Global Corporate Reputation Index Finds Major Global Brands Lag in Citizenship Qualities. DAVOS, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Major global brands have more work to do to close the gap between their performance in the marketplace and their citizenship, according to the inaugural Global Corporate Reputation Index, released today by Burson-Marsteller, Landor Associates, Penn Schoen Berland, and BrandAsset Consulting. “In an increasingly transparent world, isolated programs and insufficient or insincere commitments will undermine corporate reputations. On the other hand, visible, authentic, and consistently delivered citizenship programs build successful corporate reputations and brands that stand the test of time. Good corporate citizenship really is good business.”
The tech industry scored the highest overall, but concerns about its citizenship are masked by its extreme scores on vision and innovation. The apparel industry shows the largest gap between citizenship and performance indicating continuing concerns about how its products are manufactured. Other key findings include: Log In - The New York Times. The Surprising Benefits of Solitude - Andrew McAfee. By Andrew McAfee | 2:47 PM January 19, 2012 Some recent reading crystallized two hypotheses that have been rattling around in my head for a while now: Digital crowds work better than real-world ones.For some things, nothing works except solitude.
These formed after reading a great article by Susan Cain in the New York Times called “The Rise of the New Groupthink.” The column is a preview of her new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (the title alone assures that I will buy it). The book summarizes a lot of research about what actually happens when people work together in groups, and most of it ain’t pretty.
As Cain writes, …decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. There is one large exception to this rule: groups that come together digitally, rather than in the real world, are often very creative, innovative, and productive. A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond - NYTimes.com.
Chilean Entrepreneurs Begin SRI Venture-Readiness Program in Silicon Valley. 5 Innovation Lessons From A Breakthrough Brand Aimed At Aging Americans | Co.Design. Most entrepreneurs embark down that path with a mix of luck, circumstance, and insight: They’re futzing with some clunky gadget, and then boom! They realize how to fix it. Or they’ve worked so long at something that they simply know how to do it better. Assaf Wand, the founder of Sabi, a line of branded, ergonomic wares for the aging which launches today, is a completely different sort of entrepreneur.
Rather than intuiting some need out of the ether or working toward his big idea over a decade, he applied a mix of analytics, hustle, and hard work to finding an overlooked business opportunity. Granted, Wand had the benefit of training as a McKinsey consultant and venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Finding the Whitespace Wand had already served as the CEO of a company that was aiming to bring mobile broadband to Africa--and in that capacity, he’d raised over $400 million for his venture.
"Low-tech businesses have a massive talent gap," explains Wand. How IBM's Sam Palmisano Redefined the Global Corporation - Bill George - HBS Faculty. By Bill George | 9:30 AM January 18, 2012 In the 20th century, a select group of leaders — General Motor’s Alfred Sloan, HP’s David Packard and Bill Hewlett, and GE’s Jack Welch — set the standard for the way corporations are run. In the 21st century only IBM’s Sam Palmisano has done so.
When Palmisano retired this month, the media chronicled his success by focusing on IBM’s 21% annual growth in earnings per share and its increase in market capitalization to $218 billion. But IBM hasn’t flourished because it kowtows to Wall Street. In fact, five years after Palmisano took over, IBM stock was stuck where it had been when his tenure began. The real story behind IBM’s success is the course Palmisano set for 21st century global enterprises. Recognizing that the company’s command-and-control culture wouldn’t work in the 21st century, he defined leadership as leading by values and created a unique collaborative organizational structure. Humility and openness. Patience and a long-term view. Train Your Brain to Focus - Paul Hammerness, MD, and Margaret Moore. By Paul Hammerness, MD, and Margaret Moore | 1:32 PM January 18, 2012 Next time you are sitting in a meeting, take a look around.
The odds are high that you will see your colleagues checking screens, texting, and emailing while someone is talking or making a presentation. Many of us are proud of our prowess in multitasking, and wear it like a badge of honor. Multitasking may help us check off more things on our to-do lists. But it also makes us more prone to making mistakes, more likely to miss important information and cues, and less likely to retain information in working memory, which impairs problem solving and creativity.
Over the past decade, advances in neuroimaging have been revealing more and more about how the brain works. Here are three ways you can start to improve your focus. Tame your frenzy. Frenzy is an emotional state, a feeling of being a little (or a lot) out of control. What can you do? What can your team do? Apply the brakes. What can you do? What can your team do? Why Is Diversity Vital For Innovation?
14 Ideas for Busting Bureaucracy. Everybody hates it, but so much of life is ruled by it: bureaucracy. It's time to bust up the ideology of control that has infiltrated every aspect of organizational life. That's why we launched the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge (the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation)--a call for inspiring stories, bold ideas, and instructive experiments that demonstrate what can happen when you scrap compliance, conformance, and predictability for freedom, passion, and dynamism.
We asked management innovators around the world to share their stories and hacks about: *making organizations more inspiring, engaging, and passion-driven *shifting from a top-down to an edge-to-edge orientation *managing without managers We heard from CEOs, courageous in-the-trenches innovators, startup leaders, and social entrepreneurs alike. --how to transform an entire organization with an eclectic portfolio of grassroots initiatives And so much more. M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All. How To Charge Higher Prices And Thrive. Harvey’s Hardware is a legend in my town of Needham, Mass. In business since 1953, Harvey’s sells what most people consider to be commodity items--nuts, bolts, lawnmowers, shovels, and so on. And yet, Harvey’s revenue per square foot is almost four times higher than the typical hardware store.
This is shocking considering that even though they sell commodity products: Harvey’s never has the lowest prices. Harvey’s never runs a sale.Harvey’s never provides discounts or offers coupons. Harvey’s limits their advertising to the backs of Little Leaguers’ uniforms. Why would people crowd into Harvey’s to buy something that they could get for less at Home Depot or another big box store? First proposed in the 1980s by Michael Lanning and Lynn Philips, benefit experiences are the sum of the specific and measurable events that happen in your customers' lives as a result of doing business with you. The concept of a benefit experience is something that few people talk about. Average Is Over. What's Your Extra? - Bill Taylor. By Bill Taylor | 9:05 AM December 19, 2011 I approach a book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman with a mixture of wariness and anticipation.
Wariness because Friedman’s books tend to go on for many pages longer than they need to, and many of those pages contain his trademark blend of Davos Man self-congratulation and cheesy metaphors. Yet I still have a sense of anticipation because in every one of Friedman’s books there are a handful of insights that are so clear, so sharp, so flat-out right that they frame how you look at the world going forward. That Used to Be Us, Friedman’s newest book (written with Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum) has at least one such observation — a principle so clearly true, and so crisply expressed, that it should become a mantra of sorts for leaders everywhere who want to build something great and do something important. Most organizations don’t stand for anything special, of course. Talk about positive word of mouth. 1111 Lincoln Road. Home | Commonwealth Connects Programme – Bridging the digital divide.
Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone, on Remembering Basics. Trust Me: Here's Why Brands Sell Trust, Subconsciously. Let's say that not that long ago you came across a fascinating article. But when you later try to verify some of the facts, you just can't pinpoint exactly where you first read it. What you do recall is that the source was reliable and you trusted the message.
This is a situation I find myself in quite regularly. So much so, that I've pondered the conundrum and come up with a theory: we store information according to how trustworthy we deem the source of the message to be. There's more to it. Trust isn't the only criteria we impose on information we receive every day, it's also linked to the emotional relationship we've developed with the source.
Take for example your average mother. Many studies demonstrate that trust, above all else, becomes a more salient feature in our life as we grow older. In a 2010 study conducted by Harvard professor Bharat Anand, and Alezander Rosinski, they examined how the power of ads are influenced by the magazine or newspaper they appear in. Atul Gawande: Lowering Medical Costs By Providing Better Care. Hide captionAtul Gawande is a staff member of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His books include Better and Complications. Fred Field Atul Gawande is a staff member of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
His books include Better and Complications. One of the criticisms of the health care reform bill enacted last year is that it expanded coverage without doing enough to control rising health care costs. Surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande says there are hopeful signs that costs can be contained — not by cutting back, but by providing more intensive services to chronically ill patients who incur huge costs with long stays in hospital rooms and intensive care units.
Gawande's piece in the current issue of the New Yorker about those who focus on patients with the highest medical costs is called "The Hot Spotters. " One of the physicians he profiles, Jeff Brenner, is a family practitioner working in Camden, N.J. The Thought Leader Interview: Meg Wheatley. With her first book, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (Berrett-Koehler, 1992), Margaret J. (Meg) Wheatley began developing a body of work around the links between organizational learning, innovative leadership, and such fields of thought as chaos theory, quantum physics, and neuroscience. Around the same time, she cofounded the Berkana Institute, a U.S. -based not-for-profit organization, dedicated to experimental efforts to build healthy communities around the world, often in highly impoverished areas with many serious challenges. During the next 15 years, Wheatley’s views on communities, and her experience with innovative management practice, made her a central figure in a wide network of pioneers in organizational learning and change.
Then, starting in the mid-2000s and accelerating with the economic crisis of 2008, Wheatley noticed new levels of anxiety among her friends, clients, and business acquaintances. Business and Web 2.0 An interactive feature - McKinsey Quarterly - Business Technology - Strategy. For the past seven years, thousands of executives from around the world—across a range of industries and functional areas—have responded to a McKinsey survey on how organizations are using social (or Web 2.0) technologies.
In 2009 we created an interactive tool that links the data from these survey results and charts it to the emerging trends in Web 2.0 adoption. This interactive focuses on several of the survey’s core questions—from what technologies and tools companies view as most important to what kind of investments, if any, organizations plan to make in Web 2.0 in the future. Our most recent survey examines the business use of 13 social technologies and tools: blogs, collaborative document editing, mash-ups (a Web application that combines multiple sources of data into a single tool), microblogging, online videoconferencing, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.
Interactive. How social technologies are extending the organization - McKinsey Quarterly - High Tech - Strategy & Analysis. Companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities—key findings of our fifth annual survey on these tools and technologies, in which we asked more than 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy them and the benefits they confer. When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, respondents say, confirming last year’s survey results. But this is a very dynamic environment, where the gains from using social technologies sometimes do not persist, perhaps because it takes so much effort to achieve them at scale.
Some companies, respondents indicate, reaped fewer benefits and thus became less networked, while a smaller percentage learned how to deploy these technologies to become even more networked. Usage at scale and continued benefits Looking ahead. Why innovation should start in emerging markets. Kiira, The Ugandan Electric Car That Could. Africa can claim a simple formula for its recent economic success: falling costs, a rising middle class and tenacious faith in its own future. Uganda, one of the continent’s poorer countries, has little to show for that success, except one thing: a new, homegrown electric car. The plug-in Kiira electric vehicle (EV) was designed, manufactured, and assembled in Uganda by students and faculty at Makerere University.
The two-seater can maintain speeds of more than 60 mph and operate for about 4 to 5 hours before its lithium ion batteries need to be recharged. The bright green vehicle took its first official test run in November, inspiring government and university officials to proclaim it a symbol of Uganda’s ability to start solving its social and economic problems. For Paul Isaac Musasizi, the university engineering professor who oversaw the project, the experience of Kiira’s first test drive was nothing like the thousand of similar events that happen in the developed world each day.
Inside P&G's digital revolution - McKinsey Quarterly - Retail & Consumer Goods - Strategy & Analysis. Robert McDonald is a CEO on a mission: to make Procter & Gamble the most technologically enabled business in the world. To get there, the 31-year company veteran and former US Army captain is overseeing the large-scale application of digital technology and advanced analytics across every aspect of P&G’s operations and activities—from the way the consumer goods giant creates molecules in its R&D labs to how it maintains relationships with retailers, manufactures products, builds brands, and interacts with customers.
The prize: better innovation, higher productivity, lower costs, and the promise of faster growth. Podcast Inside P&G's digital revolution DownloadListen to more of the interview, including Robert McDonald’s views on radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking technology and the growing use of smartphones in developing markets. Real-time insights Our purpose at P&G is to touch and improve lives; everything we do is in that context. One way is through consumer feedback. Building a Frictionless Company. Local high-tech firms see big need for STEM jobs (with video) - Cecil Whig: Business. What Crabs in a Pot Have to Do with Leadership Presence. INFOGRAPHIC: Here's How To REALLY Use LinkedIn. Get Schooled on Customer Engagement. SparkPeople. News | Canadas innovation window of opportunity. The Complexity Challenge | BUSINESS RESEARCH.
Video: John Kao on the Global Innovation Agenda. Why Peter Drucker Distrusted Facts - Stephen Wunker. Designing Tension into Innovation. Why You May Be Blind to a Good Idea (and What to Do About It) - Cathy N. Davidson. How to Avoid the Innovation Death Spiral. Get the Mentoring Equation Right - Whitney Johnson. TEN - Top Executives Net Group News. The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key. Top 'Innovators' Rank Low in R&D Spending. Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People. A Case for Using Social Media with Learning.
Innovation: Corporate Culture is Not the Answer! Competitive Advantage through Business Model Design and Innovation. Slideshare. Learn How to Think Different(ly) - Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen.