Companies screw up. Nothing shocking there. Much more surprising is the degree to which mistakes spiral out of control before executives and other authorities decide to act--and I'm not just talking financial markets. The dairy industry in China, to take a not-so-subtle example, has all but imploded, primarily because people neglected to act when and as they should have as a very bad situation unfolded (and then unfolded some more). Whistleblowers were ignored, customer complaints weren't addressed, four infants died, and hospitals were forced to create makeshift exam rooms in hallways just so they could handle the tens of thousands...
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I was doing some prep work a couple of weeks ago for a blog on whether Barack Obama's success in politics would rub off on African Americans in the C-suite. During my conversation with a leading African American business scholar, he said something that rang all too true. "In the life of the average American," he argued, "you would be very hard pressed to find a white woman who'd say 'let me be a black man' - and that cuts right across all parts of society. That said, it's easier for people to take a black man as a leader...
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The comment that stuck with me the most vividly after a high-powered Harvard panel discussion (RealPlayer required) on the financial crisis yesterday was a stray remark that might have interesting implications for businesses over the long term. It came at the very end of a brief Q&A session that followed informal presentations by six well-known professors who had accepted Harvard President Drew Faust's invitation to sit on a Cambridge stage and explain what the crisis is all about and what might cure it. I don't even remember the question. But the answer, from public-policy professor Kenneth Rogoff, addressed the evident...
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Early on the morning of August 7, 1974, French wire walker Philippe Petit, aided by a multinational band of co-conspirators, stepped out onto a slender cable his team had rigged between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He stayed on the wire for 45 minutes, making eight trips back and forth--strolling, dancing, lying on his back, coming teasingly close to the grasp of waiting police and then retreating--all to the delight and amazement of New Yorkers watching from the streets below. The tale of Petit's self-described "coup" is told in an exhilarating documentary called Man on Wire....
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User innovation. Crowd sourcing. Peer production. By now, your eyes may glaze over when you hear about concepts like these -- unless, that is, mention of them starts your stomach churning and mind racing: What plans are rivals hatching around these ideas that could render my current business irrelevant? An article in the October Harvard Business Review is a good antidote to this mixture of ennui and anxiety. In "The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business," Intuit founder Scott Cook lays out a well-defined mechanism for harnessing the talents and energy of people beyond your organization. A user contribution...
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The numbers of unemployed are rising. The economy is rocky. And given the recent massive blows to Wall Street, odds are that things could get a lot rockier. Your firm may be thinking about belt-tightening, and the standard way of doing this is to lower headcount and cut back on benefits. But these moves can eviscerate morale, making it more difficult to keep good people on board or hire new talent when needed. What should top decision-makers do? They might get a tip from Scott Scherr, CEO and founder of Ultimate Software, a mid-sized company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (disclosure:...
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In December 1993, a book smelling like new arrived at my worktable in Delhi, India. Its title, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, left me cold initially; I had OD-ed on the word revolution for too long. I needn't have worried, though; the first book co-authored by Michael Hammer--who passed away in Boston on September 4, 2008--lived up to the hype. Companies should redefine the way they do things instead of using computers to replicate inefficient processes, argued Hammer and co-author James Champy, who now heads Perot Systems' consulting practice. Importantly, they were among the first to predict...
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There's a debate going on about the role of ethics in science. As a recent article in the New York Times "Science" section points out, the relentless pursuit of breakthrough science -- say, carbon capture -- is fraught with ethical danger because the average bench scientist cares more about making the darn invention work than about a potentially awful outcome. The debate may be hotter than the A-bomb, but it's much older than that. Sometimes, in our headlong drive to find technological solutions to all our problems, we forget that we can find guidance in the humanist perspective of...
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Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull exemplifies the greatest form of leadership: empowering others to achieve the extraordinary. I had the pleasure of working with Ed on his September 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review in which he describes the architecture of Pixar's collective genius--a community where people at all levels support one another. The results speak for themselves: Beginning with Toy Story in 1995 and ending with WALL•E this summer, Pixar has produced nine blockbuster computer-animated films in a row. An accomplished computer scientist who personally wrote some of the foundation code that made computer animation possible, Ed is an...
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I've never liked Bratz dolls. They seem so lazy, louche, and full of 'tude. I'd rather see my daughter playing with career-minded Barbies or high-energy Groovy Girls any day. So when the verdict came down last month in Mattel's suit against Bratz marketer MGA Entertainment, I admit that I was pleased to see that Bratz are a product of illegitimate birth. In the days since, however, I've had some misgivings about the case. Not on pure legal grounds; it seems absolutely clear that designer Carter Bryant came up with the Bratz concept while working for Mattel, and Mattel has fair...
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