sean f burns
Harvard Business Review
Disruption & Long-Term Strategy, the Amazon Way
Listening to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos‘ recent interview with the Harvard Business Review, you can hear an executive who’s planning on the long-game. This is a CEO who has put customer value above profits. Wall Street is letting him get away with it. Below are a few Bezos gems from the interview: becoming long-term oriented … Continue reading
Structured decision making for developing strategy
In the evolving and fast-moving technology sector, an increasing complaint coming from executives is their inability to develop an effective strategy due to a lack of certainty in the market. To understand what’s going on here, let’s start by looking at what an effective strategy is and what role decision making plays in that process. … Continue reading
What is the true Cost of Capital?
A recent Harvard Business Review article by Jacobs and Shivdasani addresses what it truly means to have massive amounts of capital on the balance sheets. Corporations have never had so much money. How executives choose to invest that massive amount of capital will drive corporate strategies and determine their companies’ competitiveness for the next decade … Continue reading
Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads:
According to HBR, if you read nothing else read these 10 articles. They didn’t include the links, so I have done for you below. Happy reading! 1) “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change,” by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf, explains why so few established companies innovate successfully. http://hbr.org/2000/03/meeting-the-challenge-of-disruptive-change/ar/1 2) “Competing on Analytics,” by Thomas … Continue reading
Harvard Business Review Blog: Modern Jibberish
There’s an amusing blog post on the Harvard Business Review from Dan Pallotta on the stupidity of business talk that has invaded the domain on sensible conversation. He outlines five strains of this plague, summarized below: Abstractionitis: People have forgotten the real names for things. Dan uses the example that a doorknob reinvented has become … Continue reading
The Ultimate Challenge: Conquering Bureaucracy
There’s a great contest on at the moment running in conjunction with McKinsey and the Harvard Business Review. The aim is to discover how organizations are overcoming and conquering bureaucracy. In my humble opinion, there is no sector more in need of this cause than the wider public sector. Increasingly, the free market ensures most … Continue reading
Transformation & the 3-Box Approach
There’s a new article in the Harvard Business Review on organizational transformation titled ‘Transforming Your Organization with the Three-Box Approach‘ by Govindarajan and Goldner. The article is based on Vijay Govindarajan’s and Chris Trimble’s article, ‘The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention‘, which appeared in the January-February 2011 issue. What is the three-box approach and … Continue reading
Havard Video: Leading Collaboration
John Abele of Boston Scientific has recently written an article for the Harvard Business Review on various forms of collaboration and is interviewed here. John gives a few examples of collaborative leadership, even in cases when leaders don’t get along, for the leaders to get the best outcomes from each other and the situation. Key … Continue reading
Harvard Video: Small Wins and Progress
In this short video, Teresa Amabile talks about her new book on the importance of progress. It is important to occasionally remember how important progress and those small wins are to keep momentum. It is common for organizations to fall victim into paralysis of the ability to make progress. Working with leaders to re-awaken the … Continue reading
How to spot the bias in a recommendation
A great article has come out of Harvard on spotting the cognitive biases in a teams’ recommendations. Whether I’m mediating between two groups of people, reviewing program evaluation recommendations, or deciding where to direct funding, the ability to see through the bias of a recommendation is in everyone’s best interest. Avoiding the distortion of reasoning … Continue reading
