Power and influence

You and your team have been wrestling with the problem of increasing efficiencies without a big budget to make it happen. You've been authorized to look...

The position, not the person, often determines whether a manager has power.

The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, and it is on the rise. The authors' consulting firm has seen a steady increase in the...

Executives of multinationals partnering with Chinese firms should be alert to Mao Zedong's lingering influence on some of the country's most successful...

Today's post is about how important our mindset is for achieving buy-in. Recently, one of this blog's readers, Bob Ferrer, asked why I used the word enemy...

Eliot Robbens is the CEO of TrakVue, a spinout launched two years ago with highly ambitious financial projections. His vice president of sales has just...

The past decade may well be remembered as the era of the high-flying, aggressive leader. Corner-office titans like Kenneth Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, and...

New research reveals the power and limits of “influencers”

Leadership transitions go awry with alarming frequency, often the result of an emotionally charged power struggle between the CEO and his would-be heir. Four practices, however, can help successors defuse the crisis—and make it to the top.

Management has usurped control from boards—and the directors themselves are to blame.

One of the most agonizing experiences that any business faces is the moving from one generation of top management to the next. The problem is often most acute in family businesses, where the original entrepreneur hangs on as he watches others try to help manage or take over his business, while at the same time, […]

Have a new idea that you want to sell into the company? Make sure your proposal does more than address company needs—it must also benefit the key decision makers. by Jennifer McFarland

(Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and Tom Davenport are at work on a book on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organizational, not just individual, strength. Over the next few months, we’ll each be authoring posts in this blog to test-drive ideas and invite input as the research progresses.) As Tom Davenport, Larry Prusak, […]

Webster tells us that a peer is “one of equal standing with another” or “one belonging to the same societal group (that is, based on age, grade or status).” On the job, most of us have peers that we enjoy, respect and cultivate. We also have peers that we abhor, ignore, and avoid. Most peer […]

When executives need to persuade an audience, most try to build a case with facts, statistics, and some quotes from authorities. In other words, they...

Jane Goodall set out into the Tanzanian rain forest 50 years ago to study chimpanzee behavior. Her research changed our understanding of our closest relatives’ capabilities, emotions, and relationships and redefined what it means to be human. Later Goodall shifted her focus to saving chimps and their habitats. Her global nonprofit, the Jane Goodall Institute, […]

At the core of your company, there is a group of people who seem to call the shots--or, rather, all the shots seem to be called for their benefit. This...

When an executive comes from the private sector to a nonprofit, the usual understanding is that he or she is there to inject some business discipline. When I arrived at the American Red Cross, there were certainly problems to be tackled. The books were closed on FY08 just six days after I started, with a […]

The CEO of a global technology firm was invited to lecture at a local university on the future of the internet. After his presentation, a student in the audience asked him for his views on network neutrality: the idea that internet service providers shouldn’t base their prices on the content their customers access. The CEO […]

Persistence is key.