Harvard Business Publishing

Judgment is the genome of CEO leadership. The selection of a new CEO is a bet on a leader who can make great people judgments (who is on the team or off the team), strategy judgments (where we go to make money) and crisis judgments (how we deal with the inevitable tempests threatening the organization). In our forthcoming book, Chris DeRose and I look at successful and unsuccessful examples of CEO judgment and develop frameworks that help Boards ensure that their companies won't be at a loss for senior executives with seasoned judgment. The case of A.G. Lafley at Procter & Gamble helps illustrate one key idea — what we call the "re-do loop." We have yet to find a CEO who says that one of his or her most important judgments unfolded exactly as planned. In 2000, A.G. Lafley took over at Procter & Gamble, a company deep in... Keep Reading »

In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. Information overload is more serious than ever. What are the implications for marketing? The world has witnessed two revolutions in the way consumer data has been solicited and collected. And consumers have changed the way they use the web to converse, shop and transact. As a result, people have elevated their expectations for good, healthy customer relationships and exchanges. And this has put pressure on marketers to forge astute, coherent strategies for how they engage people, what data they gather, and how they use it. The first data revolution came about when web commerce got going in earnest. It arose from the dream of collecting data from consumer decision-making. With the advent of the web, firms pondered whether it might be worth saving the vast amounts of data that customers were generating... Keep Reading »

Inspire your team to innovation! Sounds easy, right? Just schedule a meeting, title it "innovate new opportunities" or "strategic alignment" or one of those types of titles. Get your team together, kick off the meeting with a vision of the future, and unleash the brainstorming. Capture the good ideas, action item the next steps, and hit the ground running! But have you ever really taken a step back and watched the dynamics in the room? Do you truly have the right set-up and the right leadership to get the biggest ideas in motion? Are you really opening up dialogue, or are you somehow ensuring that the same people that always talk are still talking — while others are remaining silent, sitting on ideas that could blow open the industry? If you are only hearing from the same people, those that feel safe speaking, you are not going to likely reinvent... Keep Reading »

I believe we have a moral obligation to increase the power and presence of technology in the world, but not everyone believes that — to put it mildly. Many believe the opposite: that we have a moral obligation to reduce the power and presence of technology. I want to fully understand those arguments so I am collecting them in order to confront them as well as I can. I am interested in valid reasons to diminish technology, but also in mythical reasons as well. Things people believe about the technium which may not be true, but motivate them. Here is my first cut. Please comment on alternative reasons I missed. I think there are four basic arguments against technology, with many sub-reasons. In summary: Technology should be reduced as much as possible because it is contrary to nature, and/or to humanity, and/or to technology itself and finally, because it is... Keep Reading »

"If the government's money goes to cement the current technology in place, we will have a very hard time innovating...." Kenneth D. Mandl, and Isaac S. Kohane, "No Small Change for the Health Information Economy", www.nejm.org 3/28/2009 In the early 1990s, when "convergence" was becoming the buzzword of the telecommunications industry, I and some colleagues visited the editors of the Economist to discuss the industry's future. They had a hard time understanding that the digitalization of voice, data, and media was a change in economic infrastructure, like electrification, rather than an industry-specific phenomenon. Five years later, our point of view had become a kind of mantra: "The Internet Changes Everything." The dot-com bust — a bursting of the e-commerce bubble — discredited the idea, but in fact we've been building this new infrastructure steadily. Open standards are an essential enabler in the development of any shared infrastructure — sixty-cycle alternating... Keep Reading »

As part of the ongoing bailout of Citigroup, it was recently announced that the government's investment of about $25 billion in preferred stock would be converted to common shares, increasing the government's ownership from 8 percent to about 36 percent. This move was designed to remove a large amount of expensive preferred stock from Citigroup's balance sheet, shoring up the firm's tangible common equity and hopefully calming down the continually deteriorating financial markets. As a result, the government became by far the largest shareholder of Citigroup stock, while stopping short of a full-blown "nationalization," according to a popular view. But are we on a path to a nationalized banking sector? It is not a semantic technicality to say that the answer depends on the definition of "nationalization." The term typically stands for an action by the government where assets, companies, or entire industries are taken into public ownership. In the... Keep Reading »

Ben Bernanke is angry. "If there is a single episode in the entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can't think of one," he is quoted as saying. "AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system. This was a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company, made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses." Mildly put, the Fed Chairman is indicating that American International Group wasn't what it seemed. Bernanke, of course, is referring to one of the central causes of the current financial crisis. AIG (and so many other financial institutions) made "huge numbers of irresponsible bets" that were not visible to the outside world. These risks ended up threatening the stability not only of these companies but of the entire financial system. In the case of AIG, its scale, complexity, and global reach have made the problems... Keep Reading »

Not too long ago, I was checking my Facebook (FB) page when the newsfeed (the feature that shows tiny bulletins keeping users abreast of their friends' FB activities) alerted me to a vital ongoing interaction. It was played out in the form of postings on the walls (a publicly viewable bulletin board on a user's page) of two friends: Sadie: out? Olivia: lol...no I didn't go out...I stayed in...im a loser. Sadie: you're home! Olivia: lol. "home" yes, I am. Are you? Sadie: yes, I am. I don't want to be though Olivia: Lol. Me neither. But what can we do? nada. The conversation may seem superficial but could be considered positively profound when viewed next to other forms of FB interaction. The advent of specialized FB applications like the massively popular SuperPoke has allowed people to engage in such sophisticated activities as tickling, boxing a kangaroo, hugging a tree,... Keep Reading »

Though I've done time in corporate IT — and have even born the CIO title more than once — I've always had more sympathy for the firewall-breaking, virus-toting, data-leaking users than I have for the responsible and sober IT departments that struggle every day to keep the systems running while the users set out to dismantle it. IT's origins are in the priesthood of the mainframe — my father's generation of geeks, who tended huge, centralized beasts that served the whole enterprise from their humming, air-conditioned sanctuaries. The priests met with management to determine what the business's technology needs were, then filled those needs as best as they could, seeing to it that the cogs in the vast machine could each gain access to the forms and calculations they needed to perform in order to do their jobs. Lutheranism came in the form of the PC, on which users, armed... Keep Reading »

Every morning we wake up to scrolls of depressing news: massive layoffs, budget shortfalls, and companies (even industries) collapsing. Once we get to the office, we're part of conversations about this economy's impact on our own organizations. As leaders, we move from feelings of numbness, to questioning reality, to determination. And we wonder how we can still achieve growth while enacting stringent budget cuts. It doesn't have to be this way.  Recently, I was a panelist at an MIT conference in Boston and was asked to talk about cutting costs while growing the business. One might expect I'd focus on the need for senior leaders to "batten down the hatches" in these perilous times, but that is not what I believe. Instead, I spent time convincing them that now is the time to stop and take a fresh look at your assets, and engage the people — right in front... Keep Reading »