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From BP to Boeing, Supplier Safety Is the CEO's Problem
Explore HBR Blog Network (Mar 1 2013)
The current sub-contractor controveries surrounding BP's liability for the gulf explosion and Boeing's grounding of its 787 Dreamliner should not obscure an ultimate take-away for corporate leaders: companies must take operational responsibility for ensuring that products and services provided to them by third party suppliers are safe, effective and of high quality. In this era of complex supply chains and the hiring of expert sub-contractors, taking such responsibility is crucial for preventing events with the potential to adversely affect the corporation and its reputation.
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Mentions: Boeing
The Inside Story of Diageo's Stunning Carbon Achievement
Explore HBR Blog Network (Feb 19 2013)
How the company's North American division cut emissions by 80%. This is the exclusive, short story of how Diageo North America, with creativity and guts, both in operations and in the senior ranks, achieved the holy grail of carbon emissions reductions. They did it without using carbon offsets — and about 38 years earlier than they had to. Here's what scientists are telling us: the world must cut carbon emissions by at least 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to (we hope) avoid the worst of climate change.
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Building Customer Communities Is the Key to Creating Value
Explore HBR Blog Network (Feb 1 2013)
What are your customers telling their friends and colleagues about your business? Your prospective customers and buyers increasingly learn about you from their peers — including your current customers — while tending more and more to ignore traditional sales and marketing communications from corporate. Companies are now taking advantage of this new marketing reality, becoming more skilled at getting their customers to advocate for them, create peer influence in their markets, and make important contributions in areas like product development and services. You're denying the new marketing reality if you're not encouraging social capital.
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What Makes Social Entrepreneurs Different
Explore HBR Blog Network (Jan 10 2013)
When social entrepreneurs say that they want to "work themselves out of a job" they are not making a glib statement to sound cool. They are merely stating the obvious — they want to fundamentally solve the problem that their solution is designed to address. Commercial entrepreneurs are different. They're out to standardize a business model. That model might solve a social problem — but if it's profitable and doesn't fix the problem, that's okay, too.
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Mentions: Africa
To Grow, Social Enterprises Must Play by Business Rules
Explore HBR Blog Network (Jan 9 2013)
We can't ask social enterprises to have a big impact if they can't get the resources they need to grow bigger. In Britain, for example, fewer than 10% of the tens of thousands of social enterprises generate more than £1 million in revenue. Why is that? One reason is that the scrappy, entrepreneurial approach that characterizes many of these organizations starts to break down as they pass that threshold.
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It's Time to Wage an All-Out War on Waste
Explore HBR Blog Network (Dec 11 2012)
In 1996, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones popularized the term "lean thinking". It was their expression for what they'd observed studying Toyota's manufacturing operations: an absence of waste. Today, lean concepts have moved beyond the factory floor to become an organizing set of principles and practices applicable to all business operations and activities, including entrepreneurial start-ups. Here's seven targets for keeping your innovation efforts lean:
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How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation
Explore HBR Blog Network (Dec 7 2012)
If there's been one topic that has entirely dominated the US post-election landscape, it's the fiscal cliff. Will taxes be raised? Which programs will be cut? Who will blink first in negotiations? For all the talk of the fiscal cliff, however, I believe the US is facing a much more serious problem, one that has simply not been talked about at all: corruption. But this isn't the overt, "bartering of government favors in return for private kickbacks" corruption. Instead, this type of corruption has actually been legalized. And it is strangling both US competitiveness, and the ability ...
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Use Street Strategy to Build New Ventures
Explore HBR Blog Network (Dec 3 2012)
Need expertise in a new market? Let local experts light your path. The holiday season in the Northern Hemisphere is often a time for talk of miracles and displays of lights. Richard Fahey's story involves both.
It takes place in Africa and involves solar technology, but the miracle of getting the lights to work contains a widely applicable leadership lesson: surprising solutions from using what I call "street strategy." Fahey is a successful corporate lawyer who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia.
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Mentions: Africa California France
Why Rebates Encourage Tax Evasion
Explore HBR Blog Network (Nov 9 2012)
Last weekend I stopped by my local Staples office supply store to take advantage of a fantastic deal. They were offering 500-sheet reams of paper for $6.99, with a $5.99 rebate, leaving a net price of $1. Applying for my rebate could not have been easier: I simply inputted a series of numbers listed on my receipt on the Staples web site, and chose to have the money deposited in my PayPal account. This experience got me wondering: Why are rebates used, and more importantly, why aren't other retailers focused on rebates as vigorously as Staples seems ...
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The Middle East Could Be a Cradle of Innovation
Explore HBR Blog Network (Oct 15 2012)
The region is using fresh thinking to solve local problems -- and world-class innovations may be the result. Consider mobile devices in Africa. Throughout the continent — and this is true throughout other emerging markets too — millions of people are glued to their cell phones. Since Africans were never tethered to landlines, innovation has been astounding. Kenya's M-Pesa, for example, allows customers to withdraw and deposit money via text message.
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Mentions: Washington Africa Japan
Shape Strategy With Simple Rules, Not Complex Frameworks
Explore HBR Blog Network (Sep 26 2012)
Successful companies shape their high-level strategies by relying not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. Managers in these organizations translate corporate objectives into a few straightforward guidelines that help employees make on-the-spot decisions and adapt to constantly shifting environments, while keeping the big picture in mind.
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Mentions: Brazil
It's Time To Bring Back the Executive Dining Room
Explore HBR Blog Network (Sep 21 2012)
Dust off the china, press the tablecloths, and re-create a forum where silo walls disappear. As leaders search for ways to make their teams more effective; consultants search for mechanisms to increase informal, cross-functional communications within their client organizations; and architects consider their next headquarters redesign project, I'd suggest they consider restoring the faded institution of the executive dining room.
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The Exploding Business of Bartering
Explore HBR Blog Network (Sep 11 2012)
Companies are bartering everything from cars to jet fuel to legal services.The International Reciprocal Trade Association reports that in 2011 over 400,000 companies worldwide used bartering to earn an estimated $12 billion on unwanted or underused assets. Our Global Trends research, along with discussions with senior executives around the world, show that in response to tighter credit and budgets companies are exploring new ways to create and capture value.
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Mentions: Honda
How Bad Leadership Spurs Entrepreneurship
Explore HBR Blog Network (Sep 7 2012)
What do 70% of successful entrepreneurs have in common? They all incubated their business ideas while employed by someone else. Indeed, most people start their own companies — or go freelance — in order to stop working for others. Why? Because most managers are simply unbearable. Year after year, Gallup reports that most employees are unhappy at work, and that the number one reason for dissatisfaction is their boss.
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Understanding Customers in the Solution Economy
Explore HBR Blog Network (Aug 24 2012)
Companies in all varieties of B2B markets have moved beyond selling products and services to offering complete "solutions" to their customers. Alstom keeps trains ready to run each morning for railroad operators rather than just selling the rolling stock to them. General Electric helps hospitals manage and use patient data rather than selling them the equipment and software to do the job.
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Social Media's Productivity Payoff
Explore HBR Blog Network (Aug 20 2012)
Social technologies aren't just giant time sinks. On the contrary, they may raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers.
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Mentions: Turkey San Francisco
Debating Disaster in Order to Prepare for It
Explore HBR Blog Network (Aug 2 2012)
It's been over a year since the Fukushima nuclear accident, and two years since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Knowing when to expend time and effort preventing — and planning responses to — low probability, high consequence events is now, more than ever, one of the hardest and most important risk management problems to address.
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Mentions: Japan
New Research on Why CEOs Should Use Social Media
Explore HBR Blog Network (Jul 26 2012)
For CEOs who are trying to decide whether participating in social media is worth their time, there's new research that could help tip the balance. The new report from CEO.com and business intelligence firm DOMO notes that social media is more pervasive than ever among consumers: 50% of the population currently uses Facebook, and more than 37% use Twitter. Yet among Fortune 500 CEOs, the report says, only 7.6% are present on Facebook........
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The Game Buyers Play with Vendors
Explore HBR Blog Network (Jul 26 2012)
There was a time when customers wanted to trust their suppliers. They expected salespeople to take care of them. For the supplier, selling was all about figuring out what and how the customer wanted to buy. Relations between the two sides were cordial. But that type of customer — the relationship buyer — has been in steady decline, replaced by the economic buyer, who is in the grip of Procurement.
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When to Change a Winning Strategy
Explore HBR Blog Network (Jul 24 2012)
Companies tend to repeat what has worked for them in the past. In our research on the telecom industry, for example, we found that the great majority of the executives we surveyed preferred internal development to external sourcing when they needed to develop differentiated products and services. We get similar results in other industries, though the preferred growth mode may differ.
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Mentions: Walmart
The Cracks are Starting to Show at Apple
Explore HBR Blog Network (Jun 27 2012)
During the past few months, two troubling fault lines have surfaced at Apple — one at the top and another... (Read Full Article)
Mentions: Apple China Steve Jobs
Data: One Antidote to Risky Behavior
Explore HBR Blog Network (May 24 2012)
Every large financial services company has instituted risk management, but that hasn't prevented risky behavior in the form of office politics and personality conflict — as the JP Morgan trading debacle has demonstrated. Reports last week in the New York Times cited organizational discord at JPMorgan Chase as contributors to the company's multi-billion dollar trading loss.
Risk management isn't exclusive to banking. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, insurers, and retailers invest millions in risk avoidance.
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A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation
Explore HBR Blog Network (May 9 2012)
The innovator's quest has been to find the win-win proposition: a great new product that can create differentiated value for consumers while supporting differentiated profits for the producer. But the focus on win-win can blind us to the needs of critical partners.
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We're All E-Commerce Companies Now
Explore HBR Blog Network (May 3 2012)
The day of e-commerce is finally here. Traditionally, e-commerce has been viewed as buying or selling a product online with direct delivery. It was a simple business model distinction — either you sold online, or you sold in store. But over the past few years, with retailers increasingly moving their inventory online, the landscape has become more complex....
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