Growth is shifting, disruption is accelerating, and societal tensions are rising. Confronting these dynamics will help you craft a better strategy, and forge a brighter future. “The trend is your friend.” It’s the oldest adage in investing, and it applies to corporate performance, too. We’ve found through our work on the empirics of strategy that capturing tailwinds created by industry and geographic trends is a pivotal contributor to business results: a company benefiting from such tailwinds is four to eight times more likely to rise to the top of the economic-profit performance charts than one that is facing headwinds. It’s easy, however, to lose sight of long-term trends amid short-term g
An important part of your job as a manager is making sure everyone on your team has the right amount of work. It’s tempting to give the workhorse more projects than others (especially if she’ll get them done the fastest) or to ease up on someone who is struggling, but you also need to be fair. How do you make sure that work on your team is evenly distributed? What do you do about the person who’s great at saying no and the one who can’t say no? Whether you’re dividing up the workload for next year or next week, here are some strategies to help. Have a plan Divvying up assignments for your team members requires forethought and planning. It’s not something you can do during the cracks of your
Business problems today are too big for any one person to solve. Agile teams are much more effective at solving problems than are lone geniuses. So why do we still reward the smartest people in the room more so than those who excel at working with others? In today’s more open world, where the best work is done by teams and communities, we need to rethink which skills have become the most valuable. I’m not arguing that intelligence isn’t a crucial skill. Rather, when we overvalue an individual’s abilities to the detriment of the team, we’re likely putting our organization at a disadvantage. It’s not an individual’s IQ that separates our best people from the rest; it’s their ability to work we
