How to Foster Talent Management Champions
Stefan Jooss, Anthony McDonnell, and Agnieszka Skuza
Key Insight: Five research-backed interventions can help leaders better support their organizations’ talent strategies and staff development.
Top Takeaways: A long-term, coordinated strategic talent management approach is a powerful mechanism in facilitating employees’ mobility and deployment, which can increase engagement and reduce turnover. But organizational success requires the commitment of leaders across functions. Researchers share a novel talent management model that can help companies diagnose ineffective talent leadership behaviors, along with five interventions for strengthening team leaders’ commitment to actively identifying, developing, retaining, and deploying talent.
A Data-Driven Approach to Advancing Meritocracy
Emilio J. Castilla
Key Insight: Leaders can follow a five-step process that relies on analytics to implement a fairer, more merit-based talent management strategy.
Top Takeaways: Many organizations’ efforts to foster meritocracy may, paradoxically, deepen inequities. Systematically collecting and analyzing data on demographics, hiring processes, and outcomes can help give everyone an equal opportunity to compete and succeed. This excerpt from the new book The Meritocracy Paradox introduces a strategic talent analytics approach that organizations can use to identify and eliminate bias and inefficiencies in hiring, promotion, and rewards decisions.
Building Innovation Teams Across National Borders
Solon Moreira, Ram Mudambi, and Deepak Nayak
Key Insight: Multinationals need to adapt their innovation strategies to better manage increasingly distributed R&D teams amid immigration restrictions.
Top Takeaways: Tightening immigration policies worldwide are disrupting multinational enterprises’ ability to recruit global R&D talent for colocated teams, while research shows that dispersed teams’ innovation output is lower than that of teams working together in person. Companies can apply four approaches to help their R&D teams maintain innovation excellence while navigating mobility constraints: immigration arbitrage, modularization, flexible talent orchestration, and regional ecosystem integration.
Get Work Back on Track With Visual Management
Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer
Key Insight: Visualizing how work flows can help leaders and their teams better manage their activities as a coherent system.
Top Takeaways: A system that allows everyone to see when and how the work is flowing — especially complex knowledge work — prevents hidden problems from festering and limits the proliferation of work-arounds that can cause organizational rigidity. In this article, adapted from the new book There’s Got to Be a Better Way, the authors explain how work-process visualizations can reveal the ways in which individual activities affect one another and how they can help teams surface — and solve — problems sooner.
Formalize Escalation Procedures to Improve Decision-Making
Jonathan Hughes and Gabriella Salvatore
Key Insight: Team members are better able to resolve conflict at the right level of management — or on their own — if there are documented escalation guidelines in place.
Top Takeaways: When employees are in conflict, they often seek support for their points of view from sympathetic leaders and managers rather than trying to work out the issue collaboratively. That can result in higher-ups endorsing a poor decision because they have insufficient information, and lead to diminished trust and damaged relationships. Six guidelines around escalating conflicts offer a systematic approach that encourages the people involved to start by working toward a resolution together.
Strategic Alignment Reconciles Purpose and Profitability
Jonathan Trevor
Key Insight: Sustained performance requires clarity around why a company exists, and how it defines and measures success.
Top Takeaways: The long-running debate about whether a company’s purpose should be a values-based goal or simply the goal of turning a profit presents a false choice. Strategic alignment requires both: Chasing profit alone won’t yield a sustainable enterprise, and a noble purpose that is out of step with market realities is destined to fail. Successful long-term strategies align both purpose and profit.
A New Method for Assessing Circular Business Cases
Samsurin Welch and Khaled Soufani
Key Insight: Business leaders must consider several complex financial factors to ensure that their circular business strategy is viable.
Top Takeaways: Circular business models offer companies opportunities to capture value while using resources more sustainably. But because such models are more complex than conventional, linear models, assessing their potential returns requires a new approach to financial analysis — one that considers additional costs and revenue opportunities across the full product life cycle. To make more informed strategic decisions and extract long-term financial value from circularity, leaders must consider an asset’s potential profitability, risk, and financial performance over time.
The High Cost of Executives’ Intellectual Property Blind Spots
Frank Tietze, Marcus Holgersson, Pratheeba Vimalnath, and Charlotte van Dijk-Wittkampf
Key Insight: Recent research highlights the gaps in intellectual property (IP) knowledge that can result in poor strategy decisions by senior executives.
Top Takeaways: Do senior executives understand intellectual property issues sufficiently to make good strategic decisions? A study that invited IP experts’ opinions on the question found that 40% have encountered top managers whose grasp of IP affected their ability to make a full informed business decision. Research data underscores the IP essentials that top executives need to understand and highlights strategic considerations they should keep in mind when making decisions involving intellectual property.
How Direct Mail Delivers in the Age of Digital Marketing
Jonathan Z. Zhang
Key Insight: Research on direct mail reveals why it’s reemerging as a profitable marketing channel and how it can complement a digital ad strategy.
Top Takeaways: As digital ad fatigue accelerates among consumers, and privacy regulations erode many of digital tracking’s advantages, the return on increasingly costly digital ads is dipping to historic lows. Direct mail, once seen as an old-fashioned medium, is proving to be a powerful addition to businesses’ marketing strategies, with strong ROI, customer engagement, and conversion rates, especially with younger consumers.
AI Can Improve How Humans and Robots Work
Benedict Jun Ma and Maria Jesus Saenz
Key Insight: Robots and humans are essential partners in most warehouse settings. Adding AI to the mix can enhance their collaborative capabilities.
Top Takeaways: When humans and robots work together, they deliver better results for warehouse operations than robots do on their own, but that collaboration could be improved in the face of increasing demands for speed and accuracy in e-commerce fulfillment. A new framework describes four collaboration scenarios and points to how artificial intelligence can be applied to optimize the performance of human-machine collaborations and boost automation’s ROI.