun Khanna

At Deloitte we’re redesigning our performance management system. This may not surprise you. Like many other companies, we realize that our current process for evaluating the work of our people - and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly - is increasingly out of step with our objectives.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission, was created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002. This independent, bipartisan commission had the task of producing a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attack, including preparedness and immediate response, and providing recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.

First, V. Kumar, J. Andrew Petersen, and Robert Leone explain how to identify the customers who bring in the most referrals and then capitalize on that knowledge. Next, Alvin Roth discusses a new branch of economics that allows businesses to create markets where there were none or fix them when they go wrong. Also, Tony Schwartz on the science of stamina that enables individuals, teams, and whole organizations to significantly increase their capacity to get things done. Finally, you'll hear executive summaries of the remaining articles.

In the years leading up to 2009, Intel tried a number of popular approaches to tame its soaring health care costs. To encourage employees and their families to be more involved in the purchase of their care and aware of its actual cost, the company implemented “consumer-driven health care” offerings such as higher-deductible plans with lower premiums, tax-advantaged accounts, and tiered-provider options.

Despite massive investments of management time and money, innovation remains a frustrating pursuit in many companies. Innovation initiatives frequently fail, and successful innovators have a hard time sustaining their performance - as Polaroid, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, and countless others have found.

The evolution of products into intelligent, connected devices – which are increasingly embedded in broader systems – is radically reshaping companies and competition.