When Mohamed El-Erian abruptly resigned from his high-profile, and highly lucrative, position as Pimco’s co-chief investment officer a year ago, most observers were shocked. I wasn’t. As a researcher and consultant to executives across diverse industries, I know how common it is for successful, high-performing people to lose their passion for work — and their… Read More »
If you’re in business, you negotiate–every day of the week. While you may not be negotiating multimillion-dollar deals with customers or vendors, chances are you’re negotiating all sorts of things–from a hoped-for raise, to a flexible work schedule, to a plum assignment on a product development team. Negotiation is a skill that gets better with… Read More »
Is your team stressed out? These days, everyone seems overwhelmed and way too busy. But even when your team members have a lot on their plates, they don’t have to sacrifice their health or happiness. What can you do to reduce your team’s stress? How can you help them focus on what really needs to… Read More »
It’s been almost 10 years since HBR published John Kotter’s classic article,”Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” And although his suggestions for how to improve the odds have been widely accepted, the success rate of major corporate change programs remains essentially unchanged — it still hovers at 30%. Given the amount of research that business schools have… Read More »
The traditional operating model is based on the assumption that consumers begin and end their shopping experiences in one place, usually the store. But that assumption is no longer valid; the explosive consumer adoption of “smart” mobile phones has triggered new anytime/anywhere shopping behaviors. Now consumers can carry the store around in their pockets and purses, and retailers have… Read More »
After watching the Drive – The surprising truth about what motivates us, I found quite interesting Daniel Pink’s keynote related to Wikipedia and Microsoft Encarta: In the mid-1990′s Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They employed all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole… Read More »
An interesting article about how we do shopping and how much Google knows about us 🙂 December of 2014 may be remembered as the first truly omni-channel holiday season: the year retailers really stretched the sales funnel to include mobile, store visits and online buying under one big connected holiday umbrella. Let’s take a break… Read More »
Getting people to do their best work, even in trying circumstances, is one of managers’ most enduring and slippery challenges. Indeed, deciphering what motivates us as human beings is a centuries-old puzzle. Some of history’s most influential thinkers about human behavior—among them Aristotle, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow—have struggled to understand its nuances… Read More »