My most recent Harvard Business Review piece discusses retail industry trends, specifically big brands and other progressive retailers like Whole Foods, Starbucks and Lululemon Athletica who are increasingly shedding their national standards and conventions to achieve a more local brand image. Given the successes reported by these pioneering retailers, it’s likely we’ll see even more companies moving in this […]
In a highly instructive HBR article, Harvard Professor Nava Ashraf outlines three particularly effective behavior-changing tools: […]
How effective are cascades – you know, those processes by which communication flow down through an organization from the CEO through senior leaders to middle managers to frontline employees? Not very, was the answer in a piece in last month’s Harvard Business Review. […]
brand-as-business bit: In this month’s Harvard Business Review, author and management advisor Michael Watkins addresses the challenges a function head faces when he or she first becomes an enterprise leader. Watkins outlines seven “seismic shifts” that executives must navigate including shifting from specialist to generalist and from tactician to strategist. In my own leadership experiences as […]
If you’re looking for hot topics and insights on brands, businesses, and the people who work on them, here’s a digest of my content from the past month: brand experience: McDonald’s Metro: Lipstick on a Pig – a post about how McDonald’s new Metro concept only looks better, when it needs to actually be better […]
brand-as-business bit: What makes an ad something people want to share with others? Is there a secret formula for making ads that are most likely to be shared? The March issue of the Harvard Business Review included a report by Harvard prof Thales Teixeira who tracked viewers’ eye movements and facial expressions while watching ads. […]
brand-as-business bit: “Do well by doing good” has become the ultimate rallying cry for corporate social responsibility (CSR) – and case studies from Walmart to Nike to Timberland prove it is possible to benefit society and the bottomline. What’s more, CSR programs can make companies more innovative: According to research featured in April’s Harvard Business […]
In the spirit of New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas, I’ve compiled an alphabetical digest of ideas, from A to Z, that I wrote, spoke, and passed along over the past 12 months. The following are excerpts — the original pieces linked. […]
This is the last post in a mini-series about the F word – failure, that is. (Previous posts relayed insights about managing yourself through awareness and assessment and managing others with clear expectations and empathy.) People may not like to fail but according last month’s Harvard Business Review, they should. Most of the 140 pages […]
It might seem ironic that the venerable Harvard Business Review, a publication from an institution that has produced many successful leaders, would devote an entire issue to failure as it did last month. But given how much research and work has been done on the subject, it turned out to be one of the best […]