The 2003 HBR list. Breakthrough ideas for tomorrow's business agenda

International conflict. Bear markets. Corporate scandals. The events of this past year have prompted intense soul-searching in many quarters and led us, in this year's list of the best business ideas, to reassess some of the most basic assumptions about strategy, organizations, and leadership. We began by reconsidering the role of the leader. Whether the boss is a hero or villain, discussions of leadership focus almost exclusively on the CEO. But attention also needs to be paid to the other people who make organizations work, not only to the corporate boards that oversee CEOs but to the followers--to their responsibilities, their power, and their obligation not to follow flawed leaders. And we considered the fate of soft issues, like emotional intelligence, in hard times. It's tempting to dismiss them when your employees will do anything just to keep their jobs. But hard times are good times to employ such tools on yourself. They can arm you with the self-awareness you need to understand, anticipate, and outwit your enemies. Where tools may fail, an attitude adjustment may be what's needed. Despite valiant efforts to lead change and eliminate inefficiencies, organizations stay messy. Perhaps it's better to learn to live with messiness and even focus on its benefits, one of which may be growth. Not the meteoric, effortless illusion we indulged in during the 1990s, but significant gains nonetheless. These can come when managers embrace messiness not just within their organizations but along the boundaries of the firm, blurring the line between their own core assets and functions and those of other companies. There's growth potential, too, in considering the company as a portfolio of opportunities--but only if managers can sell off poorly performing business units as easily as they've been shedding ailing stocks of late.     

Selling the brand inside

When you think of marketing, chances are your mind goes right to your customers--how can you persuade more people to buy whatever it is you sell? But there's another "market" that's equally important: your employees. Author Colin Mitchell argues that executives by and large ignore this critical internal audience when developing and executing branding campaigns. As a result, employees end up undermining the expectations set by the company's advertising--either because they don't understand what the ads have promised or because they don't believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. Mitchell offers three principles for executing internal branding campaigns--techniques executives can use to make sure employees understand, embrace, and "live" the brand vision companies are selling to the public. First, he says, companies need to market to employees at times when the company is experiencing a fundamental challenge or change, times when employees are seeking direction and are relatively receptive to new initiatives. Second, companies must link their internal and external marketing campaigns; employees should hear the same messages that are being sent to the market-place. And third, internal branding campaigns should bring the brand alive for employees, creating an emotional connection to the company that transcends any one experience. Internal campaigns should introduce and explain the brand messages in new and attention-grabbing ways and then reinforce those messages by weaving them into the fabric of the company. It is a fact of business, writes Mitchell, that if employees do not care about or understand their company's brands, they will ultimately weaken their organizations. It's up to top executives, he says, to give them a reason to care.     

Failing by design

It's hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments, where failures are bound to be more common than successes. Yet if you ask executives how well, on a scale of one to 10, their organizations learn from failure, you'll often get a sheepish "Two-or maybe three" in response. Such organizations are missing a big opportunity: Failure may be inevitable but, if managed well, can be very useful. A certain amount of failure can help you keep your options open, find out what doesn't work, create the conditions to attract resources and attention, make room for new leaders, and develop intuition and skill. The key to reaping these benefits is to foster "intelligent failure" throughout your organization. McGrath describes several principles that can help you put intelligent failure to work. You should decide what success and failure would look like before you start a project. Document your initial assumptions, test and revise them as you go, and convert them into knowledge. Fail fast-the longer something takes, the less you'll learn-and fail cheaply, to contain your downside risk. Limit the number of uncertainties in new projects, and build a culture that tolerates, and sometimes even celebrates, failure. Finally, codify and share what you learn. These principles won't give you a means of avoiding all failures down the road-that's simply not realistic. They will help you use small losses to attain bigger wins over time.     

穿越绩效管理盲区

如今,食业管理者掌握了各种各样的管理工具,包括预算、计划、质量控制等等。但是,很少有人能掌握一套系统的方法米履行他们最重要的职责之一--最大限度地激励员工。     

Beware the busy manager

Managers will tell you that the resource they lack most is time. If you watch them, you'll see them rushing from meeting to meeting, checking their e-mail constantly, fighting fires--an astonishing amount of fast-moving activity that allows almost no time for reflection. Managers think they are attending to important matters, but they're really just spinning their wheels. For the past ten years, the authors have studied the behavior of busy managers, and their findings should frighten you: Fully 90% of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities. A mere 10% of managers spend their time in a committed, purposeful, and reflective manner. Effective action relies on a combination of two traits: focus--the ability to zero in on a goal and see the task through to completion--and energy--the vigor that comes from intense personal commitment. Focus without energy devolves into listless execution or leads to burnout. Energy without focus dissipates into aimless busyness or wasteful failures. Plotting these two traits into a matrix provides a useful framework for understanding productivity levels of different managers. Managers who suffer from low levels of both energy and focus are the procrastinators: They dutifully perform routine tasks but fail to take initiatve. Disengaged managers have high focus but low energy: They have reservations about the jobs they are asked to do, so they approach them half-heartedly. Distracted managers have high energy but low focus: They confuse frenetic activity with constructive action. Purposeful managers are both highly energetic and highly focused: These are the managers who accomplish the most. This article will help you identify which managers in your organization are making a real difference--and which just look busy.     

Are you working too hard? A conversation with mind/body researcher Herbert Benson

Stress is an essential response in highly competitive environments. Before a race, before an exam, before an important meeting, your heart rate and blood pressure rise, your focus tightens, you become more alert and more efficient. But beyond a certain level, stress overloads your system, compromising your performance and, eventually, your health. So the question is: When does stress help and when does it hurt? To find out, HBR talked with Harvard Medical School professor Herbert Benson, M.D., founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. Having spent more than 35 years conducting worldwide research in the fields of neuroscience and stress, Benson is best known for his 1975 best seller The Relaxation Response, in which he describes how the mind can influence stress levels through such tools as meditation. His most recent research centers on what he calls"the breakout principle," a method by which stress is not simply reduced but carefully controlled so that you reap its benefits while avoiding its dangers. He describes a four-step process in which you first push yourself to the most productive stress level by grappling intently with a problem. Next, just as you feel yourself flagging, you disengage entirely by doing something utterly unrelated-going for a walk, petting a dog, taking a shower. In the third step, as the brain quiets down, activity paradoxically increases in areas associated with attention, space-time concepts, and decision making, leading to a sudden, creative insight-the breakout. Step four is achievement of a "new-normal state," in which you find that the improved performance is sustained, sometimes indefinitely. As counterintuitive as this research may seem, managers can doubtless recall times when they've had an "aha" moment at the gym, on the golf course, or in the shower. What Benson describes here is a way to tap into this invaluable biological tool whenever we want.     

Chronic time abuse

Anyone who has ever managed people who abuse time--whether they are chronic procrastinators or individuals who work obsessively to meet deadlines weeks in advance--knows how disruptive they can be to a business's morale and operating efficiency. But lessons in time management will have no impact on these employees. That's because real time abuse results from psychological conflict that neither a workshop nor a manager's cajoling can cure. Indeed, the time abuser's quarrel isn't even with time but rather with a brittle self-esteem and an unconscious fear of being evaluated and found wanting. This article describes four types of time abusers typically encountered in the workplace: Perfectionists are almost physically afraid of receiving feedback. Their work has to be "perfect," so they can increase their likelihood of earning a positive evaluation or at least avoid getting a negative one. Preemptives try to be in control by handing in work far earlier than they need to, making themselves unpopular and unavailable in the process. People pleasers commit to far too much work because they find it impossible to say no. Procrastinators make constant (and often reasonable-sounding) excuses to mask a fear of being found inadequate in their jobs. Managing these four types of people can be challenging, since time abusers respond differently from most other employees to criticism and approval. Praising a procrastinator when he is on time, for instance, will only exacerbate the problem, because he will fear that your expectations are even higher than before. In fact, some time abusers, like the perfectionist, may need professional treatment. This article will give you insight into why they are the way they are--and what can be done to help them manage their problems.     

Is your company ready for one-to-one marketing?

One-to-one marketing, also known as relationship marketing, promises to increase the value of your customer base by establishing a learning relationship with each customer. The customer tells you of some need, and you customize your product or service to meet it. Every interaction and modification improves your ability to fit your product to the particular customer. Eventually, even if a competitor offers the same type of service, your customer won't be able to enjoy the same level of convenience without taking the time to teach your competitor the lessons your company has already learned. Although the theory behind one-to-one marketing is simple, implementation is complex. Too many companies have jumped on the one-to-one band-wagon without proper preparation--mistakenly understanding it as an excuse to badger customers with excessive telemarketing and direct mail campaigns. The authors offer practical advice for implementing a one-to-one marketing program correctly. They describe four key steps: identifying your customers, differentiating among them, interacting with them, and customizing your product or service to meet each customer's needs. And they provide activities and exercises, to be administered to employees and customers, that will help you identify your company's readiness to launch a one-to-one initiative. Although some managers dismiss the possibility of one-to-one marketing as an unattainable goal, even a modest program can produce substantial benefits. This tool kit will help you determine what type of program your company can implement now, what you need to do to position your company for a large-scale initiative, and how to set priorities.     

How right should the customer be?

If your salespeople aren't sure who their boss is--the district manager? the regional manager? the customer?--it could be a sign that your company's sales force controls are working at cross-purposes and that your sales function is in trouble. Sales force controls are the policies and practices that govern the way you train, supervise, motivate, and evaluate your sales staff. They include the types of compensation you offer your people and the criteria your sales managers use to evaluate the reps' performance. These controls let salespeople know which trade-offs the company would prefer them to make when the inevitable conflicts arise between what they want to do (spend lots of time and money to get a sale) and what they actually can do (use limited resources and still get the sale). When sales force controls aren't aligned--when, say, the system simultaneously encourages reps to be entrepreneurial but also to file detailed call reports and check in frequently with their bosses--individuals become discouraged and unproductive, and they eventually leave the company. The authors' research suggests there are significant differences between the control systems of companies that encourage salespeople to put the customer first-outcome control (OC) systems--and those that encourage reps to put their managers first--behavior control (BC) systems. In this article, they list the characteristics of OC and BC systems, describe the potential fallout from conflicts within these systems, and explain how you can tell which control system is appropriate for your firm. In most cases, the right choice will be a consistent system somewhere in the middle of the OC-BC continuum.     

Connectivity and control in the year 2000 and beyond

By now, most executives are familiar with the famous Year 2000 problem--and many believe that their companies have the situation well in hand. After all, it seems to be such a trivial problem--computer software that interprets "oo" to be the year 1900 instead of the year 2000. And yet armies of computer professionals have been working on it--updating code in payroll systems, distribution systems, actuarial systems, sales-tracking systems, and the like. The problem is pervasive. Not only is it in your systems, it's in your suppliers' systems, your bankers' systems, and your customers' systems. It's embedded in chips that control elevators, automated teller machines, process-control equipment, and power grids. Already, a dried-food manufacturer destroyed millions of dollars of perfectly good product when a computer counted inventory marked with an expiration date of "oo" as nearly a hundred years old. And when managers of a sewage-control plant turned the clock to January I, 2000 on a computer system they thought had been fixed, raw sewage pumped directly into the harbor. It has become apparent that there will not be enough time to find and fix all of the problems by January I, 2000. And what good will it do if your computers work but they're connected with systems that don't? That is one of the questions Harvard Business School professor Richard Nolan asks in his introduction to HBR's Perspectives on the Year 2000 issue. How will you prepare your organization to respond when things start to go wrong? Fourteen commentators offer their ideas on how senior managers should think about connectivity and control in the year 2000 and beyond.     

AN INTRODUCTION TO GAME THEORY AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

Sound managerial decision making often requires “putting yourself behind your rivals' desk.” Assuming rivals are rational and acting in their selfinterest, what decisions are they likely to make and how are they likely to respond to your actions? A complicating factor is that rivals' optimal choices typically will depend on their expectations of what you will do; their expectations in turn depend on their assessments of your expectations about them. This type of circularity or recursive thinking might appear to make the overall problem completely intractable. Yet, this situation is precisely where game theory is most useful. This article introduces the basic elements of game theory within the context of business strategy and shows how managers might use these tools in decision making. This analysis also provides managers with a richer understanding of competition within different market settings. For example, it provides insights into why there is fierce competition in some concentrated industries (such as commercial aircraft), but not in others. Although the authors focus primarily on interactions among rival firms in product markets, these concepts also are useful to managers when dealing with other parties, such as suppliers, employees, or gov‐ernment officials.     

Who's bringing you hot ideas and how are you responding?

There's an unsung hero in your organization. It's the person who's bringing in new ideas from the outside about how to manage better. These aren't your product and service innovators--those people are celebrated loudly and often. This is the manager who, for instance, first uttered the phrase "balance scorecard" in your hallways, or "real options," or "intellectual capital." Managerial innovation is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage--especially given the speed with which product innovations are copied--but it doesn't happen automatically. It takes a certain kind of person to welcome new management ideas and usher them into an organization. The authors recently studied 100 such people to find out how they translate new ideas into action in their organizations. They discovered that they are a distinct type of practitioner; that is to say, they resemble their counterparts in other organizations more than they resemble their own colleagues, and they share a common way of working. "Idea practitioners," as the authors call them, begin by scouting for ideas. All of them are avid readers of management literature and enthusiastic participants in business conferences; many are friendly with business gurus. Once they've identified an idea that seems to hold promise, they tailor it to fit their organizations' specific needs. Next, they actively sell the idea--to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. And finally, they get the ball rolling by participating in small-scale experiments. But when those take off, they get out of the way and let others execute. In this article, the authors identify the characteristics of idea practitioners and offer strategies for managing them wisely.     

Managing Middlescence

They make up more than half your workforce. They work longer hours than anyone else in your company. From their ranks come most of your top managers. They're your midcareer employees, the solid citizens between the ages of 35 and 55 whom you bank on for their loyalty and commitment. And they're not happy. In fact, they're burned out, bored, and bottlenecked, new research reveals. Only 33% of the 7700 workers the authors surveyed feel energized by their work; 36% say they're in dead-end jobs. One in three is not satisfied with his or her job. One in five is looking for another. Welcome to middlescence. Like adolescence, it can be a time of frustration, confusion, and alienation. But it can also be a time of self-discovery, new direction, and fresh beginnings. Today, millions of midcareer men and women are wrestling with middlescence-looking for ways to balance work, family, and leisure while hoping to find new meaning in theirjobs. The question is, Will they find it in your organization or elsewhere? Companies are ill prepared to manage middlescence because it is so pervasive, largely invisible, and culturally uncharted. That neglect is bad for business: Many companies risk losing some of their best people or-even worse-ending up with an army of disaffected people who stay. The best way to engage middlescents is to tap into their hunger for renewal and help them launch into more meaningful roles. Perhaps managers can't grant a promotion to everyone who merits one in today's flat organizations, but you may be able to offer new training, fresh assignments, mentoring opportunities, even sabbaticals or entirely new career paths within your own company. Millions of midcareer men and women would like nothing better than to convert their restlessness into fresh energy. They just need the occasion-and perhaps a little assistance-to unleash and channel all that potential.     

Are you a good boss--or a great one?

Private moments of doubt and fear come even to managers who have spent years on the job. Any number of events can trigger them: an initiative going poorly, a lukewarm performance review, a daunting new assignment. HBS professor Hill and executive Lineback have long studied the question of how manager grow and advance. Their experience brings them to a simple but troubling observation: Most bosses reach a certain level of proficiency and stay there--short of what they could and should be. Why? Because they stop working on themselves. The authors offer what they call the three imperatives for managers who seek to avoid this stagnation. First, manage yourself--who you are as a person, the beliefs and values that drive your actions, and especially how you connect with others all matter to the people you must influence. Second, manage your network. Effective managers know that they cannot avoid conflict and competition among organizational groups; they build and nurture ongoing relationships. Third, manage your team. Team members need to know what's required of them collectively and individually and what the team's values, norms, and standards are. The authors include a useful assessment tool to help readers get started.     

Leveraging the psychology of the salesperson. A conversation with psychologist and anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille

We have to admire salespeople's resilience in the face of endless rejection, their certainty that things will work out in the end. At the same time, we're repelled by what their job can do to them. (Think Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, dramatic portraits of hollowness and moral capitulation.) Just what type of person goes into sales, and how do salespeople cope with their jobs? For insight into these questions, HBR approached G. Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist, anthropologist, and marketing guru who researches the impact of culture on business and markets. In particular, he studies archetypes--the underlying patterns in psychology that illuminate the human condition--and shows organizations how to use those patterns to sharpen their sales and marketing efforts. He points out, for instance, that a keen understanding of the Great Mother archetype has helped Procter & Gamble achieve great success with Pantene hair products. By promoting nutrition--and reminding consumers that hair must be nurtured--the Pantene brand appeals to the maternal instinct. Rapaille says that salespeople have their own archetype: They are Happy Losers who relish rejection and actually seek out jobs that provide opportunities to be turned down. That, of course, has implications for how they should be managed. Rapaille's research shows that the leading motivator in sales is not money; it's the thrill of the chase. "Hold huge company meetings where you give a salesperson the gold medal of rejection," he advises. "Jonathan sold 500,000 computers last month, but he was rejected 5 million times! It may sound ludicrous, but this is the way to get fire in the belly of your sales force--particularly in America, where beating the odds is highly prized".     

Understanding "people" people

Nearly all areas of business--not just sales and human resources--call for interpersonal savvy. Relational know-how comprises a greater variety of aptitudes than many executives think. Some people can "talk a dog off a meat truck," as the saying goes. Others are great at resolving interpersonal conflicts. Some have a knack for translating high-level concepts for the masses. And others thrive when they're managing a team. Since people do their best work when it most closely matches their interests, the authors contend, managers can increase productivity by taking into account employees' relational interests and skills when making personnel choices and project assignments. After analyzing psychological tests of more than 7,000 business professionals, the authors have identified four dimensions of relational work: influence, interpersonal facilitation, relational creativity, and team leadership. This article explains each one and offers practical advice to managers--how to build a well-balanced team, for instance, and how to gauge the relational skills of potential employees during interviews. To determine whether a job candidate excels in, say, relational creativity, ask her to describe her favorite advertising campaign, slogan, or image and tell you why she finds it to be so effective. Understanding these four dimensions will help you get optimal performance from your employees, appropriately reward their work, and assist them in setting career goals. It will also help you make better choices when it comes to your own career development. To get started, try the authors' free online assessment tool, which will measure both your orientation toward relational work in general and your interest level in each of its four dimensions.     

Taking the stress out of stressful conversations.

Stressful conversations are unavoidable in life. In business, they can run the gamut from firing a subordinate to, curiously enough, receiving praise. But whatever the context, stressful conversations carry a heavy emotional load. Indeed, stressful conversations cause such anxiety that most people simply avoid them. Yet it can be extremely costly to dodge issues, appease difficult people, and smooth over antagonisms; avoidance usually only worsens a problem or a relationship. Using vivid examples of the three basic stressful conversations that people bump up against most often in the workplace, the author explains how managers can improve those interactions unilaterally. To begin with, they should approach the situations with greater self-awareness. Awareness building is not about endless self-analysis; much of it simply involves making tacit knowledge about oneself more explicit. It is important for those who are vulnerable to hostility, for example, to know how they react to it. Do they clam up or do they retaliate? Knowing how you react in a stressful situation will teach you a lot about your trouble areas and can help you master stressful situations. The author also recommends rehearsing difficult conversations in advance to fine-tune your phrasing and tone. And the best way to keep from being thrown off balance by difficult conversations that crop up unexpectedly is to develop a few hip-pocket phrases that you can pull out on the spot. We all know from past experience what kinds of conversations and people we handle badly. The trick is to have prepared conversational tactics to address those situations.     

Quality circles after the fad

On the face of it, it makes sense, If you want to involve your employees more in decision making and shift the organization toward a more participative culture, starting suggestion groups called quality circles seems to be a risk-free way to begin. Having studied many quality circles in different organizations, the authors of this article conclude that quality circles have their distinct advantages but that they have inherent in their design numbers of factors that often lead them to self-destruct. Quality circles are also said to be a poor forerunner for more participative approaches to management. Changing a quality circle into an institutionalized participative structure involves making many changes in important features of the organization that do not naturally flow from the implementation of a circle program. The authors describe the stages that quality circles go through, discuss the various threats they must survive, and then outline the most effective uses that managers can make of them.     

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.