Harvard Business Publishing

I recently received my new BlackBerry. I could no longer pretend that having one of the original clunky, black devices was retro chic and was delighted to get my slimmer, shiny silver model. In a rare victory for grammarians, the new BlackBerry keyboard now features a semi-colon. Dependent clauses everywhere are rejoicing now that they may be properly joined in a sentence. There is a dollar sign now as well. Its omission on earlier models seemed odd given how indispensable PDAs quickly became to the capitalist class. Perhaps they didn’t want to offend those who trade in Pounds, Euros, Yen, and the rest. The front-mounted trackball that has replaced the side-mounted wheel for navigation (the latter of which also disconnected calls and was located exactly where my thumb wanted to be while I talked) and it is a joy to use. But there is a larger trend at work: the... Keep Reading »

I read the recent BusinessWeek special issue on "The Future of Work" with interest as we are holding an event on the links between education and the competitiveness of the next generation workforce in Boston in November. The issue had articles on globalization, connectivity, the changing relationship between employer and worker, and of course the inevitable article on prospering in this chaotic futurescape by branding yourself. The notion of individual as brand started about ten years ago with a Tom Peters article, "The Brand Called You." It sounded sexy and logical all at the same time. At the fork in the Porterian road, each of us has to choose a strategy of differentiation or low-cost just like businesses do. Since virtually no one wants to be the low cost provider of labor when you have to worry about a mortgage, repaying college loans, a new car, and all of life's... Keep Reading »

As summer comes to a close I thought I would look back over some of the posts from the past few months and see what updates might be called for. The Chinese Risk. You can say you heard it on “Heard in the Suite” first and the groundswell around the dangers of products manufactured in China continues to grow with recent recalls by Mattel and others. One of my colleagues reported to me just today that a Vermont-based wooden train maker has seen spikes of traffic on their Web site similar to the holiday period. Watch for more consumers to demand “Made in the U.S.A.” or other trusted countries until manufacturers can ensure that products made in developing markets are safe. Gonzales v. Wolfowitz. Well, I blew this one. In April I predicted that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be shown the door before World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz... Keep Reading »

One of the great joys of vacation is the time to actually read the papers. Yes, those old-fashioned, un-hip, finger-dirtying newspapers. It is glorious to page through not one but two or even three before setting about in the day’s activities. Gone is the skim through the front section of The Wall Street Journal and the business section of The New York Times over gulps of coffee before launching into my accumulated e-mails. Replacing it is the ritual of starting with Dining In or Arts or some other section that would ordinarily be deemed “interesting but not essential.” I have read about the American Cheese Society conference in Shelburne, VT, possible treasure recovered from what might be the wreckage of a pirate ship that sank off the coast of Wellfleet, and a salon in New York where I can get my shoes shined for free with my haircut (the cut,... Keep Reading »

Recently I spent several days at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, where we held a workshop with Marcus Buckingham. It’s one of the hippest hotels in the country, I’m told. My colleagues spotted a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan, Sean Penn, and Prince on the premises though my days were celebrity free. I was more likely to run into the group of sales managers from a car company with their shiny name badges pinned to their golf shirts. The Roosevelt has a great history and retains some of the old-school glamour of 1920s Hollywood with its luminous tile floors and ornate pillared archways. My room was spacious and the bathrobe among the plushest I can recall. But it has all the hallmarks of a tragically hip property. The staff looked great doing what they did, but that didn’t translate into actually doing it well. Everyone was pleasant -- except for the waiter... Keep Reading »

Ah, vacation. Just around the corner. As I clean off the desk, tidy the files, and delegate tasks for the week ahead I come to one of the more challenging pre-holiday tasks: preparing Outlook. Of course I’ll set my Out of Office Assistant to let people know that I’ll be away and not checking e-mail. I’ve taken a public pledge to leave the BlackBerry behind. I may even try some of those special rules gizmos to automatically route some messages to the appropriate person (or the trash). But I’ll have to do a serious cleaning to enable my in-box to handle the 400-500 messages I’ll receive next week without exceeding its size limit. We’re running a pool on the exact number. Write your guess on the back of a $20 bill and mail it to me. (Note to any of my readers in law enforcement: I'm kidding). All of this... Keep Reading »

We held two dinners this spring, one in New York and one in London, that gathered executives, authors, academics, and others to discuss the topic of "Leading for Innovation" that will be the focus of our Burning Questions conference to be held in October. At both dinners, there was much discussion of the role of failure in innovation. Every journey has missteps, and organizations must learn to incorporate them into the process and learn from them. The general conclusion was that companies still do a poor job of recognizing and rewarding these “smart failures” as part of the innovation process. We were heartened to learn that one company is taking steps in the right direction. Paul Iske, chief knowledge officer and a senior vice president at ABN AMRO, shared with us their concept of the Institute of Brilliant Failures that will highlight the importance of experimentation and failure in progress... Keep Reading »

There’s an observation that Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco in Brazil, made at one of our Burning Questions conferences a few years back that came to mind last Sunday evening as I checked the office email. “Americans have learned to work on Sunday nights,” he said. “But you haven’t learned to go to the movies on Tuesday afternoon.” It was an astute observation. So many of us who aren’t in hourly jobs have let work creep into our personal time. It’s so easy to sneak that BlackBerry out for a quick peek while you are sitting in line at the car wash on Saturday morning. When you log on to your laptop to check a movie time you might as well sneak a look at your office emails. After all, you are already online. To my mind, we have Lee Iacocca to blame for all of this. Back in 1984... Keep Reading »

The New York Times ran a story on the front of the business section on July 16, 2007 heralding John Kotter’s latest book, Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions. It has already sold 224,000 copies according to the Times and may be on pace to surpass the sales of Leading Change, the original on which Iceberg is based. (Disclosure: Harvard Business School Press published Leading Change and I have worked with Professor Kotter as a speaker on several occasions.) Much is made in the article about the accessibility of this book. There will be debates in publishing and academic circles about intellectual heft vs. the drive for sales, but, truth be told, Leading Change is itself a pretty brisk read and putting penguins on its cover was considered edgy back in 1996 . But that misses the larger point: organizations struggle gaining traction with any initiative... Keep Reading »

I’ve spent a lot of the past few months traveling around North America with Tom Davenport as part of our Competing on Analytics event series tied to his latest book. I’ve learned a lot about companies that are finding interesting insights into their data and using them to outperform their competitors in everything from hotels to telecommunications. Davenport’s research has taken us inside Marriott, Netflix, RBC, and many other companies. What’s critical, according to Davenport, is to find a new perspective and new metrics that will reveal untapped sources of value. Citibank, for example, has found that the deep view into consumer behavior that it gets from aggregated (and depersonalized) credit card transactions helps it make better informed decisions about opportunities in the capital markets. This also meant that I spent a lot of time on the road, from city to city. So it was with great interest that I... Keep Reading »