UnFollow The Leader

Cultural norms of deference to authority figures can inhibit Indian employees from challenging the status quo and sharing innovative ideas with managers.

In a working world made smaller, managers increasingly oversee employees across the globe — and the cultural divide. But while crossing cultures can create new opportunities, it brings challenges, too.

Take India, which seeks to transition from an economy based on manufacturing and offshored services to one based on innovation and design. A challenge for managers is to foster independent thinking in a culture where employees are socialized to defer to authority figures more than are their western counterparts.

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Hybrid Strategy Management

Despite my lack of doctoral and/or Harvard credentials, I’m going to go out on a limb and challenge a bit of the conventional wisdom that’s been passed unto us by Michael Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors – 1998), later revised by Treacy and Wiersema with their Value Disciplines model (The Discipline of Market Leaders – 1997), now taught in nearly all business school programs, and which crops up at least once at every business conference.

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A Rant On Engagement

*A portion of this blog post is republished with permission from SiriusDecisions, Inc. To read the full post, please visit:http://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/a-rant-on-engagement/*   I’ve got a gripe with the term engagement. I think it’s misleading. What most marketers are calling engagement is really content consumption. The content may be presented contextually; it may be presented dynamically by industry…

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The Core – Communicating Strategy, Vision and Values

“The Finance Talk. When I sit you down and explain that if you miss your income statement, you might get chewed out a bit, but if you miss your balance sheet, you get fired”. In layman’s terms, that means that if I missed the forecast there was a chance I’d get a tongue lashing, but if I was hiding things on the balance sheet, that was cause for dismissal.

Which brings me to the subject of values and corporate strategy. How do you go about communicating these things in your organization?

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Financial Risk Systems — So Nineties. Why Are They Back?

…some firms have found that tactical approaches — doing just enough to meet the reporting requirements — have not been sufficient for increasing regulatory demands or the needs of internal business users.

Apparently risk wasn’t entirely solved during the 1980s and 1990s when big systems went into banks from Algorithmics, SunGard and other major players. SAS recently ranked in the upper right quad of a Chartis report on risk systems, along with Algorithmics, now part of IBM; Moody’s analytics; SunGard and Oracle.

An Austrian bank took the tactical approach to create reports from existing infrastructure, Rogers said by way of example.

“But tactical can mean not necessarily considering all the elements you need. You meet the reporting for your regulator, but you don’t have the long term infrastructure to extend those reports to areas you really want to work on for stress tests, capital planning or overall risk management reporting.”

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Why Organizations Secretly Fear Creative Ideas

Why are creative ideas often rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity?

Does society really value creativity? People say they want more creative people, more creative ideas and solutions, but do they really?

For all the talk of creativity in business, industry and academia, there’s evidence that it’s implicitly discouraged in these areas as well. Although leaders of organisations say they want creative ideas, the evidence suggests creativity gets rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity (Staw, 1995 cited in Mueller et al., 2011).

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Can Finance Have a Seat at the Strategy Table? Not Without Change, New Survey Reveals.

A NEW CFO PRIORITY: TALENT DEVELOPMENT WITH A FOCUS ON SOFT SKILLS In previous years, the finance function sat mostly on its own and “crunched the numbers” without having much input into daily operations or long term strategy. However, the finance role has evolved to one that needs to provide sharp and meaningful analyses to…

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Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

In looking at the great leaders of history—whether they are political leaders like Julius Caesar or business leaders like Steven P. Jobs—many people probably assume that they must have taken a particularly active role in running their organizations. Caesar, after all, personally led his troops into Gaul, and Jobs was famous for checking the design of even the smallest inner workings of every product at Apple.

“Most leaders do too much,” Murnighan says. “And when they do, they’re seen as micromanagers.”

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Rules for Assuring Poor Performance

In 1773 Benjamin Franklin, one of the USA’s founding fathers, wrote a pamphlet aimed at the royalty of England titled Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One. Satire is one way to get your point across. I apply my own style of satire here to appeal to organizations to cease their hesitation and skepticism and embrace the benefits of applying business analytics and enterprise performance management. I apologize in advance if I offend anyone, but sometimes there is truth in humor.

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