Management
-
Are Your Ads Truly Paying Off?
It’s a familiar experience for today’s online shoppers: seeing tailored offers and promoted items while you’re filling your cart. A search returns “sponsored” items at the top of the results, and embedded ads suggest additional purchases based on your browsing history. Picking out some pasta? Maybe you’d like to try this sauce. Typically order water…
-
Automation, management and the future of work: Insights from LSE’s Department of Management
As a student at LSE, I am fortunate to be immersed in a world-renowned hub of learning, where ideas that shape the world are not only studied but actively debated – often by the very pioneers behind them. This vibrant intellectual community is one of LSE’s greatest strengths, and few experiences showcase it better than…
-
Why Managers Struggle to Delegate
Stop trying to delegate tasks. Start delegating problems. That’s the key insight from this conversation between MIT Sloan Management Review’s Elizabeth Heichler and columnist Sanyin Siang about why delegation is so hard for managers. “I personally had a goal to delegate more last year,” Heichler admits. “I think it’s the one thing that I fell…
-
Get Work Back on Track With Visual Management
Ken Orvidas/theispot.com Despite corporate investments in digital initiatives, automation, AI tools, and reorgs, many managers struggle with the daily reality that the core work of their organization is both slow and error-prone. While head-spinning changes in the operating context are keeping many senior executives focused on strategies to fend off disruption, their employees and team…
-
The Planetary KPIs That Inform Eco-Friendly Strategies
Beth Goody/theispot.com Monitoring the right metrics can help companies closely track changes in their markets and the broader operating environment, enabling them to identify opportunities early and reduce their exposure to material risks. As extreme weather events and other environmental changes accelerate, business leaders must factor these developments into their organizations’ goals and strategies —…
-
How RLI’s CEO Builds Agile Culture in a Conservative Industry
Aleksandar Savic RLI could have suffered the fate of Polaroid, Blockbuster, or BlackBerry, slipping into oblivion when market changes eroded demand for their core product. Founded 60 years ago as Replacement Lens Inc., the company insured the cost of replacing lost or damaged contact lenses — then an expensive purchase. As disposable lenses became the…
-
How to Automate Operations Without Breaking the Bank
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Many executives at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) associate process automation with expensive robots and assume that it’s within reach only for large enterprises. However, possibilities for reducing the amount of human involvement in tasks extend well beyond robots and include a host of affordable approaches. In our research…
-
Business Leaders Must Address the U.S. STEM Education Gap
Alice Mollon / Ikon Images As home to some of the best universities and most innovative companies in the world, the U.S. has long been viewed as a global leader in science and technology. However, recent data points to a consequential shift, with concerning implications for companies that need to tap the rising generation of…
-
Formalize Escalation Procedures to Improve Decision-Making
Michael Austin/thesipot.com The CEO of a fast-growing pharmaceutical startup recently forwarded us an email exchange he had had with his chief financial and chief commercial officers. It seems that the CCO had surprised both the CEO and CFO by proposing to spend more than $450,000 to retain an outside agency. The CFO immediately fired off…
-
Ownership Mindset Drives Innovation: Milwaukee Tool CEO
Aleksandar Savic When Steve Richman became president of Milwaukee Tool in 2007, he joined an 83-year-old company selling a limited range of traditional power tools. “We were this small little company. … Our brand was your grandfather’s brand,” Richman recalled. “It was the brand of old plumbers and electricians and mechanical contractors.” With revenues under…