harvard business review Archives

Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times: Rethinking Customer Segmentation

Rethinking your customer segmentation model is a potentially powerful approach for differentiating versus key competitors and for finding new needs that you can fulfill with your core capabilities. Experiment with the various ideas and strengthen your team's execution skills in the process. In additional to the potential tremendous upside from solving customer problems, the energy and excitement generated during this process will convert the organization's "sense of fear" into a "sense of urgency."

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:48:20-05:00December 1st, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|0 Comments

Good People or Good Ideas? The Importance of the Working Environment

After many years of leading and now several years of working with aspiring and experienced leaders in all manner of industries and cultures, I remain convinced that most individuals lack proper context for their role as leaders. The great leaders at all levels understand that they have a unique responsibility and unique power to adapt and form their working environment to the unique circumstances at a point in time. Less effective leaders allow the environment to form around the wrong issues including ego (theirs) and petty politics. The lessons of Pixar are hard-won and the outcomes visible to all. You would be well served to listen, learn and apply some of Mr. Catmul’s wisdom to your environment.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:49:06-05:00September 10th, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|1 Comment

The Leadership Art (and Importance) of Encouraging Constructive Dissent

This topic goes to the heart of creating an effective feedback culture—one where everyone is comfortable tackling the tough topics and highlighting when the Emperor has no clothes. The discomfort of a team in expressing alternative viewpoints with a leader is one sign that all is not right with the feedback culture. In many cases, some simple behavioral adjustments and appropriate reinforcement on the part of the leader can open the spigot to some great ideas from some smart people. Remember, the contest is in the market for the hearts, minds and dollars of your customers, it’s not in your team meetings to show that you’re the smartest.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:49:14-05:00August 21st, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|0 Comments

Vacation Reading

One of the biggest challenges that I face every vacation is trying to decide what I'm going to read. Usually, I don't decide and I end up lugging 40 pounds of books with me just in case I might be in the mood for a certain work. (Note: I know that the Kindle from Amazon will solve this problem...I just can't get beyond my "I don't buy the first generation of any consumer electronics" rule.) Eventually, I thrift my choices down to a full duffel bag (for driving trips), and when my wife is not looking, I sneak a few additional volumes into someone else's bag or under the seat. I guess I'm a book smuggler.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:49:47-05:00June 30th, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|0 Comments

Want to Kill a Few Brain Cells, (Try and) Read a Management Textbook

And while I'm loving the experience, I can't help but observe that the textbooks are some of the most mind-numbing, coma-inducing products ever to emerge from Gutenberg's great creation. In particular, the Management text in my Fundamentals of Management course this Spring is almost certain to drive the most interested of business majors to consider something more exciting like accounting or neurophysiology. What a shame to take a noble and exciting and complicated topic like management and wrap a bunch of dead theories in-between some interesting case studies and let that suffice for something that is supposed to teach the fundamentals of management.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:49:48-05:00June 25th, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|3 Comments

Your Next Boss Might Just Be a 20-something Level 5 Guild Leader

While to most it might seem implausible or even laughable that the leaders of tomorrow are applying skills developed from years of what we viewed as "wasting time" by playing on-line games, it merits some consideration. Certainly most organizations completely drop the ball on effectively identifying and developing leadership talent, and my own experience and research indicates that where most (new) leaders struggle is in the area of soft skills and feedback. You don't learn how to lead from a book or sitting in a classroom at graduate school, so who's to say that the on-line gaming environment is not an outstanding and risk-free way to develop leadership acumen.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:50:24-05:00May 12th, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|0 Comments

From Strategy-Starved to Strategy-Fueled: It’s All About Communication

It's critical for leaders to recognize that organizations that broadly understand their strategy and employees that specifically understand how their activities and decisions impact strategy execution are going to defeat less-enlightened competitors. Strategy is not an abstract concept reserved for the deep-thought thinking sessions of senior leaders. Strategy is a powerful leadership tool to engage the hearts and minds of associates and to fuel performance.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:50:58-05:00April 2nd, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|1 Comment

Stress at Work, Great Leadership Practices and Ignoring Bad Advice

Every once in awhile, a number of articles or blog posts converge nicely to build on each other. Today over at Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog in his post entitled Sunday Afternoons, Wally offers his perspective on an article describing that many people report feeling a high degree of anxiety about work as Monday looms in the foreground. Wally's guidance for the leader's role in helping eradicate the causes of this unproductive stress is priceless and timeless (go ahead and click over and read it) and it puts the exclamation point on the leadership themes found in several other recent articles and posts.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:51:03-05:00March 25th, 2008|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|2 Comments