When to trust your gut

Many top executives say they routinely make big decisions without relying on any logical analysis. Instead, they call upon their "intuition," "gut instinct," "hunches," or "inner voice"--but they can't describe the process much more than that. What exactly is gut instinct? In this article, author Alden Hayashi interviews top executives from companies such as America Online and Johnson and Johnson to find out how they make decisions. Hayashi also presents the research of leading scientists who suggest that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential. Specifically, one theory contends that our emotions help us filter various options quickly, even if we're not consciously aware of the screening. Other research suggests that professional judgment can often be reduced to patterns and rules; indeed, truly inspired decisions seem to require an ability to see similar patterns across disparate fields. A CEO who possesses that ability can craft a perfect strategy by detecting patterns that others either overlook or mistake for random noise. But various traits of human nature can easily cloud our intuitive decision making. One potential pitfall is our tendency to see patterns where none exist. Thus, continual self-checking and feedback are crucial, and some organizations have made these processes part of their corporate culture.     

Don't homogenize, synchronize.

To be more responsive to customers, companies often break down organizational walls between their units--setting up all manner of cross-business and cross-functional task forces and working groups and promoting a "one-company" culture. But such attempts can backfire terribly by distracting business and functional units and by contaminating their strategies and processes. Fortunately, there's a better way, says the author. Rather than tear down organizational walls, a company can make them permeable to information. It can synchronize all its data on products, filtering the information through linked databases and applications and delivering it in a coordinated, meaningful form to customers. As a result, the organization can present a single, unified face to the customer--one that can change as market conditions warrant--without imposing homogeneity on its people. Such synchronization can lead not just to stronger customer relationships and more sales but also to greater operational efficiency. It allows a company, for example, to avoid the high costs of maintaining many different information systems with redundant data. The decoupling of product control from customer control in a synchronized company reflects a fundamental fact about business: While companies have to focus on creating great products, customers think in terms of the activities they perform and the benefits they seek. For companies, products are ends, but for customers, products are means. The disconnect between how customers think and how companies organize themselves is what leads to inefficiencies and missed opportunities, and that's exactly the problem that synchronization solves. Synchronized companies can get closer to customers, sustain product innovation, and improve operational efficiency--goals that have traditionally been very difficult to achieve simultaneously.     

Don't hire the wrong CEO

A disturbing trend is going on in corporate America--CEO churning. Top executives are rapidly coming and going, keeping their jobs for increasingly shorter periods of time. The reason? Most boards are so unclear about the definition of leadership, they are picking the wrong people. CEO churning needn't be, say leadership experts Warren Bennis and James O'Toole. Boards can reverse the trend by following several guidelines. First, boards must come to a shared, accurate definition of leadership. Simply put, leaders must be able to move human hearts--to challenge people and make them want to scale steep peaks. Second, boards should strengthen the CEO selection process by resolving strategic and political conflicts amongst themselves. An agreed-upon strategic direction will make choosing the CEO with the right vision for the company that much easier and can clarify the job for the new CEO. Third, the board needs to measure every CEO candidate's soft qualities. Economic measures are important, but integrity, the ability to provide meaning, and the talent for creating other leaders are critical. Fourth, boards should beware of candidates who act like CEOs. Charisma and glossy pitches can be enticing, but they're rarely the stuff of true leadership. Fifth, boards should accept that real leaders will more than likely overturn the status quo. Sixth, boards need to know that insider heirs usually aren't apparent, and finally, boards should always avoid making a hasty decision. Hiring the right CEO is a slow process at best. Ultimately, the surest way for boards to pick the right CEO is to cultivate and nurture talent in the making.     

高铁债务“绑架”了谁?

最担心的事情还是发生了。2011年7月23日20时38分,甬温线动车追尾,一声巨响,粉碎了无数个家庭的幸福。截至目前,事故已造成40多人死亡,200多人受伤。7.23甬温动车追尾事故让铁道部成为全国舆论讨伐的焦点,也让"大跃进"的高铁建设备受质疑。     

The enemies of trust

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, so the list of potential enemies is endless. Among the most common enemies of trust, though, 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--chances are you won't be thinking clearly--and be available physically and emotionally. If you "go dark" in the face of a crisis, employees will worry about the company's survival, about their own capacity to cope, and about your abilities as a leader. And if trust has broken down so badly that your only choice is to start over, you can do so by figuring out exactly how the breach of trust happened, ascertaining the depth and breadth of the loss, owning up to the loss instead of downplaying it, and identifying as precisely as possible the specific changes you must make to rebuild trust.     

The decision to trust

Surveys have shown that 80% of Americans don't trust corporate executives and--worse--that roughly half of all managers don't trust their own leaders. Mergers, downsizing, and globalization have accelerated the pace of change in organizations, creating a crisis of trust that didn't exist a generation ago. Leaders who understand how trust is built can actively influence its development, resulting in a more supportive and productive work environment and, not incidentally, a competitive advantage in the war for talent. Building on research in social psychology, and on his 15 years of experience consulting on trust, the author has developed a model for predicting whether trust or distrust will be chosen in a given situation. It helps managers analyze ten factors at play in the decision-making process. Hundreds of top executives have used it to diagnose and address the root causes of distrust in their work relationships. Some of the factors in the model relate to the decision maker: How tolerant of risk, how well-adjusted, and how relatively powerful is he or she? Others relate to the specific situation: How closely aligned are the interests of the parties concerned? Does the person who is asking to be trusted demonstrate competence? Predictability and integrity? Frequent and honest communication? Sue, a relatively new VP of sales, used the trust model to manage her relationship with Joe, an employee nearing retirement who was not performing well in a new sales role. Fearing for his job, Joe wasn't initially inclined to trust her. Sue took concrete steps to communicate openly with Joe, explore other options for him, and show concern for his well-being. When joe was transferred, he let his former colleagues know how pleased he was with Sue's handling of the situation. As a result, the level of trust increased in Sue's department, even though it was experiencing major change.     

The geography of trust

Leaders who rely forever on the same internal advisers, entrusting them with issues of ever greater sensitivity and consequence, run the risk of being sold short and possibly betrayed. Alternatively, lone-wolf leaders who trust no one may make enormous, yet preventable, mistakes when trying to sort through difficult decisions. A sophisticated understanding of trust can protect leaders from both fates. During the past decade, author and consultant Saj-nicole Joni studied leadership in more than 150 European and North American companies. Her research reveals three fundamental types of trustpersonal trust, expertise trust, and structural trust. Executives may persevere in relationships that are based on personal trust, no matter how exalted their leadership roles become. But such relationships are unlikely to remain static. They also probably won't provide the kinds of deep, often specialized knowledge leaders need. In circumstances where advisers' competence matters as much as their character, expertise trust--reliance on an adviser's ability in a specific subject--enters the picture. In organizations, leaders develop expertise trust by working closely with people who consistently demonstrate their mastery of particular subjects or processes. Structural trust refers to how roles and ambitions influence advisers' perspectives and candor. It shifts constantly as people rise through organizations. High-level structural trust can provide leaders with pure insight and information--but advisers in positions of the highest structural trust generally reside outside organizations. These advisers provide leaders with insights that their organizations cannot. High-performing leaders' most enduring--and most valuable--relationships are characterized by enormous levels of all three kinds of trust.     

Manage your energy, not your time

As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work--their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings--the body, emotions, mind, and spirit--and in each, it can be systematically expanded and renewed. In this article, Schwartz, founder of the Energy Project, describes how to establish rituals that will build energy in the four key dimensions. For instance, harnessing the body's ultradian rhythms by taking intermittent breaks restores physical energy. Rejecting the role of a victim and instead viewing events through three hopeful lenses defuses energy-draining negative emotions. Avoiding the constant distractions that technology has introduced increases mental energy. And participating in activities that give you a sense of meaning and purpose boosts the energy of the spirit. The new workday rituals succeed only if leaders support their adoption, but when that happens, the results can be powerful. A group of Wachovia Bank employees who went through an energy management program outperformed a control group on important financial metrics like loans generated, and they reported substantially improved customer relationships, productivity, and personal satisfaction. These findings corroborated anecdotal evidence gathered about the effectiveness of this approach at other companies, including Ernst & Young, Sony, and Deutsche Bank. When organizations invest in all dimensions of their employees' lives, individuals respond by bringing all their energy wholeheartedly to work -and both companies and their people grow in value.     

When your contract manufacturer becomes your competitor

PC maker Lenovo started out as a distributor of equipment made by IBM and other companies; now it has formed a joint venture with IBM and will eventually affix its own logo to its computers. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) started out manufacturing vehicles for Volkswagen and GM; now it's preparing to sell its own cars in China, Europe, and North America. Lenovo and SAIC represent a host of formerly anonymous makers of brand-name products that are breaking out of their defined roles and pushing the brands themselves aside. In this article, the authors explore the double-edged relationships original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) forge with their contract manufacturers (CMs). On the one hand, an OEM can reduce its labor costs, free up capital, and improve worker productivity by outsourcing all the manufacturing of a product. The company can then concentrate on value-adding activities--research and development, product design, and marketing, for instance. On the other hand, an OEM that retains a contract manufacturer may find itself immersed in a melodrama replete with promiscuity (the ambitious CM pursues liaisons with other OEMs), infidelity (the OEM's retailers and distributors shift their business to the upstart CM), and betrayal (the brazen CM transmits the OEM's intellectual property to the OEM's rivals or keeps it for itself when the contract is up). OEMs cannot simply terminate their outsourcing arrangements--they need contract manufacturers in order to keep specializing, adding value, and staying competitive. But OEMs can manage these relationships so that they don't become weak or the CMs too strong. Doing so requires modesty about revealing trade secrets; caution about whom one consorts with; and a judicious degree of intimacy, loyalty, and generosity toward partners and customers.     

银行家看跨境结算

自2009年8月人民币跨境贸易结算试点项目正式推出至今,已经超过一年半时间了。回望当初,"小荷才露尖尖角"的人民币跨境贸易结算只有少数业内人士关注,到如今,有关人民币国际化的话题屡屡见诸报端,大有"接天莲叶无穷碧"之势。     

See your brands through your customers' eyes.

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Outback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft and Intel logos on its computers. Such inter-weaving of different companies' brands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management-portfolio mapping--has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arranged along organizational lines with little regard for how the brands influence customer perceptions. In this article, the authors present a new mapping tool--the brand portfolio molecule--that reveals the way brands appear to customers. The brand portfolio molecule includes all the brands that factor into a consumer's decision to buy, whether or not the company owns them. The first step in creating a brand portfolio molecule is to determine which brands should or should not be included. The second step is to classify each brand by asking five key questions: 1) How important is this brand to customers' purchase decisions about the brand you're mapping? 2) Is its influence positive or negative? 3) What market position does this brand occupy relative to the other brands in the portfolio? 4) How does this brand connect to the other brands in the portfolio? 5) How much control do you have over this brand? The last step is to map the molecule using a 3-D modeling program or by hand with pen and paper. Individual brands take the form of atoms, and they're clustered in ways that reflect how customers see them. The usefulness of the tool lies in its ability to show the many forces that influence a customer's buying decision--and to provide a powerful new way to think about brand strategy.     

Building data-driven trust with physicians

Steps healthcare finance executives should take to develop a data-driven, transparent approach to working with physicians should include the following: Show the assumptions behind the data. Explain the rationale or methodology behind the assumptions and be sure there are no flaws in how conclusions are drawn from the data sets. Explain why the metrics used are representative of the physician's practice. Account for all data gaps in metrics or benchmarks, but explain how the data represent the best option for going forward.     

信托登记制度的探讨

文章探讨了我国信托登记制度。     

Societal trust and corporate tax avoidance

Using an international sample of firms from 25 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with tax avoidance, even after controlling for other institutional determinants, such as home country legal institutions and tax system characteristics. We explore the effects of two country-level institutional characteristics—strength of legal institutions and capital market pressure—on the relation between societal trust and tax avoidance. We find that the relation between trust and tax avoidance is less pronounced when the legal institutions in a country are stronger and is more pronounced when the capital market pressure is stronger. Finally, we examine the relation between societal trust and tax evasion, an extreme and illegal form of tax avoidance. We show that societal trust is negatively related to tax evasion and the negative relation is less pronounced when legal institutions are stronger.     

Reclaim your job

Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative--the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.