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Today’s businesses operate within an intricate network of suppliers, partners and customers that requires leaders to manage their processes with integrity inside and outside the corporate walls.“The ability to build and manage a relationship that produces and maintains trust is the core HR skill that everyone in the company has to develop,” said Jeffrey Word, editor of Business Network Transformation, a book featuring articles from 16 academics and researchers that provides advice for how people can understand and use the growth of business networks to their advantage.Read the entire article at: http://www.clomedia.com/talent.php?pt=a&aid=2796
Many coaches have seen their business grow during the economic downturn, according to research published this week.A joint survey of more than 600 coaches from the Association for Coaching (AC), European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) and International Coach Federation (ICF) found 70 per cent believed that their practice had either grown or stayed the same as a result of the recession.Read the Article At: http://www.trainingjournal.com/news/2447.html
A study of more than 1,000 business leaders has found the majority view the recent economic downturn as important to their personal growth.The results from the survey by not-for-profit training provider, Common Purpose, have led the organisation to claim recessions are not completely negative experiences but can also have a “silver lining”.Read the Article At: http://www.trainingjournal.com/news/2492.html
By Ellen Joan Pollock
This is a tale of obsession, passion, and guilt. You guessed it: The subject is time management.
Six months ago, I embarked on a mission to wring a few more hours of productivity out of my week. I chronicled my work with a coach in an article in BusinessWeek. If you missed it, shame on you. But I'll save you the time of thumbing through past issues or firing up your laptop and recap: I'm the executive editor of the magazine you are holding, and I work a frightening number of hours each week while keeping my fingers crossed that my 11-year-old is eating at least a gram or two of protein and has not taken up smoking. Read the Article at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_41/b4150072791166.htm
Again, some familiar sounding stuff to the people who have attending our Tone Setting, Coaching and EQ 2 programs.A manager's genuine interest in employees' lives pays off at every level, in every job
By Patrick Lencioni
"Now listen to me, all of you. You are all condemned men. We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live." Those were the words of Quintus Arrius in the movie Ben-Hur. And while he was speaking to Roman slaves, one can almost imagine a modern version coming from a manager today. "O.K., people, you all know that unemployment is at a 50-year high. You're lucky to have jobs. So work hard, and no more complaining." Lost amid the justifiable concern about the 9.7% of U.S. workers who are unemployed is the well-being of the other 90.3%, many of whom are miserable. They feel they're out of options and that management has little incentive to make their work lives more meaningful. Read the rest of the article at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_40/b4149084766472.htm
For those of you who have attended our Innovation or Change Management programs, this article will sound very familiar. Elements of Object Oriented Innovation, Champion Challenger Method and Managing the Cycle of Change are referenced.By Tim Brown
As the center of economic activity in the developed world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become nothing less than a survival strategy. It is, moreover, no longer limited to new physical products but includes new sorts of processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating. These are exactly the kinds of human-centered tasks that designers work on every day, and over time they have evolved a body of skills to help them do it. It is time for this type of thinking—design thinking—to migrate outward and upward into the highest levels of leadership. Business leaders, hospital administrators, university professors, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) need to integrate the methods of the designer, just as designers need to broaden their reach from the crafting of objects to the shaping of services, experiences, and organizations. Design, in short, has become too important to be left to designers. Read the rest of the article at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_40/b4149054679916.htm
When People Reckon It's O.K. to Cheat
Perhaps because of the cheating uncovered in the aftermath of the financial crisis—the lies told by everyone from mortgage lenders to Bernie Madoff—behavioral economist Dan Ariely has been getting a lot of calls about the nature of dishonesty. Ariely, a Duke University professor and author of the best-selling book Predictably Irrational, has spent years studying the topic. Ariely says he's not surprised that derivatives—whose values are based on other financial assets—have gotten a bad rap. He has found that people are more likely to cheat if they are a step removed from the cash payoff. In one experiment, he paid subjects (whom he allowed to report their own scores) for correctly solving math problems—some in cash, some in tokens to be redeemed across the room. The second group exaggerated their scores twice as much as the first. Similarly, in studies of real-life expense reports, he found managers pad expenses more when their assistants compile the report. Such detachment, Ariely says, may be what's involved "when you backdate a stock option." Read the Rest of the Article at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_40/c4149btw425927.htm
News that Twitter's latest cash infusion values the microblogging site at $1 billion may have confounded twittering's critics, who say nothing worthwhile can be expressed in 140 characters. To them—and to those who think BlackBerrys enslave us, Facebook supplants real relationships, and texting makes us illiterate—Dennis Baron has this to say: Nonsense. Worries about new ways of communicating, he has found, have existed for millennia. (Socrates objected to writing, in part because this "invention" eliminated the need to exercise the memory.)
Baron, an English and linguistics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has just published A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (Oxford University Press). One reason he wrote the book, he says, was to remind today's Luddites of the skepticism that reliably greeted each new communication device in the past. Read the rest of the article at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_41/c4150btw802994.htm
What's the best way for a company to disarm a disgruntled customer? A simple apology beats a cash rebate, according to a new study. Researchers at Britain's Nottingham School of Economics worked with a large German wholesaler that sells goods on eBay (EBAY), tracking the lukewarm or negative comments posted on the site by the company's customers over six months. They then responded to the 632 complaints—about defective salt shakers, say, or the late delivery of a leather belt. Half of the e-mailed responses offered a brief apology. Half offered instead a "goodwill gesture" of a small cash rebate (from $3 to $8). All the e-mails asked the customers to remove the comments they had posted online. For those offered the rebate, it was a condition of receiving the cash. The result? About 45% of customers who received an apology withdrew their so-so or negative ratings, compared with 21% of those offered money to do so. Johannes Abeler, a Nottingham research fellow and co-author of the study, says it's worth noting that the e-mailed apologies were effective even though they were brief and impersonal—and asked for something in return. His explanation? Despite the suspicions people might harbor, "apologies trigger this biological instinct to forgive that is hard to overcome."
—Douglas MacMillan from Business Week
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