June 21, 2019
In many organisations, our leadership readiness is measured in part by our willingness to speak up in meetings. How we speak off the cuff can have a bigger impact on our career trajectory than our presentations or speeches, because every single day we have an opportunity to make an impact.
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June 14, 2019
Are you doing all that you can to enhance the productivity of your knowledge workers? It’s a simple question, but one that few senior executives can answer.
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June 07, 2019
When you frame your message effectively, your audience will immediately understand the issue at hand and why it deserves their attention. Whether you’re making a presentation, sending an e-mail, or talking in private with your boss, here’s how to craft your message to get the results you want...
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May 31, 2019
Augmented reality starts with a camera-equipped device—such as a smartphone, a tablet, or smart glasses—loaded with AR software. When a user points the device and looks at an object...
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May 24, 2019
Augmented reality technologies promise to transform how we learn, make decisions, and interact with the physical world. In this package, The Harvard Business Review explains what AR is, how its applications are evolving, and why it’s so important.
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May 17, 2019
The strength of cross-cultural teams is their diversity of experience, perspective, and insight. But to capture those riches, colleagues must commit to open communication; they must dare to share.
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May 10, 2019
Decisions are the lifeblood of organisations, and meetings are where important business decisions often happen. Yet many executives are nonplussed—at best—when describing their own experience of meetings.
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May 03, 2019
In emerging markets, the digital transformation of education is gaining traction, and all stakeholders can benefit if they seize new opportunities for collaboration.
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April 26, 2019
Why does a definition of leadership matter? An incomplete definition will produce piecemeal leadership development programs with a misguided focus and poor impact. While organisations get plenty of leadership advice, they lack a way to cut through the noise. McKinsey's definition offers a starting point.
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April 19, 2019
The complexity of knowledge work today requires a workflow methodology that allows us to be intentional, proactive, and thoughtful. The basis of a useful workflow management methodology is the ability to make tasks and responsibilities easy to organise, track, and act upon.
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April 12, 2019
When people ask Maura for advice about choosing software to improve productivity for themselves or their organisations, she asks them this question: How will the software fit into the existing workflow management process? Regardless of the software, apps, and gadgets that a company invests in for its employees, those tools aren't going to make the employees more productive unless...
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April 05, 2019
An Adoption Framework Converting the primary language of a business is no small task. Adoption depends on two key factors...
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March 29, 2019
It’s not unusual to hear nonnative speakers revert to their own language at the expense of their English-speaking colleagues, often because it’s faster and easier to conduct meetings in their mother tongue.
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March 22, 2019
The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide—that’s one in every four of us.
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March 08, 2019
It's understood that different business situations often require different styles of leadership. However, the research points to a kind of core leadership behaviour that will be relevant to most companies today, notably on the front line.
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December 10, 2017
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.”
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December 03, 2017
Nearly a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon University researchers surveyed a group of graduating college students and found just 7 percent of women said they'd tried to negotiate their initial job offers, compared to a whopping 57 percent of men.
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November 27, 2017
In 1933, General Motors President and CEO Alfred Sloan established the automobile industry’s first full-time consumer research department under the direction of Henry “Buck” Weaver, a pioneer in market-based decision making.
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November 20, 2017
For years, economists and psychologists have argued about whether the standard model that economists use to explain how people make decisions is correct. It says that people make rational choices: they weigh all the options against a well-defined set of preferences to choose the one which makes them happiest or is the most valuable to them.
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November 13, 2017
Two decades before Daniel Goleman first wrote about emotional intelligence in the pages of HBR, he met his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at Amherst College, who mentioned to the young science journalist for the New York Times that he was interested in meeting with scientists.
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November 06, 2017
Since people began telecommuting decades ago, companies have been excited about the prospects to increase productivity, reduce costs, and gain access to a much larger talent pool.
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October 30, 2017
Organisations depend increasingly on independent, temporary workers, even for mission-critical work. We call this subset of freelancers who do strategic work in companies or nonprofit organisations agile talent.
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October 23, 2017
Creativity is vital in racing, for teams and for drivers, and it’s becoming increasingly important in the context of knowledge work.
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October 16, 2017
It's been said that the problems you encounter in life stem not so much from what you don't know, but from what you know for sure that isn't so. Who said it? We don't know, although many people are certain that it was Mark Twain. More on that later. For now, why would it be less hazardous—to your health, to productivity, to happiness—to not know a whole bunch of things than to believe things that aren't true? Because if you're sure that you know something, you act on it with the strength of conviction and resolve...
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October 09, 2017
We badly need to believe in the potency of leaders. Our instinctive response, when faced with a complicated challenge, is to look for a leader who will solve it…
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October 02, 2017
The first step is to understand that productivity means optimising your entire life, not just work.
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September 25, 2017
Many of our woes begin with language. For example, consider the difference between believing life happens to you and thinking life happens. Those two extra words create the potential for disastrous results: depression, uncertainty, anxiety, guilt. Traveling a different track affords you a level of personal responsibility that proves freeing.
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September 18, 2017
Napoleon, Empress Wu, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Oliver Cromwell, Akbar, Stalin. History provides many examples of strong leaders who left their marks, for better or for worse.
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September 11, 2017
I’ve developed a theory that the biggest driver of mindlessness at work comes from lack of communication. Most times, this is connected to the conversations we’re not having about our values, or about the boundaries we set (or don’t set) around how we live, honour, or uphold these values at work. You know the type of conversation I am talking about: the really uncomfortable one, where you know what you need to say is going to be awkward and might displease or disappoint another person.
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![Why English Is Such a Difficult Language to Learn]()
September 05, 2017
I am often asked why English is such a difficult language to learn, for non-native speakers. In fact, how hard it is to learn depends on what your native language is; and this follows as languages are more (or less) closely related to one another; if your mother tongue is more similar, in terms of sounds, vocabulary and grammatical patterns to another--for instance you're a speaker of Dutch or German--then English will be easier to learn. But if you speak a language that comes from a more distantly related tongue--say Japanese--then English is more likely to prove a tougher nut to crack.
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![Can we teach intelligence?]()
August 29, 2017
Hardly any other psychological concept is as important to us as intelligence. We want to make intelligent choices, be able to keep up an intelligent conversation, and simply be intelligent people. Not surprisingly, scientists have investigated intelligent and less intelligent behaviour for decades. A wide array of different, sometimes even contradicting definitions of intelligence and tests of intelligence have emerged as a result.
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August 22, 2017
Life is full of negotiations, big and small. We negotiate for raises, we negotiate with clients and providers over prices, and we negotiate for more staff, the best projects, and flex time. (Then we go home and negotiate with our kids about how old you have to be to get your own smartphone.)
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![The Key to Great Customer Service]()
August 15, 2017
This is the story of how I learned the key to great customer service.
I’d come down to New York for HSM’s World Innovation Forum. The first day of the conference, customer service guru and Zappos chief Tony Hsieh gave his spiel about Zappos being a service company that just happened to sell shoes. In fact, he said, their primary business wasn’t even delivering shoes or clothing. It was delivering happiness. He talked about how they hire — and fire — on their core values, how they’d developed and refined those values over the course of several years, and how their company mission was grounded in the latest science of what makes people happy. There was a music video and a PowerPoint. We got his book, Delivering Happiness, free in our conference bags. It was all compelling, inspiring stuff.
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![Principles For The Modern Leader]()
August 08, 2017
We’re all aware that there are timeless leadership principles that have been true since the dawn of time and that will continue to be valid in tomorrow’s business environment. Things like integrity, honesty, and personal responsibility immediately come to mind. While those are all vital traits, they’re not the leadership traits I’m addressing right now. In today’s world of technology-driven transformation, leaders need to embrace a new leadership principle if they want their organization to be relevant today and in the future.
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August 01, 2017
There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, but some 2,000 of them count fewer than 1,000 speakers. Moreover, just 15 accounts for half of the languages spoken in the world.
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July 25, 2017
How much do the creative industries contribute to the global economy? A new study has quantified, for the first time, the economic and social contribution of cultural and creative industries (CCI) around the world.
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