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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(165)
- News (11)
- Research (144)
- Multimedia (1)
- Faculty Publications (3)
- 01 Dec 2006
- What Do You Think?
How Important Is Quality of Labor? And How Is It Achieved?
Summing Up Among responses to this month's column, there was little disagreement with the premise that attitude trumps skills in the selection of new employees. C. J. Cullinane commented: "Attitude is all! I have worked with a group of Cuban refugees in Newark who... View Details
Keywords: by by Jim Heskett
- 06 Nov 2013
- What Do You Think?
Is Top-Down Resource Allocation on the Rise?
Summing Up Is Business Agility a Product of Top-Down or Bottom-Up Resource Allocation? Respondents to this month's column provided possible explanations for greater reliance on top-down resource allocation processes (RAPs) while reminding us that a blend of influences... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 03 Feb 2016
- Research & Ideas
The State of Customer Service Leadership
Harvard Business School professors Jim Heskett (now emeritus), Earl Sasser, and Len Schlesinger have been studying the service sector—the good and the great as well as the bad and the ugly—for more than... View Details
- 05 Nov 2014
- What Do You Think?
Are We Entering an Era of Neuromanagement?
Summing Up: Where Do We Draw the Line on the Use of Technology in Hiring Practices? The idea of using brain scans in hiring, while it generated limited enthusiasm among respondents to this month's column, nevertheless was rejected by only a few. Respondents instead... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 04 Sep 2013
- What Do You Think?
How Relevant is Long-Range Strategic Planning?
Summing Up How Can Strategic Planning be Adapted to Changing Needs? Strategic planning concepts and the notion of long-range planning will continue to be integral parts of responsible management. But they may require a substantial rethinking if they are to remain... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 01 Nov 2021
- What Do You Think?
How Long Does It Take to Improve an Organization’s Culture?
comments below. Editor's note: Heskett explores the leader's role in his upcoming book, Win From Within: Build Organizational Culture for Competitive Advantage, available in January 2022. References: Randall Beck and View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 28 Mar 2012
- What Do You Think?
Are Factory Jobs Important to the Economy?
Summing Up: What Next, If Manufacturing Proves Not To Be A Creator Of Those Good "factory Jobs" Of The Past? Manufacturing is essential to the health of an economy. It both fuels and results from innovation. It is natural in the course of economic activity that... View Details
- 03 Dec 2014
- What Do You Think?
Can the Brilliant Jerk Be Managed Effectively?
Summing Up Can the Brilliance of the "Jerk" Be Tapped? The best business problem cases are those that divide a class into groups making two or more persuasive arguments. The questions of whether or not and how to make investments in "brilliant... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 30 May 2019
- What Do You Think?
Is There a Distinctive West Coast Style of Management?
internet startups, two Stanford Graduate School of Business professors, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, wrote an influential book about “successful habits of visionary companies.” In it, they advanced their theories based on an extensive... View Details
- 08 Sep 2011
- What Do You Think?
What’s Apple’s Biggest Challenge: Replacing Steve or Wall Street?
years from now? What is Apple's post-Jobs future? What do you think? Jim Heskett's latest book,The Culture Cycle, was published in September. Original Article Discussions of management succession have been triggered once again in... View Details
- 04 Feb 2010
- What Do You Think?
What’s the Best Way to Make Careful Decisions?
for failure in similarly uncontrollable circumstances. We hire "stars," only to watch them burn out in a new and different managerial environment. We look for "best practice" (à la Jim Collins in Good to Great and... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 01 Aug 2012
- What Do You Think?
Should CEOs Worry About ‘Too Big to Succeed?’
Summing Up Is There a "Right Size" for a Company? This month's question of whether "too big to succeed" should be a larger worry of CEOs than "too big to fail" as usual produced more questions than answers (or agreement). Tom Dolembo... View Details
- 08 Jan 2014
- What Do You Think?
Do Productivity Increases Contribute to Social Inequality?
Summing Up Does Social Equality Improve Productivity? Inequality in our society is an important and growing issue. It prompted a debate among respondents to this month's column about the causes, specifically the role played by innovation leading to increased... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 01 Feb 2017
- What Do You Think?
Is the Next Jobs Crisis Just Ahead?
Summing Up: Should We Be Addressing the Next Jobs Crisis Now? An unusual proportion of respondents to this month’s column agreed either explicitly or implicitly on one thing: a looming service sector jobs crisis would dwarf anything we’ve seen in manufacturing. There... View Details
- 05 Jul 2012
- What Do You Think?
Why Is Trust So Hard to Achieve in Management?
Summing Up Do Managers Take Trust for Granted? Trust is a big issue these days judging from the volume of responses to this month's column. Its importance in management is agreed on. There is a long list of behaviors that can damage it. The list of things that can be... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 04 Feb 2015
- What Do You Think?
Is There a Stanford-Google-Silicon Valley School of Management?
Summing Up How Transferable is the Google "School of Management"? Responses to this month's column suggest a great deal of respect for what Google's management has been able to achieve, both in terms of a strategy for bringing high-tech services to market and... View Details
- 01 Oct 2014
- What Do You Think?
Is Too Much Focus a Problem?
Summing Up What Are the Antidotes to Too Much Focus? Individuals and organizations suffer from too much focus much of the time. That was the sense of the majority of responses to this month's column. Respondents didn't stop there. They described why it happens and what... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 01 Dec 2011
- What Do You Think?
Thinking Slow: An Argument for Bureaucracy?
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005) Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (London: Penguin Books, 2008) View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 05 Dec 2012
- What Do You Think?
Should Managers Bother Listening to Predictions?
Summing Up Can Managers Afford to Ignore Predictions in Planning? There is a healthy skepticism when it comes to the reliability of predictions as a basis for planning. Donald Kortalon, commenting on this month's column, cites a number of experts whose predictions have... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
- 03 Oct 2012
- What Do You Think?
Can We Bring Back the “Industrial Commons” for Manufacturing?
Summing Up Where Is the Leadership Necessary to Regenerate the "Industrial Commons" In their book Producing Prosperity, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih pointed to the lack of long-term thinking and investment as well as education necessary to rejuvenate an... View Details