Human Capital Briefs
2015
-
Reflections on Leadership from Gettysburg
October 14 | Paul Merrild, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, athenahealth | Comments (0)It’s impossible to visit the battlefield of Gettysburg without being deeply moved. The Union and Confederate armies together suffered more than 50,000 casualties during the three-day battle. The course of American history was changed forever by leaders making strategic decisions under grueling circumstances.
-
Managing Vacations When Your Team Is Global
September 25 | Andy Molinsky, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Brandeis International Business School | Melissa Hahn, Author, Luminarias Light the Way | Comments (0)It’s no longer unusual for teams within organizations to span different countries and cultures. While there are many benefits to this, one of the challenges for leaders of these global teams is navigating everyone’s vacation schedules.
-
A First-Time Manager’s Guide to Leading Virtual Teams
September 25 | Mark Mortensen, Assistant Professor, Organizational Behaviour, INSEAD | Comments (0)Managing a distributed team can feel overwhelming as it requires you to navigate many different types of distance: geographic, temporal, cultural, linguistic, and configurational. Daunting as that may seem, there is good news in the form of a large and ever-increasing body of research and best practices on how to increase your odds of success.
-
Presenting A Compelling Diversity Business Case To C-Suite Executives
September 22 | Dr. Shelton Goode, Executive Director, Diversity and Inclusion, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority | Comments (0)The challenges inherent in presenting a business case for diversity management become further complex when there are more C-Suite executives involved. If you think it is hard to keep the CEO focused, imagine what it’s like to have the CEO and 10 of his or her direct report sitting around the table. There is a strong probability that your presentation will get derailed, probably more than once.
-
The Factors That Lead to High CEO Pay
September 18 | Gretchen Gavett , Associate Editor, Harvard Business Review | Comments (0)No matter where you live, the difference between how much CEOs are paid and how much the average worker takes home is, well, big. Probably even bigger than most people think.
-
Becoming a Manager in a New Country
September 18 | Andy Molinsky, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Brandeis International Business School | Comments (0)It’s doubly difficult to command authority and lead a team for the first time in a new culture where the nuts and bolts of how to manage are completely different. What can new managers in foreign cultures do to ease what will inevitably be a challenging transition?
-
Piecing Together the Tesla Strategy Puzzle
September 17 | Brian Halla, Former Chairman and CEO, National Semiconductor Corporation | Comments (0)A message sent out by the company suddenly made Tesla’s long-term strategy clear to me. And that strategy is so stunning that it may revolutionize ground transportation and, if the company can pull it off, make Tesla one of the most valuable corporations in the world.
-
Amazon Is Right That Disagreement Results in Better Decisions
September 11 | Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School | Comments (0)The lengthy New York Times story, detailing some apparently brutal features of the culture at Amazon, should be taken with many grains of salt. But even if the story is full of inaccuracies, and if we put the company’s alleged harshness to one side, Amazon’s approach offers indispensable guidance for companies both large and small when they are deciding how to make group decisions.
-
Jack Welch’s Approach to Breaking Down Silos Still Works Ron Ashkenas
September 10 | Ron Ashkenas, Managing Partner, Schaffer Consulting | Comments (0)Working across organizational boundaries was a new way of thinking 25 years ago — one that was largely championed by Jack Welch. Fast forward to today, and we live in a different world. Our communications technologies have dramatically improved, and we have instantaneous access to massive amounts of information. Welch’s “boundaryless organization” should seemingly be the de facto reality for most companies.