The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
Strategy is not aspirations, objectives or wishful thinking. It is a set of hard-to-reverse choices and explaining what these choices are and why they were made is what strategy communication should be.
Sorting out future work arrangements, and attending to employees’ inevitable anxieties about those arrangements, will require managers to rethink and expand one of strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness: Psychological safety.
As companies and agencies get larger, they start to value the importance of "process" over the "product." And by product, I mean the creation of new hardware, services, software, tools, operations, tradecraft, etc. People who manage processes are not the same people as those who create product. Product people are often messy, hate paperwork, and prefer to spend their time creating stuff rather than documenting it. Over time as organizations grow, they become risk averse. The process people dominate management, and the product people end up reporting to them.
Unaudited, self-reported Net Promoter Scores undermined the usefulness of NPS. Over time its creator, Fred Reichheld, realized that the only way to correct this problem was to introduce a hard, complementary metric that drew on accounting results.
Here are three recommendations for companies that want to engage in algorithmic management and nudging, but want to avoid ethical and regulatory snares
In a study we conducted of 100 productivity hacks, timeboxing was ranked as the most useful. And over the last few years, I have also discovered several additional benefits of timeboxing, which I would like to share.
Let’s make it more than okay to take a (lunch) break, whether we choose to spend it eating alone, going for a walk, or dining with colleagues.
Every company believes it is customer-centric. However, most of them are product- and service-centric first, focusing on how to enhance their offerings
A foundation of organizational stability is what provides people with a sense of confidence, security, and optimism during times of disruptive change in the workplace, which, in turn, allows them to keep calm, act rationally, and adapt effectively as the situation evolves.
When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again.
How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own.
If people are put in a role that challenges them, 67 per cent will demonstrate above-average creativity and innovation in their performance. In contrast, only 33 per cent of people in "easy" jobs show above- average innovativeness.
When you focus on measuring face time, you get...face time. But when you actually focus on performance, you get superior performance.
Encouraging employees to be creative and independent — not obedient soldiers taking orders down the chain of command — makes everyone feel like they have a stake in a positive outcome
With so much to gain, why don’t leaders have feedback conversations more often? Because not all leaders are comfortable with the responsibility.
Treat employees like children and you increase the odds they’ll act like children.
Encouraging employees to feel like owners produces behaviors relevant to their work as well as those outside of their jobs
The six main reasons people work are: play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia.
Here are four ways to ensure you never overstay your welcome during a networking conversation.
The word "together" is a powerful social cue to the brain. In and of itself, it seems to serve as a kind of relatedness reward, signaling that you belong, that you are connected, and that there are people you can trust working with you toward the same goal.
Work can, however, provide an array of meaningful experiences, even though many employees do not enjoy those in their current job. So, what are the sources of meaningful experiences at work?
Teams are more productive and innovative than mere work groups. They produce results that exceed what groups of individuals can do through simple cooperation and coordination. Such results reflect a "team effect:" members perform better when they feel they’re part of a team.
Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.
This article demonstrates such profound lack of understanding of the art of managing technology projects that I don’t even know where to begin disassembling the profoundly wrong-headed people-as-widgets abstraction the author has attempted to apply to the field.
If you’re someone who is dissatisfied with or unchallenged by your current role and you’re considering cutting the cord, keep in mind the following: how you quit your job can be just as important as when you do so and where you go next. Here are three key steps to keep in mind as you take your leave gracefully
Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.
When the business community supports an idea, change can happen fast. HBR’s annual ideas collection, compiled in cooperation with the World Economic Forum, offers 10 fresh solutions we believe would make the world better. Ranging from productivity boosting to nation building, from health care to hacking, any of the ideas presented in the following pages could go far with broad-based buy-in. Which ones will you get behind?
It would probably save no end of managerial time if every committee had to discuss its own dissolution once a year, and put up a case it it felt it should continue for another twelve months. If this requirement did nothing else, it would at least refocus the minds of the committee members on their purposes and objectives.